What is a designer baby? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is defined as a baby whose genetic material has been artificially selected by genetic engineering combined with in vitro fertilization (IVF) to ensure the presence or absence of specific genes and characteristics. In other words, parents can modify their children’s genes for desirable characteristics, both medically and cosmetically. After choosing, they go through IVF, which is an advanced reproductive technique that fertilizes eggs with sperm in test-tubes outside a woman’s body.
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| In Vitro Fertilization |
One benefit of designer babies are Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which screens embryos if they have some kind of genetic disease and the selected embryos are implanted into the mother. They can replace and detect defective genes that are responsible for diseases, like Huntington’s chorea, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and much more. As a result, it prevents their child to inherit any kind of hereditary disorder. It also allows parents to have their ideal child. They can choose their eye and hair colour, sex, body type, how tall they will grow up to, what kind of illnesses they will be resistant to, and possibly their IQ and personality!
In order to have a designer baby, you can go through in vitro fertilization with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which will cost around or even more than $30 000! As you can see, the process of making a designer baby is very expensive and only wealthy families can afford it. I find this unfair because since this procedure isn’t available to everyone, the rich can choose to survive, while the people who are not able to afford it would have to face genetic defects and, possibly, death.
The result of genetic manipulation would cause segregation where there are those who are genetically modified, super humans, and those who aren’t. The normal people would have to compete against super humans who are meant to excel in everything. This would create a society of inequality and discrimination. It not only raises problems in our society, but also conflicts with our religion. Many people may believe that it is morally wrong to play God. As a result of all these ongoing problems involving genetic manipulation, it can lead to great chaos in our world, maybe even war.
As you can see, our society would be greatly affected by genetic manipulation, but more importantly, it also affects our families. How would people feel if they found out they were a designer baby? Would they feel like objects that were bought? They might also have an identity crisis because who knows if their parents modified their personality, like high intelligence or sports ability. I think this shows that parents will only love you if you were a certain way.
In the end, we’re not ready for designer babies. It creates conflicts in our society, religion, and in our families as well. These aspects of life are very important to me and I surely don’t want any problems in them.
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