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“For the first time ever, patients having genetic screening for abnormal chromosome conditions in their embryos will be able to elect expanded testing that can greatly increase the odds of achieving a healthy pregnancy with a preselected choice of gender, eye color, hair color and complexion ...”  

That’s a direct quotation from The Fertility Institutes, an assisted reproduction institute headquartered in Los Angeles.

Makes you feel icky, doesn’t it?

Of course babies are screened every day for certain sets of genetic diseases, and places like The Fertility Institutes have long offered infertile couples the chance to screen embryos for known susceptibilities to things such as cancer.

But this is different.

For one, we’ve never had the ability to influence, even if it’s on a limited level, characteristics like hair color and complexion. Such characteristics, unlike genetic susceptibility, have little to do with health and much more to do with aesthetics and lifestyle.

Our preferences – some of which can be pretty myopic and arbitrary – stand to gain a good deal of influence as well, which is especially startling because our likes and dislikes regarding appearance are notorious for their cultural malleability.

Though I will stop short of offering up images from Gattaca, I do so reluctantly, as the opportunity to make such choices has wide-reaching and unsettling implications. 

It’s not just that the genetic revolution has blurred the line separating what’s natural from what’s unnatural, nor that it threatens to eliminate the distinction altogether.

Preferences are inextricable from value judgments, and while preferring certain things over others – Bob Dylan over Leonard Cohen, say – won’t shake the world all that much, enactment of biases against short people or less athletic people, as could happen on a large scale with designer babies, presents uncomfortable possibilities for social stratification.

And what of the criteria for determining who gets to choose from who doesn’t?
I’m thinking Medicaid probably wouldn’t pay for those baby blue eyes, and it probably wouldn’t pay for that ease with numbers, that 40-yard dash time or that intelligence quotient.

Fertility treatments in general are already expensive, and genetic screening technology almost certainly will not be available to people unable to pay for it.

Those who can pay will pay, and just like that, it becomes possible for small clutches of kids in affluent areas and private schools to begin looking eerily and subtly alike.
The potential of a new kind of class, separated from the rest not just by money but by specific sets of physical characteristics begins to look possible.

Is that a bit melodramatic?

Perhaps, but consider: The Fertility Institutes has already gotten requests from “half a dozen” interested parties. And all of that interest is only from a press release that announced the “pending availability” of the technology.

It doesn’t help much either that many politicians and potential stake holders, such as health care providers and biotechnology companies, haven’t come to any kind of concrete position on the issue.

Brave new world, indeed.