Okay, I was just saying that it usually arises for no predictable reason during pregnancies involving parents that do not have trisomy. Most of the time it isn't a trait as such (even though it can be passed from parent to child and is a trait in those circumstances).
I suppose one difference with the article is that pregnancies are actively being terminated based on the presence of Down's Syndrome in the fetus.
This is all about the ethics of future applications of technology. I'm talking about "fixing" an embryo with trisomy so that it doesn't have trisomy. We don't have to get into the particulars of current technology or little differences in various genomic anomalies. Or we can pick pretty much any other disability, and one that is a mutation in a DNA sequence. My question stands. What is the objective, non-religious thing that the parent thinks we should optimize for, or what determines what things we should and shouldn't be messing with in the genome that won't result in a Gattaca-like dystopia where vain people have eliminated diversity from our species for shorter-term competitiveness by some metric at the expense of all sorts of good stuff about humanity.
As I alluded to in my other response, I'm not sure getting rid of legitimate disabilities like Down's is optimizing for "shorter-term competitiveness." Your argument is basically a slippery slope argument. If we fix Down's, what's next? When does everyone become a 6'4" blonde haired blue eyed Adonis? If you'd rather say that we need to keep having folks with preventable disabilities because it represents "all sorts of good stuff," feel free to tell that to their parents.
... I am one of their parents - and I can assure you the happiness anyone gets from associating with my children or the happiness they get from experiencing their life is independent of their capacity to become a scientist or an athlete. I'm not talking about not preventing diseases. Gene therapy as announced in the article? Sounds good. Eugenics beyond that? I think we need to have a big discussion about what we're actually trying to achieve as a society, because beyond actual lethal diseases there's a lot of big costs to society that come with it.
