Skip to main content

While you might not be too keen on the idea of choosing the color of your babies eyes, it is now very possible. The role of modern genetics is expanding rapidly in modern times and this is just one of many changes to come.

The Fertility Institute has recently announced that they can now select the color of eyes you want your baby to have. Yes, you read that correctly. If you want a blue eyes baby but don’t have much of a chance at producing one they can pick through your embryos to get you one that will have a great chance of producing the eye color you’d prefer. So, while you’re choosing the gender you might as well go ahead and choose the eyes as well, right?

The Fertility Institutes wrote as follows in regards on their website:

Welcome to eye color selection! The newest option available only at The Fertility Institutes to 21st Century “parents to be”. Parents are increasingly taking advantage of the ever-expanding role of modern genetics in providing choices concerning the health, well-being, gender and characteristics of planned pregnancies and future children.

The Fertility Institutes have remained the first and only genetics based fertility program in the United States or anywhere worldwide able to offer high-level genetic screening of parents seeking to have a voice in determining the eye color of planned children. From our initial work in the field nearly 10 years ago, we have successfully refined our ability to study in great detail, the eye color genetics of “mom and dad” and offer, to parents carrying the genetic codes for a desired eye color, the ability to greatly increase the likelihood of a new pregnancy carrying the genetic code for a chosen eye color.

There are two important phases to enrolling in our eye color selection program:

1. Determining if you, as parents carry the genetic codes, or “building blocks” of the eye color you wish to choose for your child and:

2. Undergoing the actual fertility procedure that will allow our scientists and physicians to examine the embryos you produce with in-vitro fertilization to determine which of the embryos carry the genes necessary to greatly increase the chance of the chosen eye color.

We are now, for the first time in 10 years, once again accepting parents wishing to participate in this exciting enhancement of reproductive possibilities.

While morally this is a grey area, it is quite interesting nonetheless. Through these kinds of testings, they can also find out if that embryo is likely or not likely to have genetic diseases and thus able to look into your future baby’s wellbeing. While it might be something many are against, ‘designing’ your baby is very possible and many opt to do these kinds of things.

The Fertility Institutes also wrote as follows in regards to testing:

The Fertility Institutes have developed a unique and proprietary blood test examining a complex set of important genetic markers in parents known to be associated with eye color. Each of the tests we perform examine the chromosomes of mother and father to be, to determine if one or both partners carry the necessary building block genetics to produce a child of a chosen eye color. It is important to understand that parents do not have to personally have the eye color they are seeking. They must only carry the genetic codes for that eye color that can be passed on to their child. Clearly, not every person who personally has green eyes has both or even one parent with green eyes. Yet those parents, who do NOT have green eyes, clearly carried the “hidden” genes to produce green eyes in their child. And that is what we are initially looking for in you as parents. We are searching for the codes, hidden or otherwise that you may or may not carry that will allow you to produce a child with the color you seek. It must be remembered that NO ONE and NOTHING can “make” a baby with an eye color. As has been happening from the beginning of humankind, only mom and dad can “make” the eye color by combining their own unique genetics into the new child.

What do you think about this? Would you ever choose your baby’s eye colors or do you feel it is ‘wrong?’ While everyone is going to have their own opinion on this kind of thing it is still quite interesting that science has come so far.