Why our exsistence should be welcomed unconditionally

In the previous section, I used the words “the sense that our existence is welcomed unconditionally.” We can find similar expressions in the report of the President’s Council. The council says what is at risk is the idea that “each child is ours to love and care for, from the start, unconditionally, and regardless of any special merit of theirs or special wishes of ours.”(9) If prenatal diagnosis becomes prevalent, the report says, “the attitude of parents toward their child may be quietly shifted from unconditional acceptance to critical scrutiny.”(10) The report discusses this topic from the viewpoint of “unconditional acceptance,” and I think their insight is correct. In the book Painless Civilization, I, too, made a detailed discussion on the conditional acceptance of our children and its impact on our society.

Let us imagine a society where almost every adult accepts a set of prenatal screening tests. When a couple wants to have a baby, they make a number of fertilized eggs outside the female’s body, and scrutinize each fertilized egg one by one, using PGD techniques. After examining the characteristics of each egg, they choose a couple of eggs to be born, according to their wishes and plans about their children. What does this society look like? In such a society, people successfully come into the world after it has been confirmed that they satisfy some conditions their parents or society require. This is a society where almost everyone tacitly knows that if they had not satisfied the conditions required, they would have never been born. And when those people get married and have children, they naturally examine the genetic makeup of their fertilized eggs, and do the same thing that was once done to themselves by their parents. In this way, the act of conditional acceptance of babies is handed down from generation to generation.

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Painless Civilization and Fundamental Sense of Security
(2005)
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