I think I heard my partner say it is now possible to choose how your child looks, he was saying he wouldn't let his wife go through the whole labour pain, that he was going to pick every gene and everything his baby would look like, and when he was saying it I was just looking at him, somehow that thought sounds very nice, but I tend to think of the consequences, will the child grow normally? You know every advantage has a disadvantage and that's just part of life on a norm.
I just stood there listening to him talk and honestly, part of me got it, the appeal is real, skip the uncertainty, skip the anxiety of not knowing what's coming, just build the baby you want. Healthy, strong, no complications, no genetic surprises, on the surface that sounds like love, like a parent doing the most they can for their child before the child even arrives,I understood the excitement in his voice. I did.
But then I started thinking, because that's the thing with ideas that sound good in a conversation, they are easy when they are hypothetical, it is when you start pulling the thread that things get complicated.
Designer babies are not a new concept, Scientists have been experimenting with genetic modification for years and the technology is moving faster than the ethics conversation around it, CRISPR and gene editing tools have already made it possible to alter embryos in ways that were science fiction not too long ago, so my partner wasn't entirely wrong, ome of this is already happening, and that is exactly what makes it worth thinking about seriously.
The case for it is not nothing, if you could eliminate a genetic disease before your child is born something like sickle cell, something that would mean a lifetime of pain , who wouldn't want that? If you could reduce the risk of hereditary cancer or a condition that has run through your family for generations, that feels less like playing God and more like being a responsible parent, that version of genetic modification is hard to argue against with a straight face.
But my partner was not talking about eliminating disease, he was talking about choosing how the baby looks, the eye colour, the height, the features, and that's a very different conversation.
Because the moment we start selecting physical traits like we are customising an order, we are not just making medical decisions anymore, we are making statements about which kinds of people are more desirable, we are saying this nose is better than that one, this skin tone is preferable, this build is the standard, and once that thinking gets normalised, where does it stop? who decides what the ideal baby looks like? nd what happens to the children who arrive the old fashioned way and don't meet whatever standard has been quietly agreed upon?
History has not been kind when humans start deciding who the superior version of a person is, wee have been down that road before and it didn't end well for anyone.
There's also the question of the child themselves, a designer baby doesn't get to choose any of this , they arrive already shaped by decisions made before they had a single thought of their own, their identity, their appearance, possibly their personality all of it selected, there is something deeply uncomfortable about that, about removing the mystery of a person before they even become one.
Every advantage has a disadvantage, that is ot pessimism, that is just how life works, and with something as foundational as the human gene, the disadvantages deserve serious thought before we get too comfortable with the idea.
My partner meant well, he loves his family before they are even here, but love is not always the same thing as wisdom.
And a baby is not a blueprint, some things should still arrive as a surprise.
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