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There are ethical, legal, and social issues pertaining 'designer babies'.

 

Ethical:

  • "playing God"

  • interfering with nature

  • "building the perfect Build-A-Bear" known as your child

  • designer babies will have the upperhand on non-designer babies, like enhancement drugs

  • "throwing out" the bad traits

  • "unethical human experimentations"

  • giving your children "superhuman" powers

  • matching parents' picky, superficial wishes such as sexual orientation and possibly perfect music pitch

  • ​logic is backed up by selfish and superficial requests

  • taking away rights of the baby, i.e., appearance and abilities

Issues

 

Legal:

  • it's not 100% safe yet

  • only in experimental stages at this point

  • no reassurance that it will work successfully

  • testing has mostly been done on animals

  • might have to terminate the unborn baby, known as abortion

  • could lead to problems and harms for future generations

  • if you are tweaking one gene here, then another gene somewhere else must shift to balance it out

  • could lead to a situation where children are programmed to do certain tasks but unable to do anything else

  • "The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs released a statement in 1994 in support of using genetic selection as a means to prevent, or cure specific diseases, but that selection based on benign characterisitcs was not ethical" (Ly).

Social:

  • designer babies will be relatively similar

  • designer babies and later generations will possbily be clones, like those in Star Wars

  • less and less diverse

  • individuality becomes rare

  • unbalanced society of "designer" and "non-designer" children

  • creating a gap 

  • discrimmination

  • segregation and prejudice

  • genetic diversity

  • our own dystopian society

(Citation 37, 40, 41, 42, 43)

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