Designer babies. A questions of ethics

Abstract

The term “designer babies” may be used to refer to a range of reproductive techniques including the use of sex selection techniques to prevent the birth of children with X-linked diseases, preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select for embryos free from genetic disorders, selection techniques for eggs, sperm or embryo donors with particular characteristics, and the enhancement of features such as intelligence, sporting ability or attractiveness. The production of designer babies entails specific medical and ethical problems. In this article, we will essentially address the latter. In our opinion, the most important aspects to consider in an ethical reflection on the production of designer babies are: 1. the instrumentalisation of the child produced in such a way that these children would be treated as commodities; 2. the secondary consequences that could result from the legal authorisation of this technique could open the door to other ethically unsuitable techniques, especially sex selection, 3. the benefit that the parents may obtain; 4. the impossibility of obtaining the consent of the child him/herself; 5. the medical problems that the use of the preimplantational genetic diagnosis technique may cause in the embryo generated; 6. as well as those inherent in the in-vitro fertilisation technique; 7. the negative ethical burden involved in the high number of embryos lost with this practice, i.e. the high number of human lives destroyed; 8. and finally, whether or not a medical alternative to the production of designer babies exists, since if so, their generation would be doubly unjustified. We think that one of the most important ethical problems is the high number of embryos lost in the production of designer babies. Thus, it can be verified that in the case of the first designer baby, Adam Nash, 33 embryos were used to obtain a useful child, so the efficiency was approximately 3%. In a study which collected the joint data from some of the leading reproductive medicine clinics in the world in which designer babies are produced, is showed that from 1130 embryos, only 35 designer babies were obtained, which indicates that the efficiency of production of these children was 1.15%