A Girl or A Boy . . . You Pick

In the last few years a genetic basis has been discovered not just for various illnesses, but for such behavioral traits as shyness, sexual promiscuity, musical ability, risk-taking and over-eating and in the future it may be po

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A concern not addressed by supporters of PGD is how the children of the future who are not "genetically engineered" will function in society and if they will be able to compete. PGD allows parents to specify that their children will not suffer from any "defects".

Another important issue that needs to be examined is that if PGD technology was available and used years ago what would have happened to the embryos with genetic "defects" that grew to become the great idealists, scientists, artists, etc. As shown in the movie the "perfect" genetic human specimens known as "valids" are not any happier or better adjusted than those "in-valids" who have not been genetically "adjusted". Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis will only lead us to a society where how far you go depends on what you're made of. What if they had been discarded as embryos? Where would we all be today without their vision?

Advocates for the disabled argue against rejecting embryos destined to have severe disease. Since it bypasses the pain of abortion, what is to keep people from abusing the procedure to reject not only the embryos that are unhealthy but the embryos because they are merely undesirable?

Although the use of PGD research offers the benefit of breeding out certain forms of disease, as stated in the article, some fertility specialists say that scientists are bound to create tests not only for disease but for various traits such as height, weight, and skin tone. Hughes' position that abortion is an evasive procedure that often carries a great emotional burden. " In my opinion, PGD provides us with too much information and forces us to make the difficult decision of which embryos live and which are discarded . However, embryo screening allows parents to judge and reject many potential children at once. Fortunately, society as a whole recognized the eugenics philosophy as discriminative and inhumane and adamantly rejected it and PGD should also be rejected for the same reasons. PGD arms humans with God-like powers to alter the world which we should not do without carefully examining the consequences. In the article he is quoted as saying: "Some people that have known genetic predispositions in the family gene line often roll the dice and hope for the best or they become pregnant and use a prenatal test such as amniocentesis followed by abortion if the test turns up a problem. By taking away the genes that make us all different we will be destined to a future void of creativity and vision since there will be no need for diversity in the tools we use to live our lives.

Common topics in this essay:
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Approximate Word count = 1440
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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