Designing babies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Designing babies - Essay Example The Greeks had similar ways to cleanse their society. The Spartans used to have their babies inspected by a council of elders and the potential unhealthy ones were left to die outside. This concept of artificial cleansing is referred to as eugenics, a practice seen in the twentieth century under Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The atrocities committed during that time put a dampener on this practice. Advancement in the field of genetics has resulted in a new interest with regard to health and eugenics. Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis is a technique by which one or two cells are removed from a blast cyst generated by in vitro fertilization so that the embryos can be tested for single gene disorders or chromosomal abnormalities. The benefit from this is parents trying to have children have an opportunity to eliminate some possible diseases and abnormalities they may carry a gene for. The development of a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) gave further fillip to this concept. The basic idea was that an embryo could be tested to find a perfect donor for treatments like organ and bone marrow transplantation. But artificial intervention has raised a lot of moral and ethical dilemmas. It can be justified if this is done in a life and death situation where a transplant can save a life (without the donor being seriously deprived in turn). But this technique has now degenerated into other disturbing areas. According to the celebrated author Debora L Spar, parents now utilize this procedure not for health reasons but by â€Å"those who want to select their child’s gender.† (Spar, 99). The Steinberg’s Fertility Centre in California even gets requests to help couples have babies with specific traits. Thankfully, technology has not developed to such an extent yet. The new eugenics have not yet resorted to killing of newborn babies, but is getting close by