Designer Babies Essay Example

If you could design your own baby, would you? The concept of a designer baby is a baby in which you manipulate the genetic material in order to create a baby with certain genetic traits, some of which can be useful to humanity; others can be completely detrimental to the whole ecosystem. Does the ethics matter? Is their suffering worth it? 

On the one hand, there are disorders that are inherited from genetics such as cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a terrible and tragic illness that will affect the child from birth throughout their life, until their untimely death.

With a designer baby, no matter if you’re a carrier or not, you can guarantee your child won’t suffer from the devastation of cystic fibrosis. What's more, if you’re unlucky enough to have a child of nature who conceives naturally without the manipulation of DNA and require treatments involving a genetic match, especially with diseases like Leukaemia. I would like to bring your attention to a film called “My sister’s keeper” as an example. In the film, there is a little girl who wants to sue her parents for the rights to her own body. She was “designed” by her parents to be a perfect genetic match for her older sister suffering from leukaemia and required perfect matches for bone marrow aspirations, kidney transplants and other procedures that affected her daily life. She's known as a saviour child, and this can also be helpful to humanity.

However, despite the points in favour of designer babies, there are a lot of points against them – a lot of them ethical. First and foremost, once people start seeing the power of designer babies in terms of genetic illness and preventing that, they might start to manipulate DNA to design babies with certain eye colours; certain heights; and other unnecessary characteristics. People will get greedy with the accessible technology as with human nature, this can be detrimental as we would be reducing the gene forms. Perhaps, certain characteristics would become extinct – never to be seen again, as people may only want rare characteristics. We will have less genetic diversity than anyone, and everyone could have blue eyes or blonde hair. Society would be chaotic.

There is a case study/fictional scenario where parents design a baby boy to have blue eyes, blond hair, be 6 foot tall and be amazing at football. However, the child, while good at football, hates it and would rather be a musician in a rock band. He dyes his blond hair pink and quits his football team in order to completely devote his time to his band. The parents designed their son to have certain characteristics, but they needed to remember they can’t change his personality or his soul. This can lead to disappointment, resentment and an eventual damaged parent-child relationship due to unrealistic and unfair expectations of the man their son would become. The child feels unwanted and unloved because his parents wanted a blond-haired football star and instead they got a son who preferred music and dyed his hair a different colour every week.