What exactly are designer babies?As genetic technology advances, the human genome is giving up it's secrets, if we can find out how and what our genes do, we can use this information to create the "perfect child". The term "designer babies", used by journalist's is a process where the mothers fertalised eggs are screened and modified to achieve a desired appearance chosen by the parents. Before the rising importance of vanity in our societies, the main purpose for this procedure was to eliminate the chances of genetic diseases by choosing the healthiest embyro, or to choose the desired gender of the baby. Of course there is nothing wrong with having healthy baby or choosing between a boy or a girl, but this procedure has progressed over the years that parents can change the hair colour, eye colour, and even the face of their future "designer baby". Who knows, with the weird minds in our society parents are bound to experiment with their babies.
Technologies used
Advanced reprodu
ctive tehcniques involve IVF or In-vitro fertalisation to fertalise the mothers eggs inside a test tube with sperm outside the mothers body. The eggs are removed from the womans ovaries and placed in a test tube along with chosen male sperm to control the fertilisation. This technique allows parents to highly reduce the risk of the baby being born with a genetic disease. Today, there are only two types of legal reproductive technologies to be used on humans. The first technique is choosing the sperm the fertalises the womans egg, this determines the gender and what kind of genes inherited from the parents the baby will be born with. In-vitro fertalisation is similar to the second technique, but instead, mutliple eggs are fertalised. These fertalised eggs are screened and modified to check for imperfections and genetic disorders before choosing the healthiest embyrios to implant back into the mothers womb.Is it Ethical?
Designer babies brings up many arguments to the table whether or not this is ethically correct.The problem with tinkering with the genes in sperm and the egg cell is that we give someone the ability to pass
on new genes that have never been present in human beings and pass it on for generations to come. This gives us the power to completely change the human race. Although, there is no gaurantee that a child will be happy and successful in the future, this technology gives them that increased probabilty, but if you think about how much money our parents are willing to spend for increased success and happiness in the future, they will be willing to spend a fraction of that money to increase their childs success and happiness in the future by using genetic engineering. However, with the expense of genetic engineering means only the rich class can buy disease free super babies, while the poor class are stuck with the diseases and abnormalities. This difference can totally split the human race into two seperate breeds (Lee Silver). Here could be a possible scenario in the future; A boss has two job applications, one applicant is a super modified human and the other applicant is a regular non modified person, which would you hire? Obviously this would create conflict. There is also a case where genetic enginearing was used to create a baby with hearing problems for a deaf lesbian couple, where the couple chose a male sperm donor with deafness in his family history. Who would ever want to be born deaf? This technology is ethical to an extent, but the only way to protect our societies from the ability of genetic engineering is public awareness and basically drawing the line on how far we want to go.
My thoughts
Well in my oppinion genetic engineering is useful to an extent. As a catholic I draw the line on changing the appearance on the babies, removing diseases, choosing child gender, and removing genetic disorders is ethical, but using this technology for something so pointless as changing looks? Is something we all need to draw bounderies on.
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