Designer Babies

In “A Christian Response to the Issue of ‘Designer Babies’”, the piece states that designer babies have “the potential to disturb the integrity of creation” and that “it is the prime responsibility of the church to oppose the creation of designer babies”. I would agree that in many cases, the concept of designer babies should be opposed, though I for slightly different reasons.

I assume that it can somewhat be taken for granted in our society that favoring people over others based on genetic factors that they cannot control, such as race, sex, appearance, intelligence, etc. is morally reprehensible. It would also appear that for the same reason, favoring those specific genetic traits themselves would be wrong. Even if a child were given specific genetic traits in order to give them an advantage over their peers, or to minimize disadvantages, this would not be a good enough reasoning, because the society which makes those traits advantageous would still be at fault and performing a moral wrong, and using that society as an authority to base decisions on would merely be perpetuating that same wrong.

However, I think in cases of terminal illness, the wrongness of allowing one to die outweighs the value of any moral constraints on the concept of designer babies, and therefore makes the question of whether the process is “natural” irrelevant and morally permits the creation of a designer baby. The piece suggests that perhaps parents with a “savior sibling” would favor one child over another. The wrongness of this would lie in the act of favoring of one child over another, rather than in the creation of the child. The fact that one child was created to save another has no direct indication that one of them is less valuable. Furthermore, it is suggested that it may be psychologically damaging to the savior sibling to learn that they were created for a purpose. However, again this holds no direct connection, because if the child is valued less, and suffers emotionally because of it, the wrongness lies in the parents’ lesser valuing, rather than the creation itself. It seems that being told one was created for a purpose would intrinsically be no more damaging that one being told their birth was “unplanned”.