Abreast of History

Believe it or not, breast implants are more important than the New Hampshire primary.

Virginia Postrel from the January 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Yet normality is, to a great extent, in the eye of the beholder. For millenia, infertility was a curse, a condition that made women worthless. Now we spend millions to induce it, with surgery and pills, shots and implants. We want control of our bodies; nothing could be more humanor more abnormal. Norplant is next on the tort lawyers' lists. If they succeed, no one will bring new contraceptives into the American market.

Change is a beautiful thing," says the ad for disposable color contact lenses. The model's green eye becomes brown, blue, violet. "Even if your vision is perfect. Anytime the mood strikes you," suggests the ad. "Change is free...Change is good."

Change will get you in trouble. Change is what this whole debate is about.

Contact lenses are dangerous. I know this from painful personal experiencea scratched cornea almost certainly brought on by sleeping in disposable extended wear lenses. Those lenses are among the greatest inventions of the late 20th century. And I still sleep in mine, happy that when I awake in the night the world will not be a blur.

Isadore Rosenfeld does not approve. Dr. Rosenfeld is, fortunately, not a federal regulator but the medical columnist for Vogue. He declares that three of the four specialists he consulted say sleeping with such lenses in "is not safe."

"My own position," Rosenfeld writes, "is that removing the lenses at night takes no more than a minute or two, and, after all, you don't need them while you're sleeping (unless you're having nearsighted dreams)."

This is the attitude that rules our public policy: A distant doctor decides for the rest of us that the hazards are great and the benefits trivial, that people who sleep in their lenses are ignorant or lazy. He suggests that safety is an absolute, that he can declare a product "not safe." And he assumes that he has all the relevant information needed to determine whether I, someone he has never met, should sleep in my contact lenses.

It is a short step from such attitudes to a product ban. Hence the fate of breast implants.

Right now these issues sound trivial, concerned as they are with eye color or breast size, the stuff of fashion magazines. Perhaps if intelligence were at issue, or height, or baldness, or skin color, or longevityperhaps then Very Important People would care.

Those days will comeand soon. The Biological Century is upon us, as Greg Benford noted in these pages. (See "Biology: 2001," November 1995.) The body, not the Internet, is the next frontier. We are extending control over life itself, over our lives ourselves. That control will, undoubtedly, have some unintended consequences, and bring some tragedies. That is in the nature of things, the nature of life. But so is the attempt to better nature, to bring the born into the realm of the made, to assert human ingenuity against chance.

The debate over breast implants is only incidentally about the venality of lawyers or the benefits of a C cup. It is about who we are and who we may become. It is about the future of what it means to be human. Pretty dull stuff by Washington standards.