Creating life is a fantastical process, that has taken creatures on this planet millions of years to perfect. So when the tarnishing of that effort is being jeopardize by designer babies, it’s bit of a problem for me.
New York times had a very interesting article, 21-Century Babies: Building a Baby With a Few Ground Rules,
which exposed the issues with couples that don’t have the ability to
have their own children due to infertility or couples who just want to control their childrens’ destiny.
Of course, every couple that want to settle down and have kids want to have a smart and handsome baby. But when couples go out of their way to find genetically viable material from fertility clinics that promise the eggs of a pre-med students from Harvard, and semen from a collegiate track star is just lunatic. I can understand if a couple wants to have children that resemble somewhat likeness to them. That would draw attention from their inability to have children but that doesn’t excuse people taking advantage of the system.
Oh but it doesn’t stop there, there is also the problem of surrogate mothers who have to go through the nine month gestation process. Going through child birth and giving up child without any recourse. And now with modern science, the donor semen and egg doesn’t even have to be from the couple so the child is birth from a mother doesn’t even have any relation other than being just an incubator. Talk about a surreal episode of Jerry Springer when the child confronts it’s parents that may have five people involved, three of them who were the cooking materials.
What the hell! The regulations on these acts are largely unsupervised and I think that they need to be monitored much closer. Lets not forget the last time a nut job thought it would be great to make a super race was a little man called Hitler, who had big ambitions in Scandinavia to create super children. If that was a monstrous act then I think couples who pay thousands of dollars to make a super baby is just as bad.
Adoption is much better in my opinion, it better controls the massive population crisis that we are already having, and it could better a life that already came into this world with lesser opportunity. If I was infertile and my wife was infertile then that’s what I would do, not accessorize my child for my own life, let the child accessorize me.
Here is the NY times link if your interested…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/13surrogacy.html