The Boozer Family Story Omits The Children They Sacrificed
The piece uses the boozer family story to question the ethical costs of savior siblings created through IVF and genetic screening. It recounts how CeCe and Carlos boozer used IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis to produce embryos, selecting one or two that matched their sickle cell-affected son Carmani so that cord blood could heal him. Carmani was ultimately cured, and the narrative highlights the visible bond among the three boys and the warmth of the family, while noting the parents’ complex emotions and carmani’s own sense that they were born mainly because he was sick.The article also points out that CeCe and Carlos later divorced, and discusses how unused embryos in such cases can become legal disputes or be destroyed, a reality rarely covered by the media.
Beyond the specific case,the author warns about a broader ethical trajectory: the potential for society to treat children as disposable or as sources for others’ medical needs,especially as technologies progress toward organ donation and even artificial wombs. The piece argues for basic rights of all children-weather conceived or born-to life, to be known and loved by their parents, and not to be created or discarded to serve the ends of others. It acknowledges the wonder of Cameron and Cayden Boozer’s basketball talents while insisting we must also reckon with the hidden costs and countless lives that were sacrificed or left behind to achieve those cures. the essay is written by Josh Wood, executive director of Them before Us.
This month you will watch Cameron and Cayden Boozer light up the March Madness tournament for Duke. The twin boys are the sons of Carlos Boozer, the legendary Duke basketball player who helped lead the Blue Devils to a national championship in 2001. Inevitably, you will hear a lot about not only how they play but about their story.
ESPN has featured the family before. You will hear again about how the twins’ parents, CeCe and Carlos, went through the IVF process to find savior siblings for their oldest son Carmani, who was born with sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell is an inherited blood disorder where red blood cells become sickle-shaped, clump together, and block blood flow. It causes incredible, severe pain, can shorten life expectancy dramatically, and affects the African-American community with overwhelming disproportionality. Both Carlos and CeCe carried the recessive gene without knowing it, and were heartbroken when their oldest son was born with it. That heartbreak led them to do everything in their power to heal him.
Everything in their power turned out to be a lot. IVF and a genetic screening process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis allowed them to create embryos en masse. Reports vary on whether they attempted to fertilize 26 or 34 eggs, but either way it was a substantial number. Out of as many as 34 that were potentially fertilized, an unknown number were viable, of the viable ten were sickle cell free and of the sickle cell free, two ended up also being a match for Carmani. These two were selected specifically to harvest their cord blood at birth for a transplant that could completely cure Carmani of sickle cell anemia. CeCe and Carlos drove headlong into this modern-day eugenics process and by their own account, felt the excitement of the possible. Out of the dozens of lives they had created, two would be usable.
The media coverage this month will no doubt be glowing. It will highlight the bond all three boys share, which is authentic and evident every time you watch them together. It will celebrate the miracle of modern medicine that made something like this possible. Carmani is completely healed. Everybody got their fairytale ending.
What will be notably absent from the coverage is the fallout of this dystopian process.
No one will mention the untold lives sacrificed to make this medical miracle possible. The miraculous story required an awful body count deemed acceptable by all the adults involved. As incredible as it is to watch Cameron and Cayden compete, it makes you think: how many boys like them were among the dozens who never got a chance? How many are sitting in a freezer right now, labelled undesirable, their genetic makeup not making the grade necessary to warrant a shot at life?
Watch any Duke basketball game for five minutes and you can see the love CeCe and Carlos have for all their boys on full display. That is not in question. But it is precisely that love, that fierce parental instinct to protect their suffering son, that blindly drove every decision they made. Desperately loving your child does not give you the right to sacrifice other children for him. That is the storyline we should be talking about, and the moral line we should all refuse to cross.
By their own admission, the journey was not all sunshine and rainbows. CeCe has said publicly that she felt guilty, that the twins were conceived “more out of love for Carmani” than out of love for them, that it felt like “having a baby for the wrong reason.” Carlos admitted he went back and forth on whether they had done the right thing. Carmani himself has said plainly: “They were only born because I was sick.“
You get the sense that in the back of their minds, questions linger. We do not know the fate of those embryos that were not selected. What we do know is that Carlos and CeCe divorced, their marriage finalized in 2015. And as often happens when couples who have undergone IVF separate, the unused embryos become a legal dispute, and courts across the country have repeatedly resolved those disputes by ordering the embryos destroyed. In a 2015 California case, a judge ruled that five frozen embryos must be thawed and discarded over the wife’s explicit objection. In Texas, courts have upheld clinic agreements requiring embryo destruction upon divorce, with the ex-husband in one case stating he would have the embryos destroyed or donated for scientific use. The Boozers have never publicly addressed what became of theirs.
It is possible to be grateful for the medical innovations that make healing possible through the utilization of cord blood, but also be deeply suspicious of where society could be headed if we continue to treat children as disposable commodities in pursuit of those cures.
It is horrific enough that there are millions of frozen embryos around the world locked in storage facilities, many abandoned for being the wrong grade, the wrong sex, the wrong genetic profile. Some with a disease or disability that made them undesirable to the adults who created them. They exist because adults wanted something badly enough to create them, and then wanted something else badly enough to leave them behind.
Yet now we must also contend with the new ways in which emerging technology will make possible child commodification at an even greater scale. My Sister’s Keeper was a bestseller in part because of the novelty of its concept: a child engineered to provide spare parts for a sibling. Unfortunately, the day has arrived where it could soon be routine. Cord blood first. Then bone marrow. Then a kidney. Researchers are already in the early stages of developing artificial womb technology that could eventually gestate a human being outside the body entirely. When that capability matures, the distance between a savior sibling and a purpose-built biological organ supply source narrows in ways that should stop us cold. We are not there yet. But will be soon.
How many were sacrificed in precisely this manner to heal Carmani? If we are to chart a better path forward, it will require us to begin affirming several fundamental realities.
Every child has a right to life from the moment of conception. Every child has a right to be known and loved by their own mother and father. Every child has a right not to be bought, sold, screened out of existence, or discarded because their genetics were deemed inconvenient by the adults who created them.
And no child should ever be created to serve the purposes of another. Not for their cord blood. Not for their bone marrow. Not for their tissue or their organs. A human being is not a means to someone else’s end, no matter how desperately that end is desired.
We can all watch Cameron and Cayden Boozer play basketball and celebrate the talent, brotherhood, and dignity of their lives. But honesty requires us to also count all the bodies it required, especially those we will never get a chance to see.
Josh Wood, @j_k_wood, is the executive director of Them Before Us and contributing author of Pro-Child Politics. He writes on Substack at Everyday Interpreter: everydayinterpreter.com.
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