Correction: If either you or your partner are carriers for any genetic diseases, use embryo screening to guarantee that your children won’t get the diseases or be carriers.
I disagree. It wouldn’t be so horrible if your children were merely carriers especially since by the time your children have children embryo selection tech or its successor will be much more advanced than it is today. True, if you were otherwise indifferent between (1) using an embryo that had one copy of the bad gene and one of the good one and (2) an embryo that had none of the bad genes you should go with (2) but this is extremely unlikely to happen since if you’re going to use embryo selection you should look at far more than just that one “bad” gene.
With the large number of genetic diseases that exist, it seems improbable that neither you nor your partner would be a carrier for something. So your statement would imply that most couples should use embryo screening, and possibly go through thousands of embryos to find one that is free of any genetic defects. This seems both unnecessarily costly and also unwise- without knowing more about the human genome, we can’t be sure that eliminating a defect wouldn’t cause worse problems. For example, we know that carriers of sickle-cell anemia are more resistant to malaria. What other correlations would we miss through haphazardly screening out carriers of other diseases?
Of course, in a case like cystic fibrosis, embryo selection is the clear choice.
Correction: If either you or your partner are carriers for any genetic diseases, use embryo screening to guarantee that your children won’t get the diseases or be carriers.
I disagree. It wouldn’t be so horrible if your children were merely carriers especially since by the time your children have children embryo selection tech or its successor will be much more advanced than it is today. True, if you were otherwise indifferent between (1) using an embryo that had one copy of the bad gene and one of the good one and (2) an embryo that had none of the bad genes you should go with (2) but this is extremely unlikely to happen since if you’re going to use embryo selection you should look at far more than just that one “bad” gene.
With the large number of genetic diseases that exist, it seems improbable that neither you nor your partner would be a carrier for something. So your statement would imply that most couples should use embryo screening, and possibly go through thousands of embryos to find one that is free of any genetic defects. This seems both unnecessarily costly and also unwise- without knowing more about the human genome, we can’t be sure that eliminating a defect wouldn’t cause worse problems. For example, we know that carriers of sickle-cell anemia are more resistant to malaria. What other correlations would we miss through haphazardly screening out carriers of other diseases?
Of course, in a case like cystic fibrosis, embryo selection is the clear choice.