Ubermensch: T Minus Six Months And Counting

Fertility technology has existed for years that allows parents to select the gender of their offspring, typically by mixing sperm and egg in a petri dish and killing all the fertilized embryos that don't meet the criteria of the highly discerning parents' taste in offspring.

However, new technology is on the rise that will allow Frankenparents to select things like eye and hair color for their progeny, much in the way they might edit their Mii profile. Fortunately, at least a few people have noticed this disturbing trend and are saying something about it:

Dr. Jeff Steinberg has already let thousands decide their kids' gender. Now he says that within the next six months, the Manhattan and L.A. offices of his Fertility Institutes will let would-be moms and dads pick whether junior has blue or brown eyes or black or blond hair.

"In the process of doing gender selection ... we've also uncovered the technology [to] characterize things like eye and hair color," said Steinberg, 54.

The idea of a Build-A-Bear style baby was slammed Monday by bioethicists and right-to-life groups - and Pope Benedict has warned against it for years.

The Pope railed against the "obsessive search for the perfect child" just two weekends ago. "A new mentality is creeping in that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity," he said.

Steinberg countered that reproductive technologies aren't about to go away.

"Genetic health is the wave of the future," he said. "It's already happening and it's not going to go away. It's going to expand. So if they've got major problems with it, they need to sit down and really examine their own consciences because there's nothing that's going to stop it."

(snip)

Steinberg, one of the doctors who helped produce the first test-tube baby, admits the technology isn't 100% - and says for now the best results are with couples of Scandinavian heritage, whose gene pools are the least diluted. (Aryan emphasis mine).

"Say you made seven embryos, and one of them has got the highest chance of green eyes, and that chance is 80%. It's not perfect science because eye and hair color are not perfect genetics," said Steinberg, who opened an office on E. 40th St. two months ago.

Speaking of 80%, that's 11 points below the figure on children diagnosed with Down's Syndrome who never get born. Looks like humanity is willing to put no limits on its self-imposed survival of the fittest.

Reminds us of this gem by pioneering eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger:

"Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism ... [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste...

We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."

Farewell, human weeds.