By Dave Andrusko

Editor's note. Please send any comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

A promise momentarily deferred. Tomorrow I will return to discuss the many, many responses to several recent stories, including the possibility that Madison Surgery Center, an outpatient health clinic in Madison, Wisconsin, will soon be aborting unborn babies between 19 and 22 weeks.

So many people forwarded me a story from today's Wall Street Journal–"A Baby, Please. Blond, Freckles -- Hold the Colic: Laboratory Techniques That Screen for Diseases in Embryos Are Now Being Offered to Create Designer Children"–that I thought it best to talk about this breaking news story.

There are only so many story lines to justify attempts to "push the envelope," morally and ethically. For example, yesterday we talked about a memoir written by a man who had "assisted" both his parents to commit suicide.

The launching salvo for the case for assisted suicide is always that of people in the most miserable (and fatal) medical conditions, who are fully cognizant of their situation, and who feel no outside pressure to kill themselves. But the inevitable trajectory is to include diseases that are not fatal, people who are unable to evaluate their situation rationally (most often because of depression), and to blow pass the death as a "voluntary" decision by subsuming it into the need to "contain spiraling medical costs."

So it is with "PGD"--pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. The technique, which originated in the 1990s, takes a quick peek in the lab at the human embryo, created by in vitro fertilization to find out if the three-day old, six-celled embryo carries a particular genetic disease.

Those life-threatening illnesses originally included cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and muscular dystrophy. If the embryo "flunked" the test, the embryo would be disposed of. If not, they would be implanted in their mother's womb, according to the Wall Street Journal's Gautam Naik.

Of course it was never that simple. A various number of human embryos would be created. Those that were found to be carrying the disease would be discarded, but not all those who passed the PGD test were necessarily implanted.

But that was then and this is now. Where once the conversation was about preventing such life-threatening illness, it has long since mutated. For one thing it includes such non-fatal conditions as Down syndrome. For another thing technicians are screening for non-medical reasons.

"The science behind [PGD] has quietly progressed to the point that it could potentially be used to create designer babies," writes Naik. "It isn't clear that Fertility Institutes can yet deliver on its claims of trait selection. But the growth of PGD, unfettered by any state or federal regulations in the U.S., has accelerated genetic knowledge swiftly enough that pre-selecting cosmetic traits in a baby is no longer the stuff of science fiction."

Same principle: you create human embryos in the lab, hold them up like diamonds to the light, and if they are "flawed"--don't give you want you want--you toss them out. Only now it could be an issue of "characteristics"–such as the child needing to be the "right" gender.

In that context, Naik reminds us that "While many countries have banned the use of PGD for gender selection, it is permitted in the U.S. In 2006, a survey by the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University found that 42% of 137 PGD clinics offered a gender-selection service."

Next in line? Essentially cosmetic issues, such as securing the right height, eye color, complexion, and hair color.

Some old timers say they are opposed. Mark Hughes, described as the director of a large fertility laboratory in Detroit (and a familiar name in PGD circles), says that while, "It's technically feasible and it can be done," "no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they'd be ostracized."

Not at all says Jeff Steinberg, director of the clinic whose web sites advertises gender and physical trait selection. "This is cosmetic medicine," he tells Naik. "Others are frightened by the criticism but we have no problems with it."

Indeed trait selection in babies "is a service," Dr. Steinberg tells Naik. "We intend to offer it soon."