‘Designer’ babies with made-to-order defects?

For the same reasons, Yury Verlinsky, another PGD pioneer and director of Chicago’s Reproductive Genetics Institute, said he also would shun those requests.

Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, whose Fertility Institutes clinics in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Guadalajara, Mexico, screen embryos for sex selection, said he’d likely consult ethicists if he were ever asked to help couples select a deaf or dwarf baby.

“Clearly it crosses some bounds,” he said.

He’d get a provocative response from University of Minnesota bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn.

“It’s an ethically challenging question and certainly it will trouble people, but I think there are good, thoughtful reasons why people who are deaf or ... dwarves could say, ‘I want a child like me,”’ Kahn said.

The traits are, for some, an important part of their cultural identity.

“If people in a shared culture all have the common clinical defect, then it’s maybe not a defect in the traditional sense,” Kahn said.

More challenging would be if normal-sized parents said they wanted a dwarf child, and yet, he added, “Why is that different from dwarf parents saying, ‘We want only an average-size child?”’

'Fully functional human beings'
Dr. Jamie Grifo of New York University, a past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, has done embryo screening for more than a decade and said if it is being used to choose defective embryos, it certainly isn’t common. Cost is one thing. But IVF alone requires weeks of injections with ovary-stimulating drugs and surgery, and couples generally have a less than 50-50 chance of a baby with each IVF-PGD cycle, Grifo said.

Grifo said he wouldn’t oppose embryo screening to select a baby with a genetic defect if the parents have been informed of the pros and cons, risks and benefits.

“In our society, people are so quick to have knee-jerk reactions to something that’s none of their business,” he said.

Despite some teasing and childhood surgery to fix dwarfism-related bone deformities, Reynolds said she considers herself “very lucky. I have a wonderful husband and a beautiful life.”

Their newborn daughter died last year from a devastating dwarfism-related disease called homozygous achondroplasia. Dwarf couples have a 25 percent chance of having babies afflicted with the lethal condition, the same odds of having “normal” children, but a 50 percent chance of having dwarf children.

When the couple consulted a specialist earlier this year about embryo screening to avoid a similar tragedy, they discussed implanting dwarf or non-dwarf embryos.

“A healthy dwarf embryo is a healthy embryo. It’s a kid who’s going to go to school, go to college and make friends,” Reynolds said she told the specialist, and he wasn’t opposed to the idea. But she decided against the procedure because her insurance didn’t cover it and her age — 39 — limited chances for success.

Karen Krogstad, a 25-year-old partly deaf student in Bozeman, Mont., said she understands why parents “would go to great lengths to make sure their child will be deaf.”

She and her deaf friends “see ourselves as fully functional human beings who can’t hear. People who wear glasses, are they disabled? No, but if you have hearing aids, to assist with hearing, you are labeled as disabled.”

Krogstad said she wants children someday and would be happy with a deaf or non-deaf child. But she said she wouldn’t use embryo screening to have a deaf child “because I think it is wrong to choose the perfect baby.”

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