Nobody's Child, Everybody's Children:
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering : An Ecological and Anthropological Breach
Dr. Louise Vandelac
Professor,
Department of Sociology and Institute of Environmental Sciences
University of Quebec in Montreal
Abstract
From this point onwards, everything is compromised : from the biological security of the planet to the biological security of our species. Even the permanence of the human body and the way we conceive children to ensure the world’s future can no longer be taken for granted.
Just as we finally begin to measure the devastating impacts of the ecological breach following from environmental deterioration and the exponential effects of climate change, we still seem to ignore the magnitude of the ecological and anthropological breach opened by life techno-sciences in our relationship to our descendants and to all life on this planet. The deep remodeling of the parameters of reproduction, and even of life itself, characterized by the reification, instrumentalization, and selection of the materials, modalities and conditions of generation, has established an astounding institutional and commercial trade, for which we have become the initiators, the stupefied funders, and voiceless commodities. This represents a paradoxical involution for a civilization putting itself doubly at risk by ignoring its anthropological foundations and the basic rules of ecology, which demand respect for the fragile equilibrium allowing living beings and ecosystems to regenerate and perpetuate themselves.
This communication on reproductive and genetic engineering will attempt to locate the principal milestones and key discourse which have, in less than 50 years, brought about the possibility of the sixth planetary extinction along with this astounding silent and progressive exit of the human species.
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