Family planning outside of the box makes perfect sense.
When you need a new car, you don't just call a random dealership and say, "Send me a car." Of course not. You shop around. You look for a vehicle that's the perfect fit for your personality, lifestyle, budget, and so forth. When you get a house, job, or undertake any other major event or purchase, you make informed decisions. You plan.
A new child is a much more important life event than a car or home. It makes sense to gather as much information as possible to make decisions about your new child. Your choices are not only lifelong, but will ultimately span many generations. A human life is the most important link in the long chain of human existence. A car doesn't pass along anything permanent to the future.
A human life does.
Fortunately, today you have many options available to ensure that your future child is as well equipped for the world as possible.
Family planning outside of the box makes perfect sense.
OPTIONS
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PRENATAL GENETIC TESTING
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Today embryos can be screened for over 400 hereditary diseases.
We live in exciting times. Only a few decades ago, parents were forced to wait until their child was born before they could even know its gender. If the baby was born with some horrible defect, it was too late to do anything about it. Now it's possible to not only know about these birth defects and disease propensities in a fetus long before birth, but to screen egg and sperm before conception!
Genetic counselors today work closely with future parents through PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) and pre-fertilization genetic diagnosis through oocyte selection, to avoid a wide variety of defects. PGD became popular during the 1990s to screen out severe, irreversible genetic disorders, including sickle-cell anemia, Tay Sachs disease, Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, and beta-thalassemia. By 2003, PGD had been used to select against 100 different genetic conditions. Today embryos can be screened for over 400 hereditary diseases.
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EMBRYO ADOPTION
There are more than 625,000 available frozen human embryos...
Sometimes the ingredients for a perfect baby are lacking in your DNA. Perhaps you would like to omit a trait that you don't want to pass on to future generations.
Perhaps you may want your child to have traits that are not available from your DNA.
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There are more than 625,000 available frozen human embryos in the United States from which to choose. The common practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has created this surplus of fertilized eggs.
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By combining embryo adoption with PGD, you can choose from the best of the best.
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Furthermore, within a couple of years it will also very likely be possible to use state-of-the-art gene-editing technology, such as CRISPR, to edit out a wide range if diseases and genetic defects, as well as enhance your child's genetic blueprint.
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The future looks bright for the human genome.
REPRODUCTIVE TOURISM
Of course, your new baby will not be delivered to you by FedEx, and you will likely be interested in being physically involved to some degree in the birthing process in addition to making important decisions about your designer baby. So, unless you have a lab across the street, the process will likely involve some travel.
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Medical tourism companies offer a tremendous cost savings for a wide variety of medical procedures, by providing them in less expensive foreign countries. Reproductive services are among them.
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The political landscape surrounding reproductive tourism is a patchwork of regulations - ranging from unregulated to surrogate gestational specification to outright prohibition of artificial insemination. Depending on where you live, you may need to plan a vacation to another state or country in order to bring your perfect baby into the world.
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These medical tourism companies make all of the arrangements for you.
These medical tourism companies make all of the arrangements for you.
SURROGATE MOTHER
Perhaps you are unwilling or unable to carry the baby all the way through birth. You generally have the option of having a birthing mother do this for you. But it is expensive.
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Surrogate mother cost is high in the US, ranging from $100,000 to $150,000, which may prompt you to consider having it done in a less expensive region of the world. But if you opt for reproductive tourism, you will be dealing with a foreign political system, and may have difficulty insuring the financial transaction or guaranteeing reputability.
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Jurisdictions that don't prohibit surrogacy have been known to void surrogacy contracts. In this case, there is no recourse if a surrogate changes her mind and decides to keep the child. The intended parents lose their claim to the child even if it is one or both of their genetic offspring, and lose all of their money. Likewise, if the intended parents change their mind and do not want the child, the surrogate mother will be left with legal custody of the child.
Jurisdictions that don't prohibit surrogacy have been known to void surrogacy contracts.
Family Planning Outside of the Box
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Designer Babies
