The Quest for Designer Children 147

GENETIC ENHANCEMENT DOES NOT THREATEN HUMAN DIGNITY

Focusing on the impact of genetic engineering on human dignity, a quality of being worthy of honor or respect, critics raise two points: first, it impinges the freedom of offspring, and second, it turns them into commodities in the marketplace.” Opponents assert that children ought to be autonomous beings with their own lives to live. Subjecting a child’s basic physical appearance and potential talents to parental whims impinges on one’s ability to develop his or her unique self. A child’s preferences concerning various benign traits or characteristics should be left to his or her own values. In other words, decisions about benign traits or characteristics are not always best left to parents. Using genetic technology to determine what children will become, makes offspring partial hostages to parents’ genetically designed blueprints.

Furthermore, non-therapeutic genetic engineering may serve to treat fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses, it is asserted, as commodities, objects of manufacture, raw material for manipulation, custom-ordered products in the genetic services marketplace, not as potentially sacred human beings. Allowing parents to manipulate a child’s genetic characteristic and making him or her in the image of a couple’s own preferences and desires, may lead to a consumeristic attitude to a child’s development and personality. It may dehumanize and depersonalize children, undermining or significantly changing the meaning of the parent-child relationship, by reducing a child to the object of technological manipulation and design, at least in the mind of the child and his or her parents.

I would let parents make the choices of what they value in their offspring, whether to be disease free, at least genetically, or come with perks, such as musical talents or athletic ability. People today enhance their appearance or health through medical technology. The demand for cosmetic surgery shows how important people consider it to look good. Drugs are used to treat obesity. Short children