All of this is done through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) where the embryo is ‘conceived’ in a little test tube or Petri dish in a nice, sterilized lab. The little embryo, along with a few other of its ‘siblings’ sit in optimal conditions until a cell can be extracted and screened for the eventual traits of the future child. Based on what the parents want, a suitable embryo is then selected and placed into the mother, where it develops like a normal embryo would. And voilà! You’ve got yourself your ‘dream child’.
I’m sure it sounds tempting. Being able to choose almost exactly how your child turns out, ensuring that they won’t be born into a diseased future from the genes they have, and being sure that they’ll be able to excel at anything they want to try. Plus, what’s one genetically modified child in a world of over 6.7 billion people? It’s like a cup of water being poured into the ocean. No one is going to notice it, so what could possibly go wrong? While genetically choosing your child might give you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside knowing that you’ve made its life a lot easier, it’s probably going to have horrible repercussions on the rest of the world, not to mention the ethical issues that go along with it.
One large problem is the future of children if genetically engineered children become widespread and favoured over natural children. It has already begun to become popular around the world in the form of gender selection. “Dr. Steinberg, Director at The Fertility Institutes, claims that they are performing on the order of 10 gender selection fertilizations every week, each for a fee of $18,400.” (singularityhub.com) It seems like a lot of money just to choose the gender of the child. What happens when children can be customized in every single way? The price tag would be huge.
Even in the present day, parents can be disappointed that their children don’t turn out the way they expected. With a fee so large, it seems like these designer babies would be investments that parents make to ensure perfection. Can you imagine being told you should be what your parents want you to be because they paid thousands of dollars for you? If genetically engineered children become popular, and they probably will, it seems that parenting will begin to lose the warmth and love that is supposed to go along with it, and become a competition of the best child, along with giving parents a mindset of ‘I paid a lot of money for you, so you better turn out the way I planned.’
From an ethical standpoint, genetically engineering babies is close to crossing the line. Using IVF creates many embryos, from which only one is selected. The fertilization clinic is then responsible for the rest of the unused embryos. More often than not, they’re just discarded as if they were unimportant. This brings up the debate of whether or not an embryo is considered ‘living’ and has a right to remain so, even if the parents don’t want it. Using these methods to engineer babies would result in hundreds of unused embryos that would be simply discarded because they’re deemed useless.
Is it right to have these future children being thrown away simply because they don’t have traits desired by the parents? Some bioethicists state that genetic screening was supposed to be used to deter life-threatening illnesses from taking hold on future generations, but see engineering children to avoid certain characteristics is a bad use of the technology.“I’m totally against this. My goal is to screen embryos to help couples have healthy babies free of genetic diseases. Traits are not diseases,” as said by William Kearns, a medical geneticist. (hplusmagazing.com) Some embryos are not allowed to develop because they don’t meet someone else’s standards, which from many people’s views, is ethically and morally wrong.
As I heard earlier this week on the radio, more and more children are being born prematurely or in multiples each year. The two main reasons for this are older mothers, who are causing children to be born earlier, and multiples, which often force doctors to remove the children by means of a caesarean section. Multiples are a common effect of IVF, because more than one embryo is usually transferred over, to increase likeliness of getting pregnant. This also increases the risk of having children die early, or missing important development during the last few weeks as a fetus. Genetically modified babies may have ‘ideal traits’, but if we get carried away, it could result in different issues.
Another issue is linked to the last bio-blog topic of biodiversity. We’re already so enchanted by the media and its concept of ‘real beauty’ that cosmetic surgery is on the rise. Now we would be able to save our children the hassle of doing this later by choosing the best cosmetic traits before they’re even born. Not only will this decrease the biodiversity and the genetic pool of the human race, but eventually, everyone may begin to look extremely similar. In a society where some traits are more desired than others, one can only imagine what everyone would look like if we could predetermine the outcome. We’re fighting natural selection and making it become unnatural. What trait will be ‘special’ when everyone has it? Genetically engineering babies seems like unnatural selection and goes completely against biodiversity.
As Dr. Steinberg, the leading geneticist of a Los Angeles clinic, says, “[Trait selection] is a service [and] we intend to offer it soon.” (online.wsj.com) At the moment, this technology is part of an industry that brings in huge profits annually. Geneticists such as Steinberg may be thinking about the parents and the children, but they’re also probably driven by the ‘rewards’ of such a popular industry. Soon, babies won’t be left up to chance, but carefully selected to meet the parents’ every whim. Our society prizes aesthetics so much that this technology will definitely be used by people around the world, by more than the many people that use it right now to choose the gender of their children.
This technology originated to help find genetic disorders, and help stop them from ever occurring. This newfound industry is moving away from what was originally intended, and things have definitely gotten out of hand. Artificial intelligence was supposed to be able to create perfect ‘humans’ that would fit into society. With genetic engineering, who needs to build robots when you can just build a baby? This inevitable future is going to take the depth of parenting and turn it into a competition that is going to homogenize society, along with throwing everything out of balance not, to mention the embryos that are being thrown away like trash. Compliment someone’s child sometime in the near future and you might just hear, “Thanks. I picked the parts myself.”
Sources:
"A Baby, Please. Blond, Freckles -- Hold the Colic" - The Wall Street Journal
"Designer Babies" - Time Magazine
"'Designer Babies' Ethical?" - CBS News
"Designer Babies - Like It Or Not, Here They Come" - Singularityhub.com
"Designer baby row over US clinic" - BBC News
"Designer Babies: A Right to choose?" - Wired.com
"The Great Designer Baby Controversy of '09" - h+ Magazine
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