Persuasive Essay On Designer Baby

“When everyone’s super… no one will be” (The Incredibles). This may just be a simplistic quotation from a children’s movie, but it poses a good point in the argument of genetically modifying humans. Genetically enhancing an embryo could be potentially harmful to an infant and a child's relationship with his or her parents, as well as with children born naturally, and furthermore, the genetic editing of human embryos will raise a generation of similar, talentless, and undistinguished people that will not be diversified enough to take on the many positions that are available in today's society, bringing a big socioeconomic change to the world as it is known today.

To describe the topic, a genetically engineered baby, or “designer baby” is
But now, it has become much more than that; many implications come to play when discussing genetic improvement. “Lee Silver has projected a dystopia in which a race of superior humans look down on those without genetic enhancements…” (“Designer Baby”). This shows the potential future of a world with wealthy enhanced humans that dominate the poorer people who could not receive genetic modification. “Set in ‘the very near future,’ it [Gattaca, a sci-fi film] depicts a eugenic dystopia created by embryo screening, in which people born naturally suffer in the shadow of those who begin life in a lab. In one scene, a geneticist reassures a couple that ‘this child is still you, simply the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result’” (Abraham). It is evident in both arguments that there will be a social change in the world between the ‘superhumans’ and the naturally born humans. The new society would be detrimental to how the world works today, and moreover, a society similar to the ones described will develop a generation of more bad and mean people than there already are today. Modifying genes will simply corrupt today's ideal balanced society of everyone having perfectly random genes and a random chance of succeeding in
They also say that the chances of having something go wrong or the development of a strange mutation is highly unlikely (Loria). But, many more problems arise besides the question of whether or not designer babies will actually work. Arguments are made even with avoiding the chance of genetic modification actually working, though. “His [Dr. James Hughes of Trinity College] argument is that we don’t stop people from passing on what we consider ‘bad’ genetic codes, things that might make a person’s life harder, so we shouldn’t stop people from trying to provide someone with a ‘good’ genetic code. Hughes doesn’t think we’re ready to make those sorts of changes yet/.../But he thinks genetically enhanced humans in the form of designer babies are going to happen” (Loria). Here, the argument is made that because children are given bad traits with no penalty, the same should be with good traits. But what Dr. Hughes does not address is that the ‘bad’ traits given to children are completely random, and so are the naturally given good traits. Dr. Hughes then makes the argument that a child’s contentment will not be affected after editing. “Besides, the parents’ decision to change a child’s DNA would often be in the interest of a child, such as making them less susceptible to cancer. Any cosmetic changes, like choosing blue