Designer Babies
We knew it would happen eventually. Embryos have been screened for genetic diseases for a few years now. But this may be the first time embryos have been specifically selected for superficial traits, such as eye color or good looks.
Apologies in advance for taking sides in a moral debate on a tech blog, but it’s impossible to extricate the science from the ethics for this issue…
What parent in the world wouldn’t wish their baby the greatest success in life? Intelligence, health, longevity. But this is a dangerous time in our history to be driving artificial selection (read: evolution) toward what could easily turn out to be a genetic dead end, loss of diversity, convergence on a narrow set of temporarily desirable traits and a loss of adaptability to long-term environmental change. But hey, give my baby blue eyes and fair skin and it’s all okay. Hell, just give the parents a living Barbie or Ken doll and they’ll be all set.
What I really don’t understand is why anti-abortion groups aren’t all over this. Why protest in front of a tiny charity-funded clinic that helps scared young women terminate a single embryo created by accident? In Vitro Fertilization and genetic selection creates from dozens to hundreds of fertilized embryos. It picks one and throws the rest away — for money — lots of it.
If abortion is murder, is IVF for genetic screening not premeditated mass murder for hire? Is that not worse, from a moral and ethical perspective, than basic abortion, where no one had any intent to do anyone or anything harm, and they just made a mistake?
I’m not saying I agree with either sentiment, but I’m puzzled by the responses I see. I happen to think IVF is an important procedure, especially for parents who can’t conceive naturally, but even for genetic screening where parents carry known genetic flaws. On the other hand, I have a big problem with treating life and artificial evolution as a profitable business.
One reason the anti-abortionists don’t protest as much, I figure, is that science literacy is so poor in some quarters that they don’t even realize what’s going on. The woman, after all, has a baby at the end of the genetic selection process. All’s well that ends well, apparently. Never mind that IVF, not abortion clinics, is where the majority of "highly objectionable" embryonic stem cells come from, whenever the government allows it, I mean. Even then, pro-lifers didn’t typically protest the IVF itself, just the scienfitic use of some to-be-destroyed-anyway embryos.
Well, I suppose it’s that science stuff, and the notion that premarital promiscuous sex is what often leads to abortion. That’s bad. Because even though IVF and genetic selection might destroy a hundred embryos, at least the parents are hetereosexual and married. Usually. Oh oh.
A natural baby is -literally and figuratively- a “shot in the dark”. No one would buy a car without reviewing the specs and taking a test drive, yet the much more important task of creating a child is left to chance. In my free online novel, set in the 2050’s, hip parents select their children from an embryo catalog, picking a boy or girl who looks like a blend of themselves, only more handsome or pretty. Given good nutrition and loving nurture, the child will develop much like the model, with the desired talents and intelligence favored by the purchasers. Only the anal religious stick to the old-fashioned traditional method, risking poor performance and the tragedy of genetic defects.
On your main point of why anti-abortion groups do not also oppose IVF – they do. As recently as last December, the Catholic Church -the strongest world-wide voice against abortion- tightened in vitro opposition. It condemns the concept of human cloning “to satisfy certain specific desires, for example, control over human evolution, selection of human beings with superior qualities, pre-selection of the sex of a child to be born, production of a child who is the “copy” of another, or production of a child for a couple whose infertility cannot be treated in another way”.
Maybe you didn’t provide the entire quote, but there’s nothing in there that indicates the church has a problem with IVF specifically because of the destruction of embryos.
I apparently screwed up the HTML code for the URL where I got that quote. The quote appears in this Reuters dispatch. The Vatican equates IVF as falling “within the sin of abortion”. IVF treats the human embryo as “simply a mass of cells to be used, selected and discarded.” [Emphasis added] The Catholic Church Statement of Dec. 2008 is long and abstruse. On page 8 there is a section titled “In vitro fertilization and the deliberate destruction of embryos” – they even condemn IVF when the embryos are destroyed unintentionally or found defective and discarded for that reason.
I want to make it clear I DO NOT agree with most of the Vatican statement and I do favor responsible IVF (implant one or two embryos – not the six that resulted in octuplets recently) .
Please sign my petition and pass it on. This situation has been going on for almost 8 years and it is time for the truth to come out.
http://www.petitiononline.com/ivfrape/petition.html
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SAVE BABY X
Artificial Insemination used for Immigration & Paternity Fraud and the complete removal of this child’s rights to a father.
