Is It Ethical to Produce a Designer Baby?

In IVF (in vitro fertilization) they take out the mother’s egg cells and fertilize them outside in a lab.

PGD is (pre implantation genetic diagnosis). They use this to screen embryos for genetic diseases.

Parents choose to do this to have a healthy child without a disease and to make their upcoming child’s and themselves a better future. Parents avoid termination by taking PGD and IVF so their child has a disease it will not get terminated. They just throw it away the remainder eggs and choose two healthy embryos.
Well do you think its right to choose what baby you have?

DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid which chromosomes are made up from. Alleles are found in chromosomes. An allele is a different version of a gene, which codes for different version of a characteristic. A gene is what you inherit from your parents. Genes create proteins such as structural proteins to build the body and they create enzymes to speed up chemical reactions in cells.

Chromosomes are long thin, thread like structures in the nucleus of a cell made from a molecule of DNA. Chromosomes carry the genes and there are 23 pairs of chromosomes in your nuclei.

Ff = You carry the disease but don’t have it 

ff = You have the disease

FF = You are not related to the disease

Tim’s parents carry the disease meaning they have heterozygous alleles which mean they are different. They do not have the disease. Tim had a ¼ chance of having the disease. He had ½ chance of carrying it and ¼ chance of not related to the disease.

You can’t catch cystic fibrosis. It is a genetic disorder. This means it is passed down from generations to their children. The disease causes big problems for breathing and digestion. Cells that make mucus in the body don’t work properly. The mucus is much thicker than it should be, so it blocks up the lungs. It also blocks tubes that take the enzymes from the pancreas to the gut. People with cystic fibrosis get breathless. They also get lots of chest infections. The shortage of enzymes in their gut means that their food isn’t digested properly. So the person can be short of nutrients.

In IVF, eggs from a woman are fertilized by male sperm in a Petri dish and allowed to grow for five days until they become blastocysts consisting of about 50 to 65 cells. Because there are currently no precise methods for selecting viable embryos, couples typically choose to implant multiple blastocysts to enhance their chances of conceiving, which may also result in multiple pregnancies. IVF has been used since 1977 to help couples that can’t conceive a child naturally. Since then over 300.000 women worldwide have become pregnant by IVF treatment. Doctors can now help couples with a child at risk from a serious genetic disorder.

Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis is a method of identifying chromosomal abnormalities before implantation of the embryo. The procedure is conducted after the egg has been fertilized in vitro, and before the developing embryo is re-implanted into the womb. After fertilization, the embryo naturally cleaves into individual cells, or “blastomeres”. These cells are virtually identical to each other. Genetically testing one such blastomere can therefore usually reflect the genetic integrity of the embryo overall. PGD involves physically removing 1 or 2 such cells from the embryo with the help of various micromanipulation techniques. 

Arguments for Designer babies.

Designer babies are a good thing because it helps cure a child of a terrible and cruel disease and it isn’t like the new baby wont be loved any more or less than any other child and it has the chance to save a life.
 It does help people who couldn’t originally have a baby, and saves people from the emotional strain and the expensiveness from looking after an ill child, and provides the child with a much happier and healthier start to life and it is a good idea because it can prevent kids being born with unwanted inherited diseases that ruin their lives.

This will benefit parents without the stress of a child with a disorder and the emotionless pain they will feel. They will have a healthier child and not too much trouble with a child with disorder. 

The stem cell baby will be even more precious for representing two lives in one. And, as someone else has commented, medical intervention has deemed it fine to kill (late terminations due to Down’s etc), so why not use technological progress to cure. It is pompous sophistry to bang on about this somehow devaluing people with handicaps. Everyone should be valued for what they are, and if science can bring about the miracle of a cure for a child in the form of a by-product of creating another, wonderful life, then it should be welcomed. 

“What is becoming of us as a nation if we cannot value the lives of our own babies”? From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4493203.stm
this can really save lives with children who need a bone marrow transplant. Parents would be proud if their child gets cured.

The question to be asked is “Is this a wanted child or is it a child that’s only being made to be a donor to its older brother?” If it were the latter, then the baby would be being treated as a commodity. To see how wrong that would be let’s invent an extreme case: If a child was being created just to provide a cure and was going to be sent off for adoption after the treatment was complete, that would clearly be very wrong. But in this case the child is clearly going to be a much-loved member of the family. The new baby will be loved for its own sake, and the special techniques being used are being used to bring additional benefits from the birth. If the new baby can’t provide suitable cells for the treatment the parents will be disappointed that there won’t be a cure, they won’t be disappointed in their new child. So in this case (and in any case that would get HFEA permission) there is no risk of the baby being seen as a commodity. And consider this too: Parents often have mixed motives for having a child – maybe they want to provide company for an existing child, or to improve their own relationship, or satisfy the in-laws, and while we might raise an eyebrow we wouldn’t say that their action was morally wrong. “As a parent in this position there would be huge temptation to take advantage of the technology” from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4493203.stm