Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

In Chinese society, every parent want to have a boy in their family, for instance, if they have a new born baby, and that baby is a girl, they will very disappoint. In today’s society, many parents want to have a “choice” of their baby to be a girl or boy, because the new technology allows them to do that.  I think that is why the idea of “designer” babies has been growing. In general, the baby is our new generation; every parent wants their child be good and perfect. Our world may change to be a perfect world in a few years, if everybody wants to design their generation.

The benefit of the Designer baby is that the advanced reproductive allow parents and doctors to screen embryos for genetic disorders and select healthy embryos, and also they can have a choice of the baby’s sex. However, according to the book, there are 22 of the 23 pairs of chromosomes found in a human cell, the two chromosomes are of the same size and shape can carry corresponding genes. So when the parents want to have a girl or baby, they may tell the doctors to choose those chromosomes and put it into the embryos. In addition, about 1 in every 10,000-15,000 infants born each year in the US has PKU. Many parents afraid their new born baby has any disorder, and the scientists have find way to avoid this thing happen. For example, the doctors can choose a sperm from the male and put them into a female’s ovum, and it is can reduce the chance that a child will be born with a genetic disorder. We want our babies to be healthy, therefore, the designer baby is a good way to avoid the genetic disorder, and it is good for our new generation.

However, even though the “designer” baby is good for our generation, this new technology can affect our society and world. If all the parents and people want to design their baby, that is mean the new life is control by the technology, and women’s womb will become the place for scientists to practice. I think we need to control and limit this thing to happen, because that is our life, it much comes from nature, not from technology. As the text book state, which is about 3.5 percent of babies will come with some genetic disorder. We still need to keep our generation going; we should not against nature and use technology to repeats it.