Designer Babies Debate. "Alpha children wear gray. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. When Aldous Huxley coined this quote in 1932 in his novel 'Brave New World', he had no idea how intense the designer babies debate could become less than a century after. The debate today is something that the public eye has been shielded from, and for good measure.
What are Designer Babies? Picture a world where parents of a yet unborn child can modify his/her genes, and thus determine his/her physical appearance, cleverness and resistance to disease. Ethical Concerns The ethical considerations come into play because of the effects this procedure will have. Designer babies. Most parents want to provide the best opportunities for their children in life, but where do you draw the line?
Professor Julian Savulescu is a practical ethicist from Oxford University who argues that parents should have the opportunity to choose the genetic make-up of their child, ranging form hair colour to intelligence. "Using IVF would give children the greatest choices and opportunities in life," says Professor Savulescu. "The basic idea is that we have already accepted using genetic testing to see if embryos have diseases," he says. "We're increasingly testing for adult onset conditions plus the susceptibility to diseases. We test for diseases because they make people's lives worse. " "Surely this means we should test for other things that impact on our happiness and reduce our ability to meet our goals?
" While Professor Savulescu is aware that there are people who believe that we should never intervene with nature; he disagrees. Where should we draw the line on 'designer' babies? Leafing through the popular press it’s easy to see that the baby industry is big business: designer labels in size 000; prams that deftly allow running parents to take baby along and pick up a single origin soy latte on the way; endless programs for developing musical ability; nursery décor that makes Grand Designs look positively pedestrian.
Design has permeated pregnancy, babies and all that that entails. And if it floats your boat, why not? We live in a time and in a nation that values – indeed enshrines – free choice. But what if baby design starts earlier? What if we chose to manipulate the genetic make up of our children before they were born? Of course this is already possible to some degree and is happening in clinics and laboratories all over the world through reproductive technologies. For the couples concerned this is entirely understandable. But what does this mean on a global scale? What can we learn from history? Designing future generations is as old as civilisation. Cookies must be enabled. You have cookies turned off To use this website, cookies must be enabled in your browser.
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Genetically engineering 'ethical' babies is a moral obligation, says Oxford professor.