The world is changing and our children are changing with it. As a pregnant lady, I need to consider how genetic alterations will affect not just my soon-to-be daughter, but how it will affect any future children I might have.
Further Reading:
Genetically Engineered Babies in China
Iceland is Eradicating Down Syndrome
The Ethical Dilemma of Designer Babies
Hi Ciara, your idea is really interesting and sounds like a podcast that i would definitely enjoy listening to. Listening to both you and your partner’s reflections on this idea would be a cool experience for your audience. Perhaps you can even have a debate with a few other people besides your husband (such as family and close friends or even people you have never met), to also get their opinions as well. It would be interesting for the audience to hear more perspectives. All the best!
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Hi Ciara,
So far, your artefact sounds really well thought out and relevant to your own personal experience. The topic of designer babies is really interesting and I look forward to hearing you talk about it in your podcast. Have you decided on a platform you’re going to upload your podcasts too?
On a further note, I would be interested to hear you talk about the contrast between IVF for people who cannot have children through natural conception vs people who would choose IVF treatments for a more “designer babies” approach.
Also, as further reading, I found this article surrounding one of your key ideas really interesting and I think it would be beneficial to check out if you haven’t already: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/gene-edited-babies-what-does-the-law-allow-in-australia
Good Job so far!
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Hey Ciara, I really like your idea and I think it connects to the future really well as with technology and research continuing advancing, there’s so much to talk about as it all makes progress.
It’s also a really important conversation to have as parents are getting sucked in to many different things to make sure that their children have the best of the best but are also the best of the best for social acceptation.
Some ideas could be along with your podcast, you could also create a group on a platform where listeners can speak about their ideas continuing on from what you have spoken about on the podcast so that maybe other ideas or other stories might get brought up that you can look into or speak about also. On your podcast also as it continues, professionals could come on as guests to back up and research you have found or to have a conversation about ideas and aspects of the future for children and families.
I would be really interested to see where this would go and I think for the future it is a really good idea and really important for the conversation to happen to education people on what may be for the future of the kids.
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Hi Ciara, congrats on the baby! This must be a very exciting time for you and I can understand as to why you would want to look into genetic engineering of babies.
I think some great topics for people to discuss about Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is whether we should even use it at all, should we only use it for medical cases i.e. I want a girl because men in my family have a high chance of having hemophilia and also whether it all should be allowed.
It’ll be good to hear your views on it all whether it should be used for family balancing (i.e. instead of trying to have a son after having 5 girls, you can be guaranteed a son after your 2nd daughter) or purely medical purposes or even purely intelligence or cosmetic purposes.
While doing this podcast, I think you need to address what you’re going to do with this information but it’ll be great to get the information out there (as I don’t think people know how much science is advancing and PGD that is happening).
Overall I love the concept and would recommend uploading your podcast to Soundcloud as it seems to be the easiest platform to do, maybe also YouTube to allow for visuals if needed.
Here are some articles that you may find interesting on this topic:
* Murphy T, 2011, ‘When choosing the traits of children is hurtful to others’, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 37, pp. 105 – 108.
* Sandel, MJ 2004, ‘The case against perfection: what’s wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering’ The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 293, no 3, pp. 50 – 61.
* Agar N, 2004, Liberal eugenics: in defence of human enhancement, Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing.
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