A fertility clinic in Los Angeles is offering its clients a choice of gender, eye color, hair color and complexion for their babies born using IVF. The technique used is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or PGD. What that basically means is that if dad’s got an afro and mom’s got blue eyes, you can instruct the doctor to ensure that the baby gets both.
It’s a tricky process and basically tampering with nature. What’s funny is that Dr Jeff Steinberg, who’s had his moments under the sun popularizing IVF, does not guarantee any success with the procedure. I don’t know if it means that the baby will be born with one eye blue and the other brown but it does amount to unethical “social selection” in my opinion. Am not comfortable with the thought. In fact I was just about beginning to get used to the idea of cloning and now this comes along.
The Germans tried something on these lines to try and create a master Aryan race with blue eyes, blond hair and all. And now this…ages pass but nothing changes. The clinic says this is a purely cosmetic procedure but from what I have read, it involves some embryo killing and that’s not nice.
For me the bottomline is “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
Comments
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March 3rd, 2009 - 9:49:42 AM
this does sort of make a person think. so you can pick out babies just like you pick out a combo at mcdonald's. it's a little freaky. now i could see some gene therapy to avoid deformities or diseases. but just to have your baby to be blue eyed instead of hazel. seems a bit much for me.
kaled ali
March 3rd, 2009 - 4:40:53 PM
this is kind of weird. i would never do this because i think it should be god's choice of what the baby looks like and what its gender is.
Juan
March 25th, 2009 - 11:05:02 PM
How is this any different than people choosing a spouse who looks very different from themselves or adopting a child from a certain country? Hair and eye color don't truly affect a baby, because they don't mean a smarter or even stronger baby, it's just a superficial cosmetic feature. So if people really want to waste money on that, then whatever, as long as there are laws in place in society that prevent discrimination based on appearance in the workplace, then this doesn't affect that at all. It's people's personal reproductive choices. Also, this is nothing like the Nazis. The Nazis were a state party telling people what they could and couldn't do with their own bodies, who could and couldn't have babies. This is the opposite, people choose for themselves their babies, and even infertile couples can have children. This reverses the Nazi idea of purity, and only certain people breeding essentially, and allows everyone the chance to choose whatever genes from within their pools. This recognizes that we as a human race share all the hair and eye colors, and thus should be free to choose whichever we want.