A fertility clinic with offices in New York and Los Angeles will offer parents the chance of choosing a lot more than the baby’s gender.

 

“Can they say to me, ‘We would prefer to have blue eyes,’ and can we offer them an increased chance of blue eyes? Absolutely,” fertility doctor Jeff Steinberg, who owns fertility clinics in both Manhattan as well as Los Angeles.

 

How is that possible, many parents will ask. The procedure is based on a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, through which parents are able to avoid passing a genetic disorder or life-threatening disease onto a child. But this was in the past. Now, through the same procedure, couples can almost custom-design their unborn babies.

 

Dr. Steinberg said he cannot promise that people will get their selections, but claimed he can dramatically increase the probability.

 

“I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that parents will be able to choose something like eye color – more like 80 percent certainty,” he said.

 

The existence of such clinics has sparked debate with the global medical community, raising huge questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.

 

“There is no more important question that is going to face us than deciding how to control and use genetic engineering and genetic selection to design our kids. Nothing. Designing your descendents and seeking out perfection is the biggest slippery slope we could go on. Are the rich going to be able to do it and the poor not? Are we going to create a sort of subpopulation of the genetically perfect as against everybody else, said Art Caplan, ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.