This Season’s Must- Have Accessory : Designer Babies!

-Yes, they are all the rage! Designer babies are the ultimate shopping experience! Now, thanks to gene therapy, you can choose your baby’s eye and hair colour and its height, so as to match it with yours! – isn’t it just great!?

- RUBBISH! In such a shallow society used to a shopping frenzy and plastic surgery, designer babies were bound to be the next trend. Not so long ago, babies’physical attributes and gender were pretty much a hit-or-miss affair, which nobody would dare complain about. And, even if gene therapy was ultimately conceived of, it was merely with the sole purpose of having it applied to an embryo to ward off a possible disease. Within a decade or two, however, not only will parents be able to choose from a wide range of physical attributes but they will also be able to pick out their babies’ IQ and personality type.

Doesn’t it strike you as sick and evil the fact that parents would go to such extremes in order to produce what they consider a “perfect and beautiful” human being ? I challenge these parents- if they deserve to be called parents- to please define the concepts of “perfect” and “beautiful” from an ethical point of view, and to ask to themselves if beauty and perfection truly make us “better people”, before making hasty decisions about gene therapy. Or else, two controversies may stem from this issue.

On the one hand, fears exist that we will breed a race of super humans who look down on those humans without genetic enhancements.Consequently, discrimination against those whose genes have not been modified may rise, and this could contribute to create a gap in society.On the other hand, the genetic modification of humans can pose an ethical debate about the rights of the baby. It seems that if genetic modification takes place, parents, in effect, would then be entitled to choose, over their babies to be, from attributes which are by no means likely to ever be reversed in the future.

All things considered, techniques for making designer babies should only be applied when it comes to disease prevention, not to “improve” what nature has dictated. We need to grapple with the above serious implications designer babies may have on us if we do not want mankind to meet its doom.

I hope this article gives food for thought on such a thorny issue.