Designer Babies: How to meet up with todays standards.

Designer babies is the term being used by the media to describe the future of modifying or selecting our children’s genes for desirable characteristics. This procedure is called In Vitro Fertilization to fertilize eggs with sperm in test-tubes outside the mother’s body in a laboratory (1). This process allows both the doctors and the parents to reduce the chance that a child will be born with a genetic disorder. Today, it is only legal to carry out two types of advances reproductive technologies on embryos which is know as Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis or PGD (1). PGD allows parents to determine the sex and the genes of the baby and screens embryos for any genetic diseases. It isn’t hard to imagine that someday they will select the babies based on their beauty and intelligence.

PGD uses DNA analysis to identify embryos with genetic diseases like Down’s syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease. Cystic fibrosis and many more.Embryos are grown to the eight-cell stage, at which point one or two cells are removed and checked for genetic variants associated with the disease (2). If embryos are tested positive for the genes that cause diseases they are discarded and the genes will then be eliminated from the gene pool.
In 2000, in the United States, the Nash family made medical history by having a baby boy named Adam, who had been selected using PGD. Molly, Adams sister has Fanconi anemia and the transplant of blood from Adam’s umbilical cord raises her odds of survival by about 55% (2). Is this not ethically wrong? Adam, a newly born infant has been forced to donate his stem cells, which in some experts eyes is seen as a form of child abuse. Joel Newman, the assistant director of communications at the United Network for Organ sharing says “Most living donors are over the age of 18, but there’s a few cases of minors donating body parts such as kidneys to siblings.” Adam is not nearly old enough to understand the risks and benefits of this procedure but his parents are. How is it fair that parents would be willing to have another child and put that child in pain, just to save another one?

There are many issues regarding advanced reproductive technologies. Sex determination has turned into a technique for screening and getting rid of the female embryo in countries were parents prefer male children (4). Some people are thinking about checking for “problems” like shyness and homosexuality which is unbelievably wrong. Every person is made differently and when we change personal traits about the person is that person not just a genetically engineered clone to acquire the more “desirable traits” in society like height, eye colour, intelligence etc. If a parent is choosing desirable traits or characterizes for their child, I do not agree with the idea what-so-ever. Although the idea of making designer babies to avoid diseases sounds like a good idea people will eventually get carried away and change their whole Childs appearance and personality. I personally disagree with the whole designer baby concept, not only is it wrong, it takes away our individuality!


Work Cited List:
1.) What is a designer baby? Bionet, November 12, 2010. http://www.bionetonline.org/English/Content/db_cont1.htm
2.) Designer Babies: Ethical considerations. Agar, Nicholas, April 2006. http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/agar.html
3.) The Nash Family: Breaking New Ground in Medicine. Frankenfield, Gay, October 4, 2000. http://www.webmd.com/news/20001004/nash-family-breaking-new-ground-in-medicine
4.) Designer Babies: Panse, Sonal. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/designer-babies.html

Blogs commented on:
1.) Grace Elkhechen: Designer Babies.... the future generation
2.) Taylor Lecours: preventing disease or enhancing attributes?