Designer Baby – The New Trend

By Suparna Chakaraborthy

Monday, August 23, 2010, 11:30

Gone are the days when parents wished for healthy babies alone, now parents wish for 'designer baby'.That's the new worldwide trend.

Designer Babies are those who undergo genetic make-up by artificially selected genetic engineering. Such babies are devoid of any genetic default. They are almost perfect. This is done by a process named, InVitro Fertilisation. In this process, the fertilized egg with the sperm is taken on to a test tube. It is then manipulated. Such a process confirms that the designer baby will be born without any genetic disorder.

Adding on to the technology of designer baby, the market is now emerging with demand for ' beautiful' eggs and sperms, 'celebrity look-a-like' sperm and even ways to pre-select the gender of your child. The California Cryobank (CCB) offers a service called 'Donor Look-a-Likes' that began in July 2009.

Scott Brown, director of communications for CCB, has confirmed that their program predates all the beautiful people stuff and that donor look-a-likes is meant to personalize and humanize the donor selection process. It was never intended to have anything at all to do with the physical appearance in the future of the designer baby.

On the CCB offers parents to choose Donor Look-a-Likes like Prince William of Wales, American heartthrob Zac Efron, Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho etc. Anyways they don't confirm that the child will look exactly like the celebrity.

Technology has now also made it possible to change the gender of the baby before it takes birth. According to the Fertility ProRegistry, a US network of certified reproductive endocrinologists, the costs for ensuring your have a 'boy' instead of a 'girl' (or vice-versa) before conception can cost between 00-4,000 (€1553-3105) plus in-virto fertilization around 00 (€2717).

In the United States, Mexico, India and Asia there are different companies like The Fertility Institutes that offer gender selection programs, family balancing and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), screening embryos for genetic diseases.