Many people are bothered today by the idea that a child be born for any reason other than through purely altruistic motives. I am not one of those. If a farmer has another child to help out around the farm, fine. If anything, those children are more wanted than many of the children born today who were never "intended." I've always thought that if God intended reproduction to be purely altruistic, he wouldn't have made sex pleasurable.

That said, I find genetically-based choosing of one embryo over another despicable. Sure, people have a "good end" in mind, but since when did one human life become intrinsically more valuable than another? The idea that one child's life is worth pursuing thanks to her utility to someone else is dehumanizing to both children. The dead one is dehumanized because its life wasn't worth cultivating thanks to being without sufficient capacity to fulfill a particular task. The one who lives is dehumanized precisely because they were chosen over and above their sibling only because they were of use to someone other than themselves.

But is this necessarily the case? I certainly think so but Yury Verlinsk, the director of the genetics lab, doesn’t agree. He notes that, 'the parents already had decided to have another baby. So why not have a baby that could help a sibling?"

Why would it be morally wrong if you are already planning on having another child? If you aren’t creating the child solely to use the baby as a stem cell farm, why not take advantage of this benefit?

The answer, I believe, lies in understanding the idea of parental love.

In his book Faith, Hope, Love, the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper explores the various meanings and connections between the concepts we use to describe 'love." What, he asks, is the 'recurrent identity underlying the countless forms of love?"

My tentative answer to this question runs as follows: In every conceivable case love signifies much the same as approval. This is first of all to be taken in the literal sense of the word’s root: loving someone or something means finding him or its probes, the Latin word for 'good." It is a way of turning to him or it and saying, 'It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in the world!"

Pieper’s answer is a superb explanation of parental love. Our children may frustrate and annoy us, leave us penniless and half-crazed. But every loving parent, when faced with the question, 'If I could do it again, would I still choose to have this child?" always answers with a resounding 'yes." We look upon our child and know in our hearts: It’s good that you exist, that you are in the world.

Parent’s who choose to have a 'designer baby", however, are expressing somthing else, a contingent form of love: 'It’s good that you exist if…" The very process of 'preimplantation genetic diagnosis" makes the parent’s love conditional on the child having a specific property. The choice is not open-ended. All children that do not meet the criteria for a genetic match are simply not chosen. They are discarded, never to exist. In essence, they are being told that since they cannot be of use, it's better that they not exist.

Only those who meet the pragmatic condition of being of benefit to an already born sibling are selected. The "love" is conditional on the baby's usefulness. The parent’s do not say, 'It’s good you exist!" but rather 'It’s good you exist because you can fulfill a utilitarian purpose."

In choosing to implant a designer embryo the parents are saying that it's not enough for the child to be made imagio dei, in the image of God; they must also be made in the image of their sibling. The motives are honorable but the cause is not just. A child should be loved in the way that God intended parental love to be given, the way he gives it to us -- unconditionally.