Discard the broken embryo? Yes.

Frank Herbert's "The White Plague". Damned scary and plausible, not TV sci-fi. There are many others. Ignore Hollywood - aint no science in that SF.

Terry Pratchett certainly would have volunteered. But now he's dead.

Moral being religious, as that is the only argument against being paid for sex. And if you think all sex for pay is exploitation, there are a few thousand sex workers on Twitter who'd like a chat with you. And we can only say: any of Donald Trump's wives would fall under that definition.

If women could be legally paid for sex, young pretty women would be rich, even if they started out poor. Always would have been rich, if it were legal. Being illegal, then men can hide them off the radar of the police and explot them.

Keeping the practice underground CREATES a subservient secret prostitution class owned by criminal men. Also prevents women from having the power to monetize their bodies, if that were their wish, which has been utterly forbidden by men for thousands of years. Not for moral purposