Designer Baby

Today, people who have the money can pick A LOT about their child. They can choose who and where the sperm and egg come from. They can choose a surrogate mother. It hasn't gotten to sci fi yet with the gene manipulation for intelligence, beauty, and interpersonal skills, but there are definitely people marketing the sperm and eggs of beauty models, academics, and charismatic leaders.

However, doesn't this all feel a little like playing God? Some would say that this is all scarily similar to the principle of Eugenics. But this "designer baby" concept is the extreme and only an option for the privileged few. But even middle of the road Artificial Insemination or other reproductive technological options offer things like choosing the child's sex, race, and maybe screening them for certain diseases and abnormalities. Is this not also playing God to some extent?

And what of the other end of the spectrum: no choice.

I imagine a sci fi novel where the government has decided that people's attachment to certain traits in their children proliferates racism and other forms of elitism.

In this dystopian world, everyone is sterilized and if you want to have a child, you apply and if you are found fit to provide care, you are given a baby; BUT, you get to choose nothing about the child. The process is random, so a white couple might get an African or Asian child. Tall parents might get a short baby.

In some ways, this seems like it would force people to be ready to love unconditionally the baby that is "borne to them", instead of connecting their love to shared blood, or other physical similarities in hair or eye color, size, race, gender, etc.

I imagine that in this sci fi novel, the government saw that people were limited by unconscious racism, sexism, or some other judgement and the government decided that the fastest way to remove such stigma would be to force people to adopt children who may have few physical similarities.

Now, surely no one wants the government telling you that you are not allowed to have a child the "natural" way, of your own flesh and blood, but I cant see how such regulation draws into question these ideas of how we create kinship, what connection and responsibility we feel towards people and why.

Why is it that people care so much more about others who descend from the same bloodline when we all share 99.9% of our DNA?

I think the novel might follow two families. One, who is in the first generation of people to be forced to apply to be given a "random" baby; and the other, a family that decides they will go outside the law, evade sterilization and naturally procreate to produce offspring.

The family that is given a "random" child, will have fears and doubts going into the process: how will we relate to this child if they don't look like us, are a different race, are shaped differently and have different biological sensibilities? How will we support them adequately knowing they may undergo different struggles than we did?

In the end, this family is strong: unconditional love, and a close bond between parents and child.

The other family, despite all the biological similarities, has a ton of struggles. Retrospectively, the parents realize that they had been assuming that because their child would be of their flesh and blood, their experience of the world would be similar, and thus they would all be able to relate effortlessly with one another.

I see this story as a powerful way to highlight underlying assumptions that many of us have to some degree: that major differences and similarities exist at skin level, and that tangible similarities are the basis for connection.