‘Designer babies’: Relax the rules?
The rules governing ‘designer babies’ may soon be relaxed to allow more screening and embryo selection.
Very interesting comments on the BBC website, some of them are:
I think I’d be very happy to know I’d helped save my sibling’s life when I was born.
It is totally illogical to not be able to cure a child when one can.
Because mankind has been slowly abandoning natural selection (ie those with bad genetic mutations are rightly NOT allowed to die) the human race is slowly overloading with unfavourable genes. We either engineer our genes directly or select the best genetic stock (no this has nothing to do with racism or eugenics). Otherwise the average homosapien will in 100,000 years need constant medical attention to stay alive.
I can’t imagine anyone having a child *only* to help an older sibling – this would surely be an additional reason. Secondly, many, many people have a second child to help their first anyway – they believe that a child is better off not being the only one in the family.
As the parent of a child who died from a genetic disorder I would not have considered giving birth to another child in the hope of saving the first one.
Perhaps the only people that are opposed to this are those who live for their suffering. I believe that if through human engineering we can bring an end to human suffering, we must, we have an obligation to many future lives that have yet to be lived.