This gives "changing the baby" a whole new meaning… Technology. It's sold to us as a benefit - the key to enriching
our already too-perfect lives. Safer cars, cleaner furnaces,
better medicine (and more expensive, too!), ever-larger and
cheaper TVs… And genetic engineering. Despite our best efforts to regulate it, stop it from
progressing, ban or criminalize it, cloning and other
genome-based technologies march forward. There is no more
sobering example of technology run amuck than the growing
specter of human genetic engineering. This is the same basic
idea - or fear, more accurately - that has arisen time and again
in monumental works of literature from Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut,
Bradbury, Asimov, and the great Philip K. Dick, just to name a
few… Make no mistake, folks - unnatural selection is coming. And
SOON. How do I know? Because we're already beginning to "test the
waters" for it. For instance, some recent research concluded
that sex selection - were it a viable option - would be unlikely
to skew the boy/girl ratio in several European countries. In the
survey-based research, about as many people claimed to want boys
as wanted girls. And among those respondents that wanted
multiple children, they tended to want an equal number of
each… But my question is this: If forces within the scientific
community weren't seriously considering moving forward with a
sex selection program at some point in the future, why the need
to study the public's attitudes about it? Also, if the study's
findings are true (that nobody cares about the sex of their
baby), why mull offering sex selection as an option in the first
place? Something's rotten here… Personally, I think this research is faulty at best,
intentionally misleading at worst. Like it or not (and whether
it's PC to say it or not), in some cultures around the world,
boy-children are preferred to girl-children. Need proof?
Consider the well-documented history of female infanticide in
China and other Asian nations. Clearly, if sex selection became
the norm in cultures with this mindset, there'd be 20 boys to
every girl in the span of a single generation. How do you think
the already-bleak women's rights picture would look in such
nations then? Shocking, yes. But then, the truth often is. Consider this next
tidbit from our OWN SHORES… ************************************************** Honey, it's a girl - and a divorce… Don't shoot the messenger on this one, OK? I'm only relaying
this to you now because it shocked me as much as it'll likely
shock you - and because it's tellingly illustrative of the way
the future might look if science is given untrammeled access to
our wombs… According to an Oct. 2 article in Slate Magazine (a credible, if
edgy, source of news and opinion), parents of a girl are
significantly more likely to divorce than parents of a boy. And
that number grows even larger when more female children are
tossed into the mix - parents of three girls were twice as more
likely to give up on their marriage than parents of three
boys… And that's just in the progressive, tolerant U.S. of A. In some
other countries (Mexico and Colombia, for example), those
numbers are larger still. And in Vietnam, it's a whopping 25%
greater divorce rate following the birth of a girl! Still think parents wouldn't choose the sex of their children if
they could? Dear reader, I've seen a lot in my 70+ years on this Earth (more
than 40 of them as a doctor). I've seen wars and I've seen
sickness and I've seen death. But scariest of all, I've seen
more and more perfectly healthy people trying to make themselves
even more perfect with silicone, collagen, botox, laser surgery,
hair removal, hair implantation, tooth whitening, and on and on
and on… These folks just aren't content with who they were born to be.
And I think they'd try to do the same kind of tinkering to their
unborn children (starting with sex selection), if only they
could. Clearly, the urge to meddle with, refine, and perfect
nature is simply too powerful for many people to resist. Do I think human genetic engineering is coming? YES. But I hope we come to our senses before we make ourselves into a
world of soulless, "perfect" beings… "Engineered" the natural way, William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
