Born Supremacy: The Science of Designing Your Own Baby

Fertility treatment can be harrowing for wannabe moms and dads. But innovations in assisted reproductive technology are easing the parenthood process

Digital Journal — How creepy would it be to choose the gender of your unborn child? Or is that an attractive possibility? How about creating a human embryo from two women, or pregnancy without sperm?

Ethical debates aside, the future is fertile with science that could revolutionize reproduction. What was once water-cooler talk about “designer” babies and DNA tweaking has become closer to reality.

Grabbing the biggest headlines recently is stem-cell researcher Paul De Sousa, who produced early-stage human embryos without using sperm — essentially, an immaculate conception. De Sousa, who works at the Roslin Institute (known for cloning Dolly the sheep), chemically tricked 300 eggs into dividing as if they’d been fertilized and allowed them to reach the blastocyst stage of containing about 50 cells. No father was used in the making of this experiment.

Quelling fears about cloning, De Sousa says he doesn’t envision implanting the embryos in a modern-day Virgin Mary.

Still, the implications for the future are awe-inspiring, as is the news out of England’s University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Scientists there are planning to create a human embryo using genetic material from two women, raising the prospect of babies born with a pair of mothers. By transferring parts of embryo nuclei made by one man and woman into an unfertilized egg from another woman, scientists hope to prevent genetic disease passed from mothers to their children.

Consider the ripples from these two developments: from the latter, babies born free of mitochondrial diseases that could damage the liver, heart or kidney, being raised by Mom and Mom; from the former, Junior born to parents who otherwise couldn’t conceive. Or, in a scarier scenario, Junior II created as a clone without flesh-and-blood parents.

Further expanding science’s role in pregnancy is pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, offered by a number of clinics across the United States, which allows doctors to screen embryos for genetic defects before implanting them.

This process has been taken a step further in the U.S. (it’s illegal in Canada) where couples who have $15,000 (US) lying around can choose the sex of their baby with 96 per cent accuracy. The most popular baby-tweaker is MicroSort, a Virginia clinic where about 450 babies have been born since it began clinical trials in 1996.
Like any medical advance, changes in reproductive technology are more likely to happen in baby steps than in leaps and bounds. But it’s easy to see how the science of fertility will help us engender a future with children whose very existence would have been inconceivable a decade earlier.
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INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW ABOUT…MALE PREGNANCY
Question: Can men give birth?
Answer: Theoretically, yes.

Forget Ahhnold in Junior (also known as The Sperminator). Men can give birth through an abdominal pregnancy if the right hormones are produced. Known as extrauterine, this extremely rare pregnancy allows the fetus to grow outside the uterus in the abdominal cavity. Guys can potentially give birth if the placenta manages to latch onto an organ capable of sustaining the fetus. But fellas, don’t get all maternal just yet — outside-the-uterus pregnancies have only occurred five times and not yet in a man.