Designer Babies

I chose the topic designer babies because it is a very controversial topic and was very interesting. PGD stands for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. It is a procedure in which a woman's eggs are gathered, fertilized in a dish (through in-vitro fertilization), and then tested for genetic defects. If defects are found, the embryos are destroyed (Hoekema, 2015). Though this procedure can be used to select the gender of a child (gender selection), it was never meant for this purpose, and many physicians will not use it for such (Hoekema, 2015). There are different types of choosing your child’s gender. Using in vitro fertilization techniques, doctors remove eggs from the woman and fertilize them with sperm in the lab to create embryos.

I believe that God has a plan for each of his children and has placed a certain child with a certain set of parents for a reason. The laws of nature should not be altered. The population has a 1:1 ratio for men to women and that is due to nature (Debate, N.D). People who want to choose their child’s gender does not think about it what it does to the population as a whole. It throws off the balance of nature. If too many males were born, the population would dramatically decrease with a surplus of males to females, who can only birth about one child per year. The same would happen if too many females were born. The reproduction process would be delayed dramatically. To throw out the balance of genders in the population would affect the population itself, and which is already on an increase. I say leave the gender to nature's

Gender selection now rakes in revenues of at least $100 million every year. The average cost of a gender selection procedure at high-profile clinics is about $18,000, and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures are performed every year (Sidhu, 2012). Fertility doctors predict an explosion in sex-selection procedures on the horizon, as couples become accustomed to the idea that they can pay to beget children of the gender they prefer (Sidhu, 2012). A 36-year-old woman named Rose Costa and her husband Vincent, 37, have spent $US100,000 ($AU134,000) on seven attempts at IVF to guarantee a daughter after having already had two sons (Sidhu, 2012). The couple underwent the $US15,000 to $US25,000 process for IVF with sex selection, the speculation has fuelled the debate about whether the screening is ethically sound or a slippery slope toward designer babies (Sidhu, 2012). Being able to choose your child gender for medical reasoning is understandable but choosing your child’s gender just because you would rather a boy over a girl or vice versa is purposely messing up the balance of the population. Couples from other countries are coming to the United States to have this procedure done because it is illegal where they are from. Sperm sorting at the moment is not regulated and banned in the UK because it does not involve donor sperm or the creation of embryos outside the body. Parents can use the technology in Australia for genetic