Designer Babies
Designer Babies
Thousands of couples take their children to build-a-bear workshops every year to build and design a perfect teddy bear but the fact that there are also “build-a-baby” workshops is preposterous! Thousands of couples from around the world are using new reproductive technology not to procreate or save a baby’s life but to build a “perfect baby” and in the process they end up killing many babies. There have been more than 4000 cases of successful gender selected babies due to new technology and scientific discoveries. Sex-selective abortion and female infanticide has been commonly reported for centuries. Couples don’t just want a healthy baby, they want a perfect baby and perfection, of course, starts with gender. In many cultures around the world, such as the Chinese, Indian and African, having a male child is more desirable than having a female child and these are the cultures where sex-selective abortion and female infanticide is most common. That’s nothing new but sex-selective procreation seems to be the new trend in the modern world. Such practices, of using science to manipulate nature to this extent, are unethical, they lead to terminating pregnancies and distort sex ratios among humans therefore they should be outlawed as they can have many negative consequences for our society
New technology, such as in-vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, has made it possible to select and fertilize gender specific sperm. Scientists use a technology called MicroSort to select gender specific sperm. “MicroSort is based on the premise that girl-producing sperm, which carry X chromosomes, are bigger than the boy-producing sperm, which carry Y chromosomes. The procedure involves coloring a sperm sample with fluorescent dye and then zapping it with a laser that illuminates the dye. The bigger X chromosomes absorb more dye and glow brighter than the Y ones” (1st website). By combing this technique with in-vitro fertilization and artificial
Thousands of couples take their children to build-a-bear workshops every year to build and design a perfect teddy bear but the fact that there are also “build-a-baby” workshops is preposterous! Thousands of couples from around the world are using new reproductive technology not to procreate or save a baby’s life but to build a “perfect baby” and in the process they end up killing many babies. There have been more than 4000 cases of successful gender selected babies due to new technology and scientific discoveries. Sex-selective abortion and female infanticide has been commonly reported for centuries. Couples don’t just want a healthy baby, they want a perfect baby and perfection, of course, starts with gender. In many cultures around the world, such as the Chinese, Indian and African, having a male child is more desirable than having a female child and these are the cultures where sex-selective abortion and female infanticide is most common. That’s nothing new but sex-selective procreation seems to be the new trend in the modern world. Such practices, of using science to manipulate nature to this extent, are unethical, they lead to terminating pregnancies and distort sex ratios among humans therefore they should be outlawed as they can have many negative consequences for our society
New technology, such as in-vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, has made it possible to select and fertilize gender specific sperm. Scientists use a technology called MicroSort to select gender specific sperm. “MicroSort is based on the premise that girl-producing sperm, which carry X chromosomes, are bigger than the boy-producing sperm, which carry Y chromosomes. The procedure involves coloring a sperm sample with fluorescent dye and then zapping it with a laser that illuminates the dye. The bigger X chromosomes absorb more dye and glow brighter than the Y ones” (1st website). By combing this technique with in-vitro fertilization and artificial