I predict that within my lifetime, the United States will arrest, try, and convict some parents for refusing to edit the genes of their child before he or she is born.
legislative majorities do believe that parents should be put on trial for withholding mainstream medical treatment when a child suffers greatly or dies as a result. And the medical treatments that are considered mainstream will change over time.
If the attendant medical procedures were as cheap and safe as a course of antibiotics, would it be unethical to deny a potential human gene editing to avert a serious disease? What if instead of a certainty of a serious disease, gene editing would reduce the chance of a typically fatal cancer by 90 percent? How about by 50 percent? 5 percent? Does it matter how much the gene editing technique would cost? What other confounding factors, if any, should enter into the picture?
Source: Will Editing Your Baby’s Genes Be Mandatory? – The Atlantic