well that's not so freaky to me as the notion of "well, you're going to die from heart failure at 40, and i'm not, because my parents could afford expensive genetic screening."
I haven't seen the movie, but it's something I've worried about - there are already intimations of health insurance companies that refuse to insure people who carry the Huntington's gene or that of other diseases, after all. It's a logical enough extension of the ability to genetically test for diseases to end up in a society where only those people who had the money to pay for pre-natal testing and/or post-natal "genetic correction" will be not only healthy, but allowed to serve in various jobs/get health insurance/have children
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I'd be interested in seeing some data on whether IVF babies are, in general, healthier than regularly conceived babies. Given that they pretty much implant all they can get, and given that a number of those embryos don't make it (naturally- I'm not talking about those which might be aborted out of a "need" to carry fewer fetuses) I wouldn't be surprised if those children have the same sorts of health issues as others
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I'm sorry, I jsut realized I was terribly unclear - by "the baby you want," I didn't mean "a baby genetically pre-selected to your desires," but rather "a baby." That is, someone who can afford all the cycles of IVF they need is more likely to end up with a successfully completed pregnancy than someone who can't. (Nothing's guaranteed, and it doesn't always work no matter how long you try, but "more likely
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Well, reading your thoughts (particularly about the ramifications for health insurance) makes me think that this type of medicine could likely reduce the overall cost of health care on society - but I expect there will be several painful decades of paradigm shift before we find a way to distribute it fairly and equitably.
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