The debate has reared its ugly head again after Dr. Jeff Steinburg from the Fertility Institutes has declared that he can offer a ‘design your own baby’ service at his Manhattan and LA offices. He has already been performing gender selection for years, where a couple can choose whether their baby is a boy or a girl. This procedure was originally invented so that people with hereditary disabilities could avoid some conditions which are sex linked, for instance, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which is fatal and affects only boys.
Now, couples who don’t have any hereditary conditions or infertility problems, are seeking the services of his assisted conception clinics in order to have their perfect baby. Not only do they want to choose whether they have a son or a daughter, they want the freedom to pick whether Junior will have blue or brown eyes, what colour hair it will have and even the type of hair.
Dr. Steinburg says all this will be possible for his clients within the next six months.
“We have the technology to characterize things like eye and hair colour”, he said.
This previously has not been possible.
The new service, however, is not 100% guaranteed. It is carried out by examining the genes of embryos and picking those which are most likely to have the desired traits, a procedure which Dr. Steinburg says could have a success rate of about 80%.
When pre-implantation genetic diagnosis was introduced into IVF to spare parents the agony of inherited disability and death, there were no laws put in place to govern how it was used, and critics say there should be tighter controls over it. With a legal frame work in place, many ethical dilemmas such as the ability to design a baby, would be prevented from occurring.
Pro-life groups and some ethicists have condemned the idea of this new service, likening it to the Build A Bear® Factory, where children can go in and design their own teddy bear by choosing its colouring and design, customizing it with a voice box or music and choosing all its clothes. Could this new frontier of IVF be like a Build A Bear® experience for grown ups?
Lori Kehoe, the director of the Right To Life group in New York, USA, says “It is sickening to flush a member of the human family down the drain because it is not perfect.” Groups such as hers are theorizing that many healthy embryos will be destroyed just because they don’t match up to their parents' expectations. But Dr. Steinburg isn’t fazed by the criticism. In his view, PGD and genetic selection are constantly evolving and aren’t going to be stopped just because some people disagree with them.
Many scientific discoveries are less than desirable; nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction, as two examples. Just because something is possible, does not mean it should be done.
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