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Essay: Should parents be permitted to select certain physical traits for their unborn fetus?

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  • Subject area(s): Sociology essays
  • Reading time: 4 minutes
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  • Published: 15 October 2019*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 1,033 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 5 (approx)
  • Tags: Gene editing essays

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The big question is, should parents be permitted to select certain physical traits for their unborn fetus? The simple answer to this is no, but everyone has their own opinion on this debate. Yes, there are good things that come out of the “designing” your baby but is it really a moral thing to be doing, after all the fetus is a human being. To have your designer baby the doctors who help accomplish this task perform genetic engineering and that is a scary thought. It has its positive sides, such as being able to prevent diseases, but overall genetic engineering to have your designer baby has unknown health risk and unseen consequences, and apart from that it is not following the natural law that God himself made.

You can think that the designer babies are being made to prevent as many illnesses as possible but that is not always the intention behind everyone, some do it out of greed of wanting to have the best or make their family be the best. With that intention having a designer baby is not good at all because they do not do it with the best intention. People should not be messing with the natural balance of how things happen naturally since that is not how we should be taking care of God’s creation. The way he created things was made for a certain purpose, it all has its purpose for why it happens and we should not be messing with the natural process of things. Humans can never fully be able to successfully modify or prevent diseases in a human because “For example, diabetes, heart disease, or certain types of cancer — are linked to several or even many genes, can’t be predicted with any certainty, and depend also on environmental factors such as diets”(Ball). The human body is complicated, every part of the body relies on another, “The human genome is 3.2 billion letters, and in the wrong place a single typo — a dozen or so misplaced atoms — can create misery”(Peterson). To be messing around with the nature of anything is risky because one never knows the consequences or the possibility of the negative outcomes. We should not try to change who people are born to be because there are amazing people out there born with disabilities and who would want to change a person who is unique and beautiful in their own special way. A big example is when a Crispr engineer, “Ms. Doudna once revealed she had a son with Down syndrome. ‘She said, ‘I just want you to know that he’s perfect just the way he is’…Even if Crispr could have fixed that genetic defect, the woman said she wouldn’t change it” (Peterson). The Crispr machine was created and its purpose was to genetically modify genes to create the “perfect” child. People think by picking out who their kid turns out to be will be the best because they will be “perfect” in their eyes. But in reality it might not be like that, since our bodies are so complex the slightest bad move will turn out with results that are unforeseen which make the child at the end maybe not “perfect”. Nobody has the right to take it upon themselves and try to mess around with the natural law because even if some people do not believe it, everything happens for a reason. If that means that someone has autism, then let it be. It was meant to happen. We have to have an open mind and accept everything for how it is, how God himself created it to be.

‘“In altering the DNA code of human embryos,” explains the MIT Technology Review, “the objective of scientists is to show that they can eradicate or correct genes that cause inherited disease, like the blood condition beta-thalassemia. The process is termed ‘germline engineering’ because any genetically modified child would then pass the changes on to subsequent generations via their own germ cells–the egg and sperm”(Stark). Making a designer baby in some people’s eyes is not as bad because it can prevent some illnesses from even existing in someone. People would be in someway better of because their would be less need of money and treatments needed for illnesses, since the illnesses would not even exist in the first place. Scientist try to prove to the people and those who do not support genetically modifying embryos that the “gene-edited embryos could be allowed to develop into people who would no longer pass down their familial genetic afflictions to subsequent generations” (Bailey). They want to pass this off as if designer babies was the best thing to happen because diseases would not passed on, but who gives us the right to decide that, we are not meant to bring chances so drastic to the world. Yes we are given the knowledge to find cures for illnesses but that is using the new technology for the best of everyone. While the designer babies are can be used for the good of some but it will mainly be used to design the “perfect” baby since it is not a cheap procedure just anyone can do.

Nobody should have the power to change the natural course of things, like be able to mess with the human genes and create your “perfect” designer baby. By doing this the whole natural process has been altered and corrupted because humans are trying to change things for their own benefit The altering of the embryo is not moral and the church does not agree with the designer babies because the embryos from the moment of  conception should already have the rights as a grown person. Making designer goes against that as we are not taking care of God’s creation as He gave it to us, instead we take it for granted and try to mold it into something we want or something that will benefit us at the end. We need to learn to take God’s gifts and embrace them instead of trying to change them and try to manipulate them into a way we want to use them.

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