Designer Babies - Ethical?

Imagine a society where the ability to produce the ‘perfect' child is a possibility. The opportunity to eliminate all genetic diseases with a few simple modifications to the genetic makeup. A society in which forthcoming parents can skim through a hypothetical catalogue and shop for desired traits to ‘design’ their children. This imagined world may soon become a reality through the rapid development of genetic engineering. Modern-day society encourages us to strive to be 'perfect', but what is perfection? Hungerford (1878) devised the well-known phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" therefore suggesting that perfection is merely subjective while others perceive it to be a fictional term that is impossible to achieve.

The term ‘designer babies’ has become part of everyday language. But what is a ‘designer baby’?  The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a "baby whose genetic makeup has been artificially selected, manipulated or changed at an embryonic stage by genetic engineering to ensure the presence or absence of particular genes, traits or characteristics".

There are some ethical concerns that are raised by choosing the traits of your child. One of them includes parents deciding what characteristics their children will have. Removing defective or adding desired genes would have an impact on the genetic biodiversity, reducing the gene pool (Patra, 2015). We would have a decrease in the variety of genes, designer babies would be prone to epidemic diseases and viruses (The Guardian, 2018). This could be dangerous as if a new virus comes along, it would be unlikely the designer babies would be immune to it, resulting in the population being vulnerable to any kind of disease. On the other hand, if we focus on parents choosing preferable characteristics, parents would want their children to be good looking, intelligent etc. The similar desires by parents would result in less genetic variation, due to most children having the same genetic sequences.

Furthermore, Altering the genetic makeup of babies would create a divide in society, it would divide the human race into additional categories. The people who can afford to have designer babies would be on a higher social scale than those who cannot afford it. This is because along with having the riches to afford to create a designer baby, the designed children would also have many advantages due to modifications. Dividing the two into “ideals" and "non - ideals" would make the "non - ideals" suffer through lack of opportunities and poverty (Catalano, 2012).  The higher class would continue to expand and become better. Along with that, Catalano (2012) also states that the kids who would be designed would have an upper hand in some situations compared to those who are not designed. This would also cause discrimination between the two classes. The social distinctions would lead the economic divisions to grow into genetic divisions, separating the people with and without enhanced traits. (Ly, 2011)

The use of gene technologies for non-medical motivations have caused wide-spread debate. The selection of physical traits such as hair colour, eye colour and skin colour in the attempts of making the child perfect, attractive, or intelligent is generally frowned upon not only by the clinics but the worldwide population. Such procedures ruin everyone’s individuality as similar traits just make everyone robotically the same. The question of who is right is difficult to answer as the same procedure can cause many benefits, however, equally many risks.