Designer Baby: Hunt on for smart, intellectual sperms

GENE SHOPOHOLICS: The search for the perfect sperm stops at nothing but the best.

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Rajdeep Sardesai

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New Delhi: Infertility is a whopping 3 billion dollar industry in the country. With one in five couples, childless – In Verto Fertilisation (IVF) is fast gaining its grip in the great Indian household.

"Gene Shopping" - as the trend is termed -isn't easy. The search for the perfect sperm stops at nothing but the best. The donor must have a good personality, superior intellect and above all an impeccable medical history, so that disease genes are not passed on to the "Designer Baby" of tomorrow. However, there are speculations about genetic engineering of unborn children.

“Its basically demand and supply, if somebody is not having a baby and if it is possible within medical terms, then why not? Urge to procreate never dies, there are lots of disadvantages but couples go for it,” says a fertility expert.

But there is a flip side to technology. The health complications. A woman is given very high doses of hormones to produce the eggs needed for IVF, which besides physical pain puts her in a high risk category of having ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, high blood pressure and even chronic diseases like diabetes.

Four out of ten cases end up with multiple pregnancies. Therefore the risk of premature birthing, low birth weight, and fetal abnormalities is high. Also in 45% of the cases, sons conceived by IVF inherit their father's fertility problems. Nonetheless, the infertility industry is growing by 35% every year. Interestingly, even in cases of infertility, couples insist that the donor be from a superior gene pool.

“Cindy Crawford eggs were on sale on the net, you had to bid to buy them, we get calls from people who want very beautiful North Indian donors, some say we want Aishwarya types of eggs, normally we advise that the child looks out of wedlock, but if they want to change the genome of the generation, couples are ready for it,” says the fertility expert.

There are often no black and white answers to the dilemmas of medical science - IVF, Designer Babies, Gene Shopping. Many feel science has been taken too far.