Bourgeois pigs kill suicidal 16 year old boy.

[Taem]

Two of those stories are quite moving, especially the one with the sisters. But having another baby to save a already born sick child is not the same thing as DNA manipulation, or genetically made babies. Nor is embryo selection (they even made this clear at the end of the article in which that was discussed). In both cases, there is a different set of ethical issues involved, and while there are genetic risks involved, they are still much more predictable and more easily controlled than actual designer babies. Not to mention the social consequences - having another baby to save your first child's life isn't going to potentially open doors to things like a 'master race' or an genetic elite class or creating a male (or female) dominated society.

I hear what your saying, but:

The surprise to many may be that despite George Bush’s ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, genetic analysis of embryos and selection for implantation is permitted in the United States. It is often used for diseases such as Beta Thalessemia, Sickle Cell Anemia, Cystic Fibrosis, or yes--even to choose the desired gender of the child.

Is this no different? You screen your child's DNA, even "choose" the correct embryos for the bone marrow - you are essentially designing your child to fit your needs. Your baby has a predisposition to be born with a certain disease so you eliminate it... your are picking and choosing what DNA is right for you.

Now that the human genome has been fully mapped out, and designer baby possibilities are already here (link, and link). But regardless, even if right-now you can now choose your child's sex or eye color, what's the difference between doing that and screening the DNA to tell before your child were conceived what characteristics that child would be most likely to have; then you'd be making that choice to keep or discard that child and choosing what you wanted for your child anyhow. This is really no different than altering the DNA to fit your needs. In one set of circumstances, you wait for your lottery ticket to win, in the other, you pick your lottery numbers after the lottery is already draw to win; either way, the results are the same. When you "design" your baby, you are still designing your baby, rather with the bone-marrow your older child needs, or with blue eyes.

EDIT: Here's an interesting article you may enjoy, albeit written back in 1997: LINK

"Eugenics" is a term of accusation and automatic condemnation. It will forever be associated with Nazi superman projects. Some eugenics-minded authors, however, were not racist murders. They were just unscientific and sinned in thinking that they knew what kinds of human beings ought to populate the earth. What eugeneticists wanted to do was to increase the frequency of socially good genes in the population, but that was too difficult, so they focused on attempting to decrease the frequency of allegedly bad genes in the population. Unfortunately they did not know how to do this either! As a result of this ignorant approach, by the late 1920s, some two dozen American states had enacted Eugenic Sterilization Laws, and such laws were declared constitutional in a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Modern medical genetics tries to avoid these pitfalls and this guilt-by- association. Medical geneticists are not out to make superior people, but to combat disease. This "medical-disease" model works fine for life-threatening diseases. Who would deny gene therapy to a child whose life could be saved by this therapy? But what about cosmetic or benign disease? For example, let us say we agree that it is a good thing to fix by somatic-cell gene therapy an embryo where the infant will inherit a missing hand and certainly would have a difficult time in life.