Alliteration

The repetition of initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words is called alliteration. I wonder how long it took the author to come up with this title, "Commercialization, Commodification, and Commensurability in Selective Human Reproduction: Paying for Particulars in People-to-Be." It's almost too cute for a very serious subject, selective reproduction (also called "offspring enhancement") by author Dov Fox, of Yale Law School, appears in the Journal of Medical Ethics. This type of enhancement looks a bit more troublesome than rich athletes using steroids, don't you think? Other than taxing it or regulating it, I'm guessing Congress won't do much. Once God's been kicked out of the public square it's hard to invite him back in. As a nation we've decided that the less-than-perfect products of conception deserve a pre-natal death; so designing the uber-perfect baby is probably the next step in our moral decline.

Pre-natal screening and genetic modification may one day enable parents to pick individual traits for their offspring from among a range of available options. If Americans already enhance themselves at a cost of $50 per orgasm, $500 per patch of hair, $1,000 per SAT point, $2,500 per cup size, and $50,000 per inch of height, and if the unlikely prospect of biological design nevertheless became possible, why wouldn’t parents opt for mathematical aptitude, a witty disposition, or straighter teeth for their children-to-be? Fortune magazine gauges the prospective U.S. market for preconception sex selection alone at over $200-million-a-year annually.Abstract here, with links to downloading