Re: Boy or Girl or chimera?
 

Unless I've misinterpreted what you meant, that is simply not true. We are not talking about ailments. We are talking about some quite horrific disorders already known to be carried a parent(s) which can be prevented or at least lessen the chance of being passed on by being able to determine the gender of the child. In those cases I see no problem with gender selection.
It is much better to determine gender at IVF and know that for example, in X-linked conditions, a girl would not be affected by the condition or would stand a 50% chance of being just another carrier. That's better than taking a 50% risk of having a child that has a 50% risk of being affected with the actual condition itself.
I do agree with you that choice of gender on just a whim is not the right thing.

Re: Boy or Girl or chimera?
 

again i think we have hit on a very emotive subject.... already we have seen some emotive responses just in this thread.... i am not belittling them before anyone flames me, but simply pointing out they are there.
conceiving a child is, and always will be, an emotive subject, i watched the itv programme about IVF the other week ("precisious babies") and i admit it actually made me cry..... watching the effect it has on someone on whether they can have a child or not is upsetting. my reason for going into this? well i think there was a lot of contraversy about IVF when it first got introduced, now there are thousands of people on the waiting list.... i think if you ask a lot of these people whether they would want to choose the gender of their child then i think they would say what coggy illustrated in her first post, that as long as the child was healthy they wouldn't mind.

i think that the problems which could occur due to people being able to choose the gender of their child would be that the IVF waiting list would get longer (from those wanting to have a certain gender)... so those waiting desprately to have a child would have to wait longer...

my personal opinion on this topic is that it is wrong.... i think that we should not muck around with nature. futhermore it could lead us on a slippery slope of "designer babies" (an issue i seem to remember debating on either here or .com)..as mick has already pointed out it puts me in mind of films like gatacca (can't spell it.... )

i could waffle on for hours on my opinions on this matter, and the inter linked issues, but i won't bore you all.

also can i point out everything i've said is opinion :)

Re: Boy or Girl or chimera?
 

In any debate on morality, there are always examples that seem to support the 'lesser' (for want of a way of describing it in a neutral manner) choice.

There is also Situation 3: Don't have a child.

Since in this case we're talking of something we know there is a chance of (rather than an unexpected illness) there are further choices.

It is pointless debating the issue on the premise that the only options are 'total freedom to choose for whatever reason at all', or 'no choice' - because that kind of polarisation doesn't actually explore the issues.
So even if your example is a good reason why it should be allowed, doesn't mean that it should therefore be allowed in every instance.

It certainly sounds like an open-and-shut argument, since I would have to be a monster to suggest otherwise.

In some cases there is already an option of genetic screening - that way you'd be looking (I would have thought) for an embryo that has neither the disease or carries the genes - best of both worlds?
However that leads us to a completely different, if not unrelated debate.

An interesting quote from the original article:

Quote:

Josephine Quintavalle, speaking on behalf of Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE),said: "There is absolutely no way that the public in the United Kingdom is in favour of designer babies, social sex selection, animal-human hybrids, human reproductive cloning, or any other brave new world proposal."

BTW - in the above I think that genetic selection embryos AND selection of an embryo with a view to tissue matching with a sibling (e.g. for transplant etc.) are both in the 'designer baby' category.

__________________

So what is your limit of acceptability?

Depends on your views on God. If you were to believe in His role in these matters then, quite rationally, it would equate to trying to be like God.

Don't know about 'woolly sentiments', but since the humans doing this stuff are part of nature, then maybeit isn't against nature? However, we are tinkering with the stuff of life, without really understanding what we're doing or what effects it may have.

Obviously, without research we'd never know, so as the genie is out of the bottle anyway, I certainly think that intelligent, ethical research is necessary - there just seem to be so many scientists prepared to run before they can walk. That may be because they realise it will take many years (probably more than their lifetime) for this science to fully develop, and they feel they ought to do what they think they can, while they can.