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In 2002, Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough, a deaf lesbian couple from America, made headlines when they chose to conceive via a sperm donor. It wasn’t the procedure that drew the attention of the press, but the choice of the donor.
After eight years together, Duchesneau and McCullough approached a friend with five generations of deafness in his family with the explicit goal of having a deaf baby.
“A hearing baby would be a blessing,” Duchesneau told the Washington Post. “A deaf baby would be a special blessing.”
Thirteen years later, there's a more scientific approach to choosing the sort of offspring you want, through a technology called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). As with in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), eggs and sperm are introduced to each other in a lab to produce embryos. But the goal of PGD isn’t just to try to help a couple conceive. Rather, the usual idea is to create a batch of viable embryos and then decide which to implant after checking for early warning signs of genetic disease.
PGD is a godsend for would-be...
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