Baby X has been stripped of his rights to have a father, by the State of New Jersey and Bergen County Courts, by a malicious plot involving NJ Bergen County Family Court and the corrupt Judge Edward Torack, Dr. Tanmoy Mukherjee, of the Mount Sinai Hospital/Reproductive Medical Center of New York.
Baby X is a victim of a sinister plot by the ruling class to destroy Black Families and Men using the false flag of Child Support system and Women’s Rights. Baby X was created during unauthorized artificial insemination by Dr. Mukherjee and a Black Woman facing deportation for
defrauding a university in New York City. In order to avoid
deportation, Dr. Mukherjee and The Mother of Baby X conspired together to take and illegally use the semen of a Black Male US Citizen in order to perform an artificial insemination, and create an anchor baby. They also conspired to victimize the said Black Male with the
responsibility of Child Support without his consent to an IVF.
During hearings at NJ Bergen County Family Court, Baby X’s Father was able to present a copy of Baby X’s Mother’s immigration records (which should a history of immigration fraud conducted by Baby X’s Mother) and get Baby X’s Mother to admit, under questioning, that she had the
child via Unauthorized Medical Experiment/IVF.
Immediately after clear evidence was presented in the court, that Baby X was created by an via Unauthorized Medical Experiment/IVF for the purposes Immigration Fraud, the Father was completely banned from all
courts and all judges – by the corrupt Judge Edward Torack of NJ Bergen County Family Court.
The court ban against the Father to Baby X includes the denial of the following rights:
1) Ban against a “Request for a DNA test of all parties”
2) Access to appeal & any other judges/courts
3) Ban against visitation between Baby X and Father X.
4) Any modifications to Child Support, including a decrease in income of Father X
5) Any ruling on evidence pertaining to immigration and paternity fraud in the case.
The end result is to totally strip Father X from any rights to the child except to shut up and pay. He did not have a right to say when where and how to have a baby, and he did not have a right to have any representation in court. And therefore the State of New Jersey has stripped Baby X’s right to have a Father!
Hello,Could someone explain the IVF to me?thanks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_fertilization
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im completely neutral with designer babies there are good things but also bad things
Jodi, I”ll tell you what, if you write out your objections to designer babies in a fairly clear and consise form and post it here, I’d be happy to comment on them, if that helps.
this is what i have now that i started my paragraphs
Even though we may or may not have the technology to “fix” babies why try to play god? Why try and make the baby a boy or a girl? I don’t see how deciding what your baby is or how they will grow is ok. I feel it goes against Mother Nature, god, and just life. It’s like the baby would come out perfect and soon no one would really be “normal” anymore.
I like it how it is, people shouldn’t be corrected on how they look and if they’re going to be smart or how strong they would be. Why does it really matter if your kid grows up a genius or if their super strong? Shouldn’t that be left to god? Shouldn’t we leave the decisions to the kids anyway? They can grow up and decide for themselves if they want to go into sports or business.
Also who’s to say it’s going to be a sure fire thing anyway? What if you get the stats that the kid won’t be what you want, and you decide to “fix them up” but, it all goes wrong and the baby mutates or dies? How are you to know that the baby isn’t going to mess up later because of what they’re doing to make the baby better? And, would it even be worth it to change your baby. I know I sure wouldn’t mess around with that stuff. I mean, you don’t know for sure if what they’re doing is safe for the mom either. It could hurt the mom in the process and the baby could be hurt too.
Jody,
I think your last argument is the best one so far: “do we really know as much as we think we do? What are the unintended consequences of tampering with a system that’s a million years old?”
I’d suggest going deeper into that and researching all of the things that could happen, biologically, sociologically (if we have lots of people who are/aren’t modified — see Gattica for inspiration), psychologically in terms of the children who do/don’t have modifications…
All of the moral/religious arguments have a fundamental problem: you can do what you believe is right, but how can you tell someone else what to do? Unless what they do hurts society or some individual, it’s their fundamental right to follow their own beliefs. You’d have to show that these activities hurts the kids especially. Unfortunately for you, the parents’ motives are the opposite, to help their kids, right or wrong. So you’re back to my first paragraph in terms of advice.
Avi