Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

Hundreds of thousands of parents around the world have suffered through the terrible news that they child is suffering from a disease, disability or genetic complication. No family ever wants to hear that “your child is THAT one out of 100,000”, so it is understandable why people turn to In Vitro Fertilization.  As technology changed throughout the years people have now become able to choose the sex of their child as well as choose healthy children over just letting nature take its course. Now as time progresses and technology changes rapidly scientist are close to being able to select what traits parents want in their children.

As we learned through the textbook as nature takes its course there are three possible ways children get their traits from. In one of the ways, a child gets all the negative genes from the parents (recessive alleles). This is what parents want to get rid of, they do not want to take that chance that their child will be suffering thus putting them through hardship. With this I do agree with parents that In Vitro could be used to prevent having children with the recessive alleles or from having a child with a certain sex that is receptive to certain diseases.

Personally I think it is unethical to just choose a child’s sex or trails for personal reason such as having a child with green eyes and blond hair. We are taking away the course that nature usually takes and just turning into a science. As the book mention there is a one in 64 trillion chance that siblings can have the exact same genes as their parents, but with this science we are changing the chances to where we can choose what children will look like. If we use science instead of nature people will not be unique because we will be controlling what sex they will be and what traits they will have. What is to say that we won’t have technology that will make children smarter, taller, or take traits that are more attractive from other people? People can lose sight of the important things so quickly such as health and just think about what they want. When do stop playing with science and let nature take its course. Nature should still take its course and we should use science for health reasons not beauty.