mens-rights-activia:

allfrogsarefriends:

mens-rights-activia:

allfrogsarefriends:

mens-rights-activia:

We really should be discussing the ethics of “designer babies” now because lmao that shit will become a more tangible reality for more and more people within the next decade 👀👀

oh we’ve been discussing that for a while now. i wrote a whole paper during my masters program about how even the concept will be massively influenced by social and cultural standards of beauty which are generally colorist, ableist, etc. 

Sorry (this post wasn’t clear I meant to save this as a draft but posted it 😩) the “we” here is talking about the average person, not in the field or adjacent to it. I’m sure there’s tones of people in those contexts having that conversation now but in the broader sphere of everyday conversation

Also (I apologize again for the lack of clarification,) I’m not just using the “designer babies” definition that most people think of such as “lemme give my baby blue eyes cause aesthetics” but also thing such as gene editing so that your baby doesn’t get a fatal hereditary disease, prenatal screening etc.

And I mean “ethics” as in a more nuanced conversation

(Background:yes I’ve seen gataca, lmao I’m only talking about this cause I saw some articles recently about Iceland “eradicating”(their word, not mine) Down syndrome from their population and then I was reading more into it and I saw a wapo article calling it genocide, but the writer was pro-life and then I realized that this conversation is heavily linked to the designer babies convo)

oh i wasnt accusing you of like, being obtuse or anything. i just got overly excited that someone online was talking about this. 

and yeah, i totally agree with you on having a more nuanced conversation on things like gene editing and such. generally when someone uses the term ‘designer babies’, i just immediately assume its for aesthetic purposes but there is a lot of good that can be done about decreasing/”eradicating” the onset of a hereditary disease if possible. i dont think i phrased it correctly either but when i said “social & cultural standards of beauty which are generally ableist”, i was also thinking of exactly how far we as a society would go to decrease the amount of diseases and how it could turn into a conversation about genocide or what THAT even means in the grand scheme of things.

background: i have no clue what gataca is, but that article does sound kind of interesting (and now im wondering what the writer’s background is or how well-informed they are about these kinds of topics). would it be okay if i asked for a link so i can check it out myself?

Gataca, I might be misspelling it, is some sci-fi movie from early 2000’s(?) about designer babies that my bio teacher made us watch. It was interesting but I honestly thot it was pretty nuance deficient but I reckon it’s hard to grasp all the nuances in 90 minutes

The first article I’m talking about:

“What kind of society do you want to live in?”: Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing

The wapo article:

Opinion | The real Down syndrome problem: Accepting genocide