In today's world, many people are interested in perfections, be it themselves or their children. With genetic research and experiments becoming increasingly successful, many options are opening up to people in terms of changing their genetic sequence, for cosmetic reasons, or to prevent certain genetic diseases. With the recent upgrades in technology and scientific advances, we are now able to "design" our babies to a certain extent. Advanced reproductive technologies allow parents and doctors to screen
embryos for
genetic disorders and select healthy embryos. However, these advanced reproductive technologies prevent normal childbirth and conception. These embryos are basically "test tube babies", and are treated like science experiments.At the moment it is only legally possible to carry out two kinds of advanced reproductive technologies on humans. The first involves choosing the type of sperm that will fertilize an egg. This is used to determine the sex and the
genes of the baby. The second technique screens embryos for a genetic disease: only selected embryos are implanted back into the mother's womb. This is called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis or (PGD).
The current utilization of ARTs (advanced reproductive technologies) is strictly for medical use, which is understandable because all parents want healthy babies. However sooner or later the fear is that we may be able to use genetic modification technologies to modify embryos and choose cosmetic characteristics. This is something that I cannot agree. Of course just as parents don't want their children to have diseases, they don't want them to be ugly, but for them to be able to choose everything down to the colour of their eyes is going to far. If this happens Mendelian Genetics and heredity will be obsolete. No longer will anyone be created in God's image. People will be born in test tubes, not in their mother's womb. In the future there may be social problems for people not born with certain traits. One day there might be a race of super humans who look down on people that don't share their special traits. On top of all this, the Church does not support any scientific modifications to embryos. People should just be born the same way they were since the beginning of time. Who knows, maybe one day these genetic enhancements will have greater problems in terms of health than normally born babies.
Sources: http://www.bionetonline.org/english/content/db_cont1.htm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989987,00.html
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