Jun 09
16
Designer Babies
I’ve always heard of the push to create “designer babies”, or babies that are genetically pre-screened for traits and only the desirable ones are kept. I was unaware, though, that it was already being done and has been since 2001. A fertility company with branches in several cities in North America is currently offering this very service.
You may not know it, but gender selection based on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been available to paying couples since at least 2001. One of the world leaders in providing this service is the Fertility Institutes, with branches in Los Angeles, New York, and Guadalajara in Mexico. According to their website, they’ve had over 3,800 cases of gender selection with a 100% success rate. Besides offering gender selection, they screen embryos for genetic defects such as breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, and over 70 other diseases. The Institutes are directed by Dr. Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF (in vitro fertilization) in the 1970s, and a successful scientist-businessman today.
With the price of sequencing a person’s genome dropping to a mere $1,000 by the end of the year, I believe there will be a real push to make sure this is available to parents. I’m going to intentionally leave out the obvious pro-life implications of this and focus on the social implications.
As a parent of a young family, I’ve become aware in the past 7 years of a tendency of many parents. Parents obviously want what is best for their children. All parents do. There are many parents who feel like giving their children the best also reflects on their own value as parents to the point of comparing what their own children can do and abilities to those of their neighbors’, families’, and friends’ children. In other words, some parents feel that to be a good parent, their kids have to be better than everyone else’s kids. In order to fuel their efforts to have the “best kid on the block”, they enroll their kids in art classes, dance classes, athletic teams, charter schools (as if a good education couldn’t be obtained from the regular public school), etc. Then the parents that can afford all of this (or accumulate massive debt trying) sit with other parents and verbally compare their child’s opportunities and well-roundedness.
This then can easily spill over into the relationship between the children creating cliques and classes of kids and outcasting the ones that “don’t measure up”.
That’s where creating a designer baby comes in. It will be passed off as wanting what is best for their children making sure that they don’t have any genetic predispositions for diseases. Then it will lead to traits such as hair and eye color, athletic ability, intelligence, creativity. To have the best kids on the block will require everything genetic science has to offer.
As the babies grow up, they’ll inevitably be looked at as being more capable than others by teachers and school officials possibly affording them exclusive opportunities to “challenge them”. As they grow older, special consideration could be given in college admission and scholarships. Beyond that, companies could give special consideration to those who have “greater potential” genetically.
There would be privacy laws and anti-descrimination laws so nobody could ask someone if they were “designed”, but what would keep those who have been from sharing that information and in so doing, slanting decisions in their favor? Would we ever be able to control this once it got started?
Anecdotally, I’ve seen the potential in the way things are currently. Do we really want to go down this road?