Designer Babies: Not To Far In The Future

Gender of a child may not have much significance for some couples wanting a child, but this was not the case with the Masterton family.

The story of Neil and Sharon Bernardi is undeniably heart wrenching. The English couple watched their first three children pass away just hours after their births. Their fourth child, Edward, lived – despite frequent, day long seizures and other central nervous system abnormalities – until the age of twenty one. In the meantime, Neil and Sharon attempted to have three more children, all of whom died from due complications before reaching age two. Years passed before the couple learned that their suffering originated from mitochondrial defects present in Sharon’s cells.

To many people GATTACA could represent a utopian world. Because most of the population are genetically modified and engineered to be born with no diseases and no tendencies towards disabilities eliminating all possibilities for suffering in the future. Which means that more and more people will born instead of dying And this could change the world as we know it. If this technology were to come available to the public would it be a good idea to have your child be genetically modified for them to have the best possible future?

The escalating supremacy and receptiveness of genetic technology to engineer and "design babies," now gives parents the option to modify their unborn children, consecutively to prevent their offspring's from receiving genetic disorders such as: "sickle cell diseases, cystic fibrosis and down syndrome ," or conceivably, make them blue eye coloured, intelligent or else blessed with enviable qualities. Would this mean there will be an increase in the superiority among the rich, both physically and mentally, or will this modification be available for all to exploit, or would we be evidencing engineered babies facing unexpected genetic predicament? The highly contentious issue of designing unborn children to be a perfect "epitome" is thoroughly investigated and examined in the article of, lead author of

Day by day, an accretion of advancements and improvements are formed across the world. Prominent developments occur rapidly, like the use and creation of technology. Technology has and continues to create an immense effect on how we live our daily lives. Its use is ranged from how information is found, travel, communication, and more. However, the advancements of technology seems to interfere with the circle of natural life, life that is brought into our world. It has changed the lives of unborn children, whom are in the form of an embryo. Altered by a new technique and process of genetic modification, that is commonly referred to as “Designer Babies”. This genetic modification, genetically modifies the DNA of an embryo to achieve desirable traits amongst them. It changes an unborn babies development and future life. While it may seem that designer babies can be a positive life change, there are negative effects that outweigh, due to the fact that it goes against human nature; genetic probability, expectations, diversity, and religious prospects.

“A certain person’s religious, economic, political, and scientific viewpoint of a situation significantly influences what his or her moral beliefs about designer babies are. Those who are highly influenced by religious teachings find the technology used by designer babies to be humans attempting to “play god”, while from an economic standpoint the inequality that would develop between the rich and poor from the expenses of using the CRISPR-cas9 system is inevitably unethical. Yet, from ethical beliefs that are developed from a political perspective, the opinion was split. Those from a conservative standpoint saw designer babies as immoral when considering the traditional rights a child has, but those from a liberal viewpoint brought into the

Imagine a world that is like a game of dress up. In dress up, you start out with a person, and you are able to choose your preferred gender, eyes, nose, lips, hair, body type and clothes. In other words, in a game like dress up, you can construct an ideally perfect person. Likewise, in the movie Gattaca, in a not too distant future, constructing a person is a reality, and it is not limited to just physical features. Gattaca shows a dystopic society where a birth made from genetic selection is widely common. The science of this idea essentially starts with DNA sequencing. Genetic sequencing is relevant and of interest is because it gives us a better understanding of our genes and the science behind our DNA. DNA sequencing is like a foundation

As said before, I would not choose to genetically engineer my children because the world we saw in Gattaca seemed too routine. It didn't seem

As health and wellness becomes more like an arms race to acquire everything necessary to live a long life, there is one thing that an individual cannot simply change, and that is genetics. However, in the future, parents would be able to pick and choose which genes that their offspring would express, creating so-called “designer babies”. This concept is explored in the 1997 film Gattaca. The film describes a world in which the more successful people are those that were genetically picked for, and those that were conceived naturally face setbacks and de-facto discrimination (Niccol, 1997). The film follows the main character Vincent, a naturally conceived person, as he assumes a new identity and ends up becoming an astronaut (Niccol, 1997). The film embraces topics discussed in the class, mostly technology used when it comes to health, as it is the key goal in a society like this, as well as security and surveillance, in which genetics is used as a way to keep track of the populous.

With all the freedom in America, is it fair to design a child? “A baby developing from an embryo created by in-vitro fertilization and selected because it had or lacked particular genes, the genetic makeup often having been notified by genetic engineering” (Dictionary,com), If this were to become popular the world would lack racial diversity and there could be genetic consequences.

Because we are not there yet “These new technologies, however, are not yet inevitable. Unlike global warming, this genie is not yet out of the bottle “( Mckibben, Designer Genes) It is possible that none of the afford mentioned scenarios will evolve, The possibility that the masses will rise up and say it is unethical,or immoral or just wrong can occur, and if the result is, a close watch is kept on the advancements in human genetic modification, then common sense and good judgment can be used , and therefore in the future another Frankenstein monster might not be a possibility.

When it comes to the subject of designer babies, or even the thought of being able to create a 'perfect' child there is either controversy or pure relief. The reason being because when it comes to designing babies there is good as well as bad. For example some may say being able to genetically modify a baby so it has no chances of coming out deformed or even with mental or psychical diseases and disabilities is a miracle. Others may say that in the law of ethics this can not be acceptable. The fact the you're choosing your child's fate is ‘wrong’ stating that whether a child ends up with a disease is life, we should not be able to control it. Which makes sense yes, unless you're talking about two parents who can't have children because

Will you go for the brown hair or blond? Would you prefer tall or short? Girl or boys? Its sound scary for me. A designer baby is a human embryo that has been genetically modified, usually following guidelines set by the parent or scientist, to produce desirable traits. This is done using various methods, such as gene therapy or preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This technology is the subject of ethical debate, bringing up the concept of genetically modified "super humans" to replace modern humans.

The idea of designer babies has been present in science fiction literature and films for decades. From Huxley’s novel Brave New World, in which babies are grown in vats and there is no such thing as family, to the 1997 film Gattaca, in which children who are genetically engineered are considered superior and a person’s value is based entirely on their DNA (Molina, 2016).

How does it sound to walk into the doctor’s office, choose what attributes you want your baby to have, and then having that exact baby 9 months later? Although this may seem quite harmless to most, the negative effects of designer babies are tremendous: the lack of diversity in our population, violation of a specific set of laws designed to protect humans, going against Christian views, and even destroying the roots of human nature. With genetic engineering biotechnology, such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (or CRISPR), new and unique altercations are being done to revolutionize many aspects of our lives. Along with astounding benefits that can come from these biotechnologies, many people have come up with crazy ideas, such as these designer baby ideas, that could be potentially harmful to our society.