If you could, would you want to choose your child's gender, hair color and eye color?
Designer babies may seem like science fiction, but the futuristic idea is a reality, NBC 4's Tacoma Newsome reported.
The technology is available to design your own baby -- but does playing God have consequences?
Genetic counseling has always been able to determine whether couples had a likelihood of passing a genetic disorder or disease onto a child. Science then could avoid it or get rid of it altogether.
A fertility clinic with offices in New York and Los Angeles is advertising that patients would be able to choose the sex, eye or hair color of their child.
"Can they say to me, 'We would prefer to have blue eyes,' and can we offer them an increased chance of blue eyes? Absolutely. Can we prefer curly hair? Absolutely," said Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, of the Fertility Institute.
"I don't think you're going to have a little Frankenstein, but I think it would be horrible to throw away an embryo just because you don't like their hair color," said Dr. Elizabeth Kennard, of Ohio Reproductive Medicine.
Kennard practices in Central Ohio and helps couples who have trouble conceiving. Those couples, Kennard said, are grateful just to have healthy children. She said she thinks this type of science is wrong and would strongly advise against it.
"I would try to talk (couples) out of it. I don't know what in the world they're thinking that we should be spending our time picking out eye color and hair color," she said.
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