Designer babies? No thanks.

I read this article recently

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2230764,00.html

Designer babies? Well for starters we all have one of those, each baby born has been lovingly designed and created with great care. Give the credit to Mother Nature, credit God if that is what you want, but we don't need people to try and design babies when it happens well enough as it is.

Nature has it's own way of designing babies, sometimes the process goes wrong and that is when a miscarriage occurs. Occasionally another problem will occur and the pregnancy is ectopic or fails for some other reason, it's sad but it is one of those things - for some reason the baby just was not meant to be born.

Those that are not lost are born with whatever conditions nature intended, with the sad exception of babies who experience problems as a result of their birth. We should accept babies that are born as they are and not put conditions on the love of our children before they are even born.

We could put into place all kinds of screening of embryos as part of IVF, we could even go further and make all women have IVF rather than natural conception and screen out anything that was considered slightly undesirable - club foot? a child likely to be left handed? brown eyes not blue? black hair not blonde? Why not, after all children could be teased for being left handed, maybe they have a squint, let's save them the indignity of glasses?

Being a parent means you have unconditional love for their child, so how can a couple expecting a baby decide that they have to have a child who is 100% perfect with no disabilities, no little flaws in their appearance.

Such a parent is saying that they cannot have unconditional love for a child, so how will they cope when they have used IVF to conceive that perfect child and then find that they have undesirable physical or psychological characteristics? Will they then say that they can't love this child and want to have him or her put down as if they were a pet? Of course not, after all that is socially unacceptable and would never happen - or so you may think.

What is proposed now was once seen as socially unacceptable and was unthinkable, yet here we are doing it. How much further are we going to go?

After all, we went to war with a certain Herr Hitler as a result of various atrocities including the murder of nearly 2 million disabled people. We thought he was wrong, yet we are now seeing it as acceptable to prevent people with disabilities being born. That is only one step removed from what Hitler sought to achieve.

Look at your own families and the people you value, how many of them would not have been born if this policy had been in place then? Would you have been born?

Now do you approve of this?