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Parents are now able to have “designer children,” or using hereditary engineering to have precisely the kid they want. The genesis of the science included was in curtailing hereditary disorders, but the fertility market is coming under fire for treating human beings like a cheeseburger. Article resource: Trend of designer babies still alive and well

Get the child you would like with screening

Many people hate the concept of “designer ba-bies.” They think it is a horrible thing to consider. To be able to get certain traits, such as sex or hair color, wealthy mothers and fathers can take fertilized embryos and have them changed genetically. Fetuses in the womb have been accessible for screening for quite a while. Screening before in-vitro fertilization is a bit more recent though.

A Time magazine article from 1999 mentions IVF clinics being able "in the past few years" to screen embryos for gender, so it first became a commercial activity in the late 1990s. Gene therapy for embryos was “a few years away,” at the time. That is what the article said. Now, it is here. It has been here for a while too.

Get your baby made

A person has to use IVF treatments to create the perfect child. An embryo has to undergo hereditary adjustment to produce the requested traits. A couple has lots of choices and services to pick from after deciding to make an artificial infant.

PGD has been around for a long time. This is Pre-implantation Hereditary Diagnostics. Typically, people use it to find diseases. This involves things such as Tay-Sachs and Down’s syndrome. The 1999 Time article explained that this was done to find a type of “water on the brain” or an X chromosome-linked hydrocephalus in order to see if male children have it.

PGD, as reported by CBS, has been used for several years to pick the sex of a baby. PGD was used by the Fertility Institute, in LA, to predict sex with 100 percent accuracy in 2009. In 2010, it could predict eye color with 80 percent accuracy.

PhD men give up sperm

There was an article done in 2007 by ABC about Jennalee Ryan. She owns the Abraham Center for Life. Ryan sources sperm from a sperm financial institution that only collects sam-ples from men with PhDs and gets eggs from beautiful 20-somethings with university educa-tions. The samples are turned into embryos that are sold for $5,000 after that.

Individuals looking for donors at the London Sperm Bank can now see personality and appearance when choosing a donor. This was a recent change the bank did, as reported by a recent Telegraph article.

Sperm banks are highly selective these days, partially because it's far easier to get sperm than eggs. CBS reports that getting into Harvard is easier than getting to donate sperm. Ideal characteristics contain above-average intelligence, six feet in height, brown or blond hair, blue or green eyes and a "medium" com-plexion.

Citations

Time: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989987-1,00.html

CBS:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/03/earlyshow/health/main4840346.shtml

The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/women_shealth/8658851/Sperm-bank-to-promise-well-dressed-donors-in-new-online-catalogue.html

ABC:http://abcnews.go.com/Business/LifeStages/story?id=2895615&page=1

CBS:http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-204_162-10007254.html?tag=page