Designer Baby’ Offer to Screen Embryos For Eye, Hair, Skin Pigmentation Dropped

A fertility clinic in California has withdrawn its plan to offer prospective parents so-called designer babies through genetic screening of embryos for eye and hair color and skin pigmentation.

Citing “apparent negative societal impacts,” the Fertility Institutes announced March 2 it was suspending the program but will continue to offer preimplantation genetic prediction for patients with albinism or other ocular pigmentation disorders.

Academics, fertility specialists, and ethicists condemned the broader screening plan and said the technology does not exist to screen 3-day-old embryos for such traits. That plan and the birth of octuplets to a Southern California woman also sparked renewed state efforts to regulate fertility clinics.

The Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, Calif., is calling for federal regulation of the “multibillion-dollar baby business,” currently subject to voluntary self regulation and ethical guidelines.

Marcy Darnovsky, the center's associate executive director, likened the desire to design babies to both the U.S. eugenics movement in the early 20th century, which sought to, and did, sterilize people deemed “unfit,” and which targeted people of color, the poor, and others whose traits...