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Designer Babies on the Way?

CanadaJohn said:
it seems to be a given now, in the minds of the majority, that homosexuality is genetic and not environmental.
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What you're describing here is an uninformed public which equates "Genetic" as the antonym of "Environmental." There are a number of ways that homosexuality can develop without finding alleles responsible for its onset and without homosexuality being a choice or an outcome of some environmental influences ( a mean mother, etc.)

how will people feel if, in time, the genetic marker for homosexuality is discovered and it is used to weed out the defect. It's not a big step from aborting babies based on sex to aborting babies based on sexuality.
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When the testing is ready for market, this will make amniocentesis testing a minor procedure in terms of number of tests performed.
 
RiverDad said:
What you're describing here is an uninformed public which equates "Genetic" as the antonym of "Environmental." There are a number of ways that homosexuality can develop without finding alleles responsible for its onset and without homosexuality being a choice or an outcome of some environmental influences ( a mean mother, etc.)
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Yes, his perspective...or knowledge of the subject...is limited. There's every chance it is environmental, but not in the way he understood. Many environmental stresses act on the mother during gestation, and she releases all kinds of different hormones and proteins. Depending on the fetal stage of development, the stress, the hormones....that is the way environment affects the fetus and influences sexual orientation (and other attributes...very possibly autism).
 
CanadaJohn said:
We could go all kinds of directions - don't want left handed babies, gone - don't want redheads, gone - imagine all the people not allowed to live if the genes related to alzheimers ever becomes known - and on and on.
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Do you mean like the two deaf lesbians?

A deaf lesbian couple in the US deliberately tried to create a deaf child. Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough hoped their child, conceived with the help of a sperm donor, would be deaf like the rest of the family. Their daughter, five year old Jehanne, is also deaf and was conceived with the same donor. News of the couple choosing to have a deaf child has only been revealed with the birth of their son Gauvin . . . . . Rather than dismiss the idea they found their own sperm donor by asking a deaf friend who comes from a family with five generations of deafness.​
 
Lursa said:
Yes, his perspective...or knowledge of the subject...is limited. There's every chance it is environmental, but not in the way he understood. Many environmental stresses act on the mother during gestation, and she releases all kinds of different hormones and proteins. Depending on the fetal stage of development, the stress, the hormones....that is the way environment affects the fetus and influences sexual orientation (and other attributes...very possibly autism).
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I didn't single out CanadaJohn because the problem with his observation isn't his misreading of what everyone knows. I specifically pointed to an uninformed public. There is a widespread belief that the cause is genetic. The factors that you specify don't really get much reporting. There are a host of theoretical problems with the genetic hypothesis. The most parsimonious explanation points to pathogens in the environment. That get's even less reporting than the biological hypothesis you note in your comment.
 
RiverDad said:
I didn't single out CanadaJohn because the problem with his observation isn't his misreading of what everyone knows. I specifically pointed to an uninformed public. There is a widespread belief that the cause is genetic. The factors that you specify don't really get much reporting. There are a host of theoretical problems with the genetic hypothesis. The most parsimonious explanation points to pathogens in the environment. That get's even less reporting than the biological hypothesis you note in your comment.
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That's because most people believe that if you are 'born that way' it must be genetic.
 
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Removable Mind said:
Man, that's the $64,000 question. But, John, I'm thinking that if things get that advanced, maybe the possibilities of having a pregnancy that would be problematic for any reason won't be an issue anymore....hopefully via prevention of unwanted pregnancy technologies working along side of cures in the womb.
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Could be, but seems to me that removing possibility of problematic pregnancy will only happen when pregnancy becomes a non-human function. It's possible, in time, that all pregnancies will be outside the womb in some form of non-human birth machine that automatically disposes of "problematic" fetuses. When the miracle of life becomes nothing but a mechanical function, that's when human life enters the end stretch. I'll be long gone, thankfully.
 
polgara said:
Good evening, CJ. :2wave:

With the current rate of abortions, and considering that many of those fetuses were probably healthy, who would be interested in curing a fetus with a birth defect? A few couples might be, for various reasons, but the overwhelming odds against anyone else agreeing to such a procedure are astronomical, IMO.
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Good morning Lady P.

It may not be in the hands of the parents - as healthcare becomes more state run/state funded, and Obamacare leads down that track, the decisions on expenditure of healthcare resources will be less about what individual patients want/need and more about the value for money of expending on certain procedures. While parents may want a procedure that saves their child, the "system" (insurers/government) may not consider that money well spent.
 
tacomancer said:
I can't say I agree. When a couple decides they want a baby, they aren't going to abort and a lot of times they let their passion guide them, meaning they will go through some pretty incredible lengths to get what they want. Humans being emotional and often irrational creatures and all.
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I agree that many parents may want to go to such lengths to save their child but it may not be their decision based on cost and/or availability. Those value judgements may be made by others as healthcare becomes more a function of society as opposed to individual responsibility.
 
CanadaJohn said:
Could be, but seems to me that removing possibility of problematic pregnancy will only happen when pregnancy becomes a non-human function. It's possible, in time, that all pregnancies will be outside the womb in some form of non-human birth machine that automatically disposes of "problematic" fetuses. When the miracle of life becomes nothing but a mechanical function, that's when human life enters the end stretch. I'll be long gone, thankfully.
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Now that is pretty futuristic. Yep, a possibility. I suspect that the rich will take advantage of such a technology in the beginning.

Actually somebody recently posted that its possible to create a conception without a sperm. That the function of a sperm can be created from other types of cells. But, in order to do artificial births in a manner that your talking about it would seem that technology will have to devise a way to create a conception without an ovum and sperm. And I don't think that's to far-fetched of an idea. Who know? Anything is possible.
 
If some gay activists get their way and prove there is some genetic test to that shows a tendency towards being gay they will succeed it getting millions of newborns killed and even more millions of abortions, plus worldwide forced sterilizations and imprisonments of those determined to have that genetic deviancy. That may be the most notable upcoming reason genetics is used for "designer babies" - meaning not-likely-gay babies.

The bizarre direction of new-age gay activism may secede in causing many time more eugenics murders than Hitler, with the added extra bizarre element of pursuing genocide of their own kind - as they see themselves.
 
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