New Orbit Magazine Online: Issue 03, June 2018

though viable and in many ways a healthy and
suitable child, is set aside for a chance at a
genetically superior randomisation of traits.
When we combine the inevitable trend of
failing to conceive naturally, being unable to
pay for indefinite rounds of fertility treatment,
and opting to take their single publicly funded
round of IVF, it is easy to see how the story in
Forecast for April could soon become a
relatively commonplace heartache.
Unlike the more radical conceptions of
designer babies, PGD does not involve directly
altering the human genome; rather, it
increases the probability of parents creating a
more desirable combination of their own
existing genes. PGD has generally been used
to assist parents to have children with reduced
risk of disease and other disorders that may
affect quality of life, therefore helping to
remove such hereditary afflictions from the
genepool. As far as PGD goes, the use of the
technology to address genetic disorders that
would critically affect child health and
wellbeing has generally been well received.
The ethical line is most often drawn when
gene screening and editing technology is used
to change or enhance aesthetic or non-health
related traits such as eye colour or intelligence,
especially when the ability to do this is a
commodity able to be bought and sold.
In 1992, Monique and Scott Collins crossed
this line when they used PGD not to reduce
the risk of genetic disease in a child, but to
ensure that their child was a female (as the
couple’s first two children were boys). This
represented a landmark instance where the
genetic makeup of a child had been selected
for a purely aesthetic purpose – a “balanced”
family – rather than ensuring that a viable
human embryo was devoid of any detrimental
genetic conditions. While the ability to choose
a child’s gender may not seem like a major
issue on an individual level, there are some
potential and ethical issues with the practice
becoming commonplace. Parents often have
preferences their unborn child’s gender,
particularly in cultural contexts where the sex
of a child comes with significant advantages or
disadvantages. In many cultures, families may
prefer to have a boy as a means of ensuring
their own future wellbeing, financial security,
or even the propagation of a last name. This
being said, those societies that value baby boys
higher than baby girls may and often do fall
prey to significant shows of sexism throughout
a person’s adulthood, as well as creating
population difficulties; young girls are
abandoned, adopted out of the country or
leave as adults, creating a disproportionately
large adult male population and making the
maintenance of society in the following
generation all the more difficult. On top of
this, the Collins case set a precedent through
which other, less socially acceptable forms of
superficial gene editing may occur, for traits
that are more luxury than necessity.
Despite being a landmark event in both
addressing the causes of genetic disease and
the path towards designer babies, PGD does
have its limitations. Embryos selected during
PGD can only possess traits encoded for in the
genes of one or both parents, as all genetic
material originates in the parents, even if
conception has occurred via IVF. This means
that it would be immensely unlikely for two
blue eyed parents to have a brown eyed
offspring, even if they were able to select from
a panel of embryos as per PGD. The PGD
procedure is further morally contentious as it
requires the fertilisation of a number of
embryos so that one “optimal” individual may
be selected for implantation, and the
remainder discarded; a practise we also see in
Forecast for April. This has attracted the
condemnation of both secular and religious
thinkers that consider human life to begin at
conception, or who would consider the