The use of genetic technologies — including preimplantation genetic diagnosis and gene editing — to select or alter heritable traits in human embryos before birth. Debate involves medical benefit, reproductive autonomy, eugenics, and intergenerational consent.
Selecting embryos free of Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, or BRCA mutations prevents severe heritable suffering. For families with a history of devastating genetic conditions, this technology offers the possibility of ending an inherited burden of suffering.
The premise that disability should be eliminated through selection reflects an ableist value judgment rather than a neutral medical one. Many people with conditions selected against live full and valued lives, and selection implicitly communicates that such lives are not worth beginning.
Parents already make consequential choices about their children's circumstances — nutrition, education, healthcare. Extending that range of choice to genetic predispositions is a natural extension of reproductive liberty rather than a qualitatively different kind of decision.
Children cannot consent to the genetic choices made for them before birth. Designer baby technology transforms children into products designed to parental specification, instrumentalizing the parent-child relationship in ethically troubling ways.
Tight regulation of permitted applications — restricting selection to serious medical conditions and banning enhancement traits — can maintain a meaningful boundary between therapeutic use and eugenics, as demonstrated by countries with regulated preimplantation diagnostic frameworks.
The distinction between therapy and enhancement is inherently unstable. Regulatory categories erode under commercial pressure, parental demand, and shifting social norms about what counts as a 'disease' worth preventing, and history offers grim warnings about where eugenics leads.
Access to genetic selection technology could democratize health by reducing the incidence of expensive, debilitating genetic diseases that disproportionately affect specific communities, potentially reducing healthcare costs and human suffering at scale.
Designer baby technology available primarily to wealthy parents will amplify existing inequality across generations. Those who can afford genetic optimization for intelligence, health, and other traits will gain permanent biological advantages over those who cannot.