With the advent of IVF parents are now seeking to pick and choose the features that they want in their babies. There are serious ethical problems when people seek to play God by testing embyroes to see if they have certain features and discarding the embryos that do not have the desired features in the baby. In fact such picking and choosing sounds extremely callous.
A part of the services offered to prospective parents is the testing for genes or extra chromosomes that could cause miscarriage or defects so severe that the baby is not able to survive. However, there is another side to this testing that raises new ethical questions.
Prospective parents who have dwarfism or who are deaf are also seeking to have children with the same features as themselves. The question here is whether a person who is a dwarf should be regarded as being "disabled" or an undesirable birth defect. What could be possibly wrong for dwarf parents wanting to make sure that their children are also dwarfs? Well, dwarfism does come with some other forms of disabilities. It would seem that ethicists have no problem with the idea of killing the embryo if the testing indicates that there is a "birth defect" that is not necessarily defined, but they raise questions regarding the desire of people who see themselves as being normal, even though they are dwarfs, desiring to have children with the same genetic traits.
Clearly, we can argue that the advances in genetics have in fact gone too far and that the world has travelled back to the 1920s and 1930s when eugenics was all the rage. There has always been discrimination against children with birth defects, and society as a whole should hang its head in shame over the way in which deformed children have been treated in the past. If we are supposedly more civilized than the ancient Greeks (especially the Spartans) who left their children in the open to die if they had birth defects, why do we permit this form of discrimination?
