Genetic Engineering Bad

The Not So Perfect Human Many technological advances have come in recent years. One of which is the scientific research of genetic engineering. They have found ways to fix genetic mutations, cure diseases, and even just improve a child’s athletic or intellectual ability. Genetic Scientists are trying to genetically engineer children in the womb, but genetic engineering is an inferior practice because of the safety, financial, and ethical issues.
First, as our society gets closer and closer to genetic perfection, it has to monitor the safety of it’s people. When someone attempts to perfect the new child, they could easily mess up or fail in the process of creating the perfect baby. As the genetically modified baby is being made, the family
pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a perfect child.(CGS) If something goes wrong, the mother and baby could die. The reward is not worth risking the life a mother and her newborn. One thing people say is that once we become more advanced, we can do these procedures more safely. Well, that is false, because when we become more advanced, we will want more, causing us never to have the degree of safety that we need. A baby's life is not worth risking for the chance to be a tiny bit smarter, or athletic. The risk is not worth the reward.
Second, is having a perfect child worth 100,000$? Well that’s how much it is predicted to cost by researchers at the Reproductive Medicine’s annual meeting(Lehmann-Haupt). After spending thousands on just getting the baby, there is also the cost to raise the baby, which can be as much as 12,000$ in the baby’s first year and rising about 500$ every year after that. So having a child that is slightly more athletic, intelligent, or social would end up costing around 349,500$ until they were eighteen. Along with the perfection, some, like the Ayala sisters, have children to use as donors for other people. In the case of the Ayala sisters, Marissa Ayala was born solely for the purpose of donating bone marrow to her sister that was dying of Leukemia(Josh Dulaney). So having this second child added on another load of hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on surgeries, along with raising the child. With all these costs, many would go into debt after spending this kind of money. So although using genetic engineering could help fix disorders in children, many parents that have children with disorders say that they are happy that their child has the disorder as it has taught them a lot about life and the changes that they can go through.
Third, when it comes to genetic engineering there's one major issue that most people will have to overcome, ethics.
83% of people identify themselves as Christians in the United States and modifying their baby would totally contradict their religion. In the religion of Christianity, the god they pray to is perfect and makes no mistakes. Designing your own baby would take away from god’s perfection in the religion of Christianity. A Christian's baby would no longer be god's perfect creation; the baby would now be a machines recent product. Many people that identify themselves as Christians that are in support of genetic engineering say that with modifying genetics, their babies can avoid common
family health issues such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.
According to the Science Of Aging, genetic engineering can for sure prevent health issues in a baby(Sivapatham). Although having this as a huge benefit in society for young kids’ health, it will be insanely tough for people to follow through on this. Many Christians have been practicing their religion since birth; their religion has been the base of their life since day one. It would be insanely tough for a parent to raise a child in this religion, if their child’s emotions were created by some sort of genetic engineering machine and not from their god. In Psalm 139:13-16 it says,”For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be(Psalm 139:13-16). This quote sums up how in the religion of christianity god is the founder of emotions, love, and everything in life. Having a machine creating your baby’s genotypes and phenotypes would be going in a whole different path than what 2.1 billion identify themselves
as. In conclusion, Scientists have been hard at working their labs trying to make humans “perfect”, though with all the breakthroughs that they have had in genetic engineering, there have also raised many problems with the study of this. There are safety, financial, and ethical issues that come from this practice, thus this study needs to stop trying to “fix” humans.