Designer Babies: What is Ethical?

Designer Babies: What is Ethical?

Imagine a parent walking into what looks like a conference room. A sheet of paper waits on a table with numerous questions many people wish they had control over. Options such as hair color, skin color, personality traits and other physical appearances are mapped out across the page. When the questions are filled out, a baby appears as he or she was described moments before. The baby is the picture of health, and looks perfect in every way. This scenario seems only to exist in a dream, however, the option to design a child has already become a reality in the near future. Parents may approach a similar scenario every day in the future as if choosing a child’s characteristics were a normal way of life. The use of genetic engineering should not give parents the choice to design their child because of the act of humans belittling and “playing” God, the ethics involved in interfering with human lives, and the dangers of manipulating human genes.

Because of the recent technological advances in genetic engineering, parents could have the choice not only to pick and choose their children’s physical appearances, but many personality traits and talents as well. As amazing and unreal as this seems, for some people a chance to create their baby’s characteristics is a dream come true. Parents can build almost every aspect of their child, taking away the faith most people have in God. The belief that He created man, makes designing and choosing characteristics in a child seem to belittle God. Altering a child‘s genetic makeup also takes away from the idea of a baby being a miracle from God because people would have the choice to change and design possibly any aspect of their child. Parents choo...

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... child, to be guinea pigs in a potentially fatal medical advancement. Although parents would like to think that altering their child is easy, and free-of-charge, the harsh reality is that no medical experiment, or procedure can be perfected. With this in mind, parents cannot choose to make their child extremely smart or blonde, without knowing the dangers ahead.

People should not have access to genetically altering their children because of people’s views on God and their faith, the ethics involving humans, and the possible dangers in tampering with human genes. Although it is many parent’s dream to have the perfect child, or to create a child just the way they want, parents need to realize the reality in genetic engineering. Sometimes a dream should stay a figment of one’s imagination, so reality can go in without the chance of harming an innocent child’s life.