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?

Of course many are jumping up and claiming that this was done for “civil rights” reasons but why did it take so long to repeal the law? Apparently California has been making a lot of money since they legalized same-sex marriages. Massachussets wants a piece of the pie.

A just-released study commissioned by the State of Massachusetts concludes that in the next three years about 32,200 couples would travel here to get married, creating 330 permanent jobs and adding $111 million to the economy, not including spending by wedding guests and tourist activities the weddings might generate. (NY Times – link above)

Somehow I think the state government is more concerned with the money than any perceived “civil right” violation.

Salt Lake City radio talk show host Bob Lonsberry, this morning, wondered if, in their rush to provide this “civil right” to homosexuals, might have overlooked an unintentional consequence.

We all remember the raiding of the compound owned by the FLDS church in Texas. One of the reasons the FLDS church built the compound in Texas was because, until recently, Texas law allowed marriage with parental consent to happen at age 14. Massachussets law allows marriage with parental consent to occur at age 12. With the repeal of this law, people will be able to go to Massachussets and marry their child brides. So how many polygamist pedophiles will make their pilgrimage to Massachussets to get their marriage on the books?

While everyone in the Massachussets government breaks their arms patting themselves on their backs for their enlightened and non-judgemental actions, it really just shows that the elected officials in that state will sell what is good for society and the safety of children for mere tourism dollars.