Design Your Baby!

First of all I wanted to thank Chet a whole bunch for stealing the picture I was going to use for this post…thanks a lot, now I have to pick a new one.

Anyways, for this blog I wanted to focus on the new fad “designer babies”. I didn’t know much at first when I began 

researching this topic and I had only heard small details about it from some media. My initial thought was: “Why the hell would people want to do this to their unborn children?” I had set my mind to the fact that I thought in no way should this be legal. I think children are born a way for a reason, and that we, still pretty immature in human sciences, should not be able to change aspects of a persons’ physical appearance to the wishes of parents for social acceptance later in life. Also, you never know what could happen if something with science goes wrong, we are still not fully formed as a society to deal with the thought of manipulating life.  

The term “designer babies” is used to describe a child whose hereditary makeup would be, using various reproductive and genetic technologies, purposefully selected to be the optimal recombination of their parents' genetic material. It works by using InVitro Fertilization to fertilize eggs with sperm in test tubes outside the mother's body in a laboratory. At the moment it is only legally possible to carry out two types of advanced reproductive technologies on humans. The first involves choosing the type of sperm that will fertilize an egg: this is used to determine the sex and the genes of the baby. The second technique screens embryos for a genetic disease: only selected embryos are implanted back into the mother's womb. This is called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis.  

There is a mixed reaction with the idea of people being able to change the genes of their babies. On the one side there are people who think that its “playing god”, by getting to decide the sex or physical appearances of their children. On the other side there are the people that consider this process because it can also reduce the chance that a child will be born with a genetic disorder. There are huge pros and cons on this topic. Everyone has his or her own opinion and ideas to how creation of a human should happen. It scares people that the original way of birth and human development is changing and makes them wonder what else can come from this advancement, good or bad.  

After researching the topic more my opinion has changed somewhat. I still don’t believe that people should be able to change appearance for aesthetic qualities. However, I have someone in my family who was born with a genetic disorder, and if this process was available when she was still developing as a fetus, and someone told our family that we could take away that disorder, then maybe I would have considered this a good idea, because it could have helped her for the future.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989987,00.htmlhttp://www.bionetonline.org/English/content/db_cont1.htm