Did you know that science has progressed to the point where we may actually be able to manipulate a baby in the womb? Manipulate is the best word for this as we may be able to choose the sex, skin color, hair color, and even eye color of the baby before the child is ever born. Strange isn’t it, the ability to make a baby to your own specifications and then give birth to a child that appeals most to you. Well I'm against such a dangerous ability.
Advantages: Yes the technology should be perused, but its application limited. This technology can help a child who is diagnosed with severe disfigurement and if they are not fully developed. But these sorts of situations are if and only if these maladies are diagnosed in the womb. So this can help babies who would suffer and offer an alternative to people who would use abortion rather than live with a disabled child (something I am also against for scientific, moral, and religious reasons). Thus, I'm fine with curing Down syndrome before the child is ever born.
Danger 1: The first danger of this technology is that if we cure someone of say dyslexia while in the womb, does this mean they will be prone to another genetic disorder, or even cancer. By putting in a preventative measure say against Alzheimer’s, does this destroy the Childs ability to feel certain emotions. We really don't know what the costs will be to "heal" some one before they ever leave the womb. How can we know how severe a person's autism is until we can physically interact with them? There are major risks to even the changing of a person’s eye color in the womb as we could make them prone to eye cancer for all we know, or some new and unforgiving disease. Changing anything could also make us even more susceptible to diseases that otherwise would not have ever been a problem before like some random strain of flue virus that affects a chicken. Sounds weird, but these genetic changes may allow a disease that only affects one type of species to infect and possibly be lethal to another.
Danger 2: Parents who want designer children are also the problem. What if the majority of parents want boys? What do you think will happen to the overall population? We obviously will have fewer girls and thus less children being born in later generations. There is also the possibility that we may all look too much alike such as all of us having blond hair and blue eyes. How can we know how this will affect the gene pool? For all we know, we can be making us all so genetically similar to the point it is like marrying a relative, you are almost guaranteed to have an increase in genetic disorders. All these are possibilities and may in fact be a worst case scenario, but we could end up using science to actually cause our own extinction simply because we want an ideal child rather than giving birth to what our genes naturally put together.
Conclusion: I am in favor of further study. But I want the application of such technology to be as limited as possible when put into practice. It should only be used in the most severe cases in which we know for a fact the child will be completely unable to live a normal life. For cases that don't meet the standards for this form of genetic manipulation, we have adult stem cell technology which is quickly progressing which should also solve some if not most of the lesser cases of things like autism and aspergers. As to designing the perfect "looking" child, I will now and forever be totally against manipulating a child’s sex and things like eye and skin color. The risks are too great for this technology to be wasted on such things and I believe is a fool’s errand. There is a danger to every new technology and an even greater responsibility to use it responsibly.
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