Designer Babies Book Report

Designer Babies
My interest in designer babies was first sparked by a book I was required to read in high school, Brave New World. For my class I was required to do a little research on this book, and as I was searching the Internet I came across a website on designer babies. Although Brave New World is not a book about designer babies, the altering of human genes described in the book is a concept very similar to designer babies. The possibility of a society made up of genetically altered humans, such as the one in this book, is becoming very real with the help of advancements in technology.
In vision one day you and your significant other are going to the doctor because you are planning to have a baby, but you are not going to the doctor
The search engine I found the most handy was the EBCO Host website. This site lead me to many resourceful articles that truly helped me better understand the topic of designer babies. The first resource I came across is titled Designer Babies: Eugenics Repackaged or Consumer Options? By Stephen L. Baird, technology education teacher at Bayside Middle School, Virginia Beach, Virginia. Baird describes how journalists are the ones who have coined the term “Designer Babies”. He goes onto to explain that this term is simply a shortened phrase that represents certain reproductive technologies that allow expecting parents to have more control on the birth outcomes of their child (15). In vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are two procedures of genetic engineering that are described through specific cases throughout this document. “Almost three decades ago, on July 25, 1978, Louise Brown, the first "test-tube baby" was born. The world 's first "test-tube" baby arrived amid a storm of protest and hand-wringing about science gone amok, human animal hybrids, and the rebirth of eugenics” (Baird 12). This “test-tube” case is the first case explained by Baird. The purpose for this example case is to describe how using the in vitro fertilization reproductive technique is not necessarily a bad thing. Although many voices of the public spoke
This article was written by Dr. Yury Verlinsky, graduate, postgraduate and PhD of Kharkov University. Verlinsky goes into detail about the different meanings the public has of designer babies. His definitions of designer babies include the sex of a child being chosen, testing embryos for unwanted disorders and diseases, or for cosmetic reasons (24). Verlinsky goes through the multiple views on the advantages and disadvantages of allowing parents to use the technology to create designer babies. One particular advantage of designer babies, pointed out by Verlinsky, that caught my attention was, “insurance companies, for example, may refuse to cover newborn malformations that could have been corrected before implantation” (25). This goes to show how people may be economically pressured into the technologies of designer babies. I found that this particular article had a lot of the same factual information as the previous