What do you think about Designer Babies?

[Yohn]

The whole designer baby thing is retarded, personally. If you want that must customization, you might as well get a doll.
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"And as the lion slaughters man, I am the wolf and you're the lamb." ~Blind Guardian

[Tullaryx]

[SwissStopwatch]

In a few limited ways, something like this is not necessarily a bad thing, if used to screen out certain defects. Besides the normal argument that says that if we start, we might not know when to stop, though, there are already procedures in place that work towards the same effect, meaning that the "designer baby" technology doesn't need to be used for this. So yes, I have some problems with this.

The first problem is in the economic divide. The procedure is most certainly not affordable to everyone in the world, so the risk of having the rich be able to design their children more or less as they please while the poor don't have the option to. And this will be a problem unless the procedure is somehow reduced in cost so much that everyone can easily afford it. Since I really do mean everyone, this isn't going to happen...

The second problem is that this works against genetic variety. Certain cultures definitely have preferences for certain traits (The notable modern example is the preference in China to have male children). Clearly, it would not be a good thing if a section of the population got to choose to have these traits; I'm sure I don't need to explain exactly why it's not a good thing. And it would happen, at least to some extent; the more available the treatment, the more significant the potential shift. The article itself mentions eugenics, which is something I feel I don't want to get more into here for a couple reasons; that goes down virtually the same road as this one, though.

The third problem is that this completely forces the parent's will on the child. I understand that the child does not get to choose what he or she looks like anyway, but that doesn't mean the parents should. And, sometimes the parent's will seems somewhat twisted to me. The article mentions a few PGD clients using the technology to try to give the embryo things most of us would probably consider bad traits (the article specifically mentions deafness and dwarfism). If someone punctured their childs eardrums or otherwise mutilated their ears so that they'd be unable to hear, they would almost certainly draw the attention of Health and Family Services and probably go to jail and lose custody of said child. How should depriving them of hearing via genetic engineering be any different? I can just image the case of a child being born deaf and then learning it was because mom and dad decided they wanted a deaf child, so off to to the genetics lab. That wouldn't be pretty. I know I'd be mad if I were that child...

I could come up with a few more points, but these are the important ones. Alone and especially in combination with each other, they add up to something pretty bad, and it should probably just be nipped in the bud before the slippery slope really kicks in. As mentioned above, I would strongly encourage parents thinking along these lines to just buy a doll instead; you can get those however you like, more or less, and you might even be able to trade it in for a mannequin if you're dead set on seeing it grow up. I'm pretty sure those just naturally come deaf, also.

[Ujitsuna]

While I see it's understandable that parents might want a certain gender due to various reasons such as having a lot of one gender and wanting to raise one from the other, or just prefering to raise a male or female. However, I think it's one step too close to babys being manufactured on an assembly line, I feel that parents should for the most part and in the most normal of cases, let nature take it's course.

[Camus the Noble]

I'm highly skeptical of these claims that parents will be able to custom build their children soon. Obviously we've been moving in that direction for a while. But I think we still have a way to go before baby-building is such an exact science that parents will be able to precisely select such traits as intelligence, height, musical ability, personality, etc. I doubt we have enough knowledge of exactly which genes affect what to pull that off, or the means to manipulate the genes precisely enough. I'm admittedly not familiar with the recent science in this field, but this just seems way beyond our current capacities.

Of course, that doesn't mean that it's beyond the realm of future possibility. As the article Rune hunter links to mentions, we already have technologies for parents to alter their children in some ways before they're born. Gender selection and elimination -- or selection -- of genetic conditions such as Down's syndrome or dwarfism are examples. Not all of these are of the same ethical standing. I think that it's good to make sure that children don't have problems like Huntington's or cystic fibrosis. But parents shouldn't be able to ensure that their children are deaf (we had a thread about this a while ago, actually) or abnormally short. Basically, I think that parents should be able to exercise eugenics (that's basically what it is, so why not call a spade a spade?) when the proposed interferences are likely to benefit the children in their lives. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with messing with nature; the history of humanity is really the history of one species acquiring deliberate dominance over the planet. Something like gender selection, on the other hand, is morally neutral, unless it leads to a socially disruptive gender imbalance, which has become a problem in India and China.

If we eventually get the capability to engineer our unborn children in the extremely specific way that is being discussed, and we very well may, then I think the same basic principle -- allow modifications if they will help the child -- should be enforced. Of course, the good of society as a whole must also be taken into account. If the very wealthy acquire a monopoly on genetic enhancement, then there's a very real chance of a stratification of society along genetically engineered social lines, and subsequent discrimination against the "inferior." Such inequality is not something I would like to see, and I don't think anyone else would either. So ideally, this sort of eugenics should be practiced on a large scale to prevent the emergence of a genetic aristocracy. Unfortunately, the only ways I can see this being implemented would be for the government to cover the costs of these procedures, which would probably be ludicrously expensive, or for it to be made illegal for the wealthy to enhance their children with the emerging technologies. This would of course be seen as a huge invasion of freedom and would be difficult to enforce worldwide anyway.

Something I'm wondering is, if it would be within our capabilities to enhance our children's intelligence, talents, and so on, might it not also be possible to make them better people? Would it be possible to write compassion, kindness, and empathy into the very genes of our descendants? If so (and I don't see why it would necessarily more complex than anything else being discussed), then that would help to prevent any social "geneism" (discrimination against those with "natural" genes, a la Gattaca) in enhanced society. This is of course highly speculative, but it seems to me that speculation is an inseparable part of most estimates about where technology will go next.

Ultimately, we may end up with a society like that in Brave New World, where the creation of new people is something that is rationally controlled by the society's decision-makers. However, I don't think that this would necessarily be a bad thing. What bothers me in Brave New World is not that humans use technology to make life more uncomfortable; what bothers me about it is that that society is undemocratic, deliberately inegalitarian, and creativity is extinguished. But I do not believe that that is the only direction that these new technologies can lead us in. Hopefully, we as a species will find a way to use them for the mutual benefit of us all.

[eXistence of Fly]

[Luceit]

Again, let me say: Designer babies are not the same as eliminating genetic problems.
Thing is, why not investigate why parents would do such a thing first before considering designer babies to be a viable option? Is it feasible to put money and time into such a complicated project to sastify the whime of parents? Wouldn't it be better to just get rid of the child's defects so that he/she can be normal and let nature be? Ultimately, perfection too is subjective; can we ever prescribe our views on our children and expect them to take it perfectly?
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