Argumentative Essay On Designer Babies

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Designer Babies What is a designer baby you may ask? It is defined as a baby whose genetic makeup has been artificially selected by genetic engineering combined with in vitro fertilization to ensure the presence or absence of particular genes or characteristics. Through gene therapy, designer babies are created. Gene therapy is the insertion of genes into a person's cells. Successful therapy causes the inserted genes to become part of the cell's genome, and give the cell a new or different characteristic. The technology used is Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) and is an expensive procedure. People use this PGD to avoid passing on a disease to their child by having a collection of embryos created for them by IVF. Some also use this new…show more content…
And naturally, people are worried about "Designer Babies". Perhaps you're concerned about the slippery slope argument—we'll start treating awful diseases, but then quickly move to less critical medical needs, and on to purely elective procedures. But wouldn't the same logic apply? The fact that you might be able to convince a doctor to implant horns on your head isn't a very good argument for not letting a doctor use similar plastic surgery techniques to reconstruct a burn victim's nose. So why is it that we would say that the possibility of genetic engineering being used for something less urgent than preventing a life-threatening illness is a reason to not allow it to be used at all? I think it might be a very good thing to take a few steps down the slope. Genetic engineering of this type is in its infancy, but you could easily foresee a time when we could address all kinds of not life-threatening but still bothersome conditions. So I totally agree with the procedure, if we could free people from things on the order of allergies or myopia, which would be an enormous benefit to
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