The clinic plans to let the would-bee parents chose the color of their baby’s eyes and the color of their hair (just like purchasing a car…). Parents can even decide what skin color their baby will have and the fact that they can chose their baby’s gender is last year’s old news. 

 

Dr. Jeff Steinberg, the head of Fertility Institutes, said the new services will be made available in about six months. He added that the new procedure called PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) is not 100 percent perfect. 

 

The clinic that also operates in Manhattan already received “a half a dozen” requests for custom-designed babies. 

 

PGD has been used to avert life-threatening diseases in children so far. But in the meantime, it progressed to this point. This “cosmetic medicine,” as Dr. Steinberg described it, has drawn harsh criticism and many critics linked the PGD use to make custom-designed babies to the pursuit of a master race. 

 

This style of building a baby has also been criticized by Pope Benedict XVI. His Holiness warned against the "obsessive search for the perfect child.”    

 

“I would not say this is a dangerous road. It's an uncharted road,” said Dr. Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF in the 1970s.

 

The PGD technique mainly consists of testing a cell taken from a very early embryo placing it into the mother's womb. An embryo that does not have rogue genes or an embryo that contains the desired physical traits is selected to continue the pregnancy, while the other embryos are discarded by doctors.  

 

According to a post on the clinic’s Web site, not all patients will qualify for the tests and it underlines the fact that the clinic makes “NO guarantees as to 'perfect prediction' of things such as eye color or hair color.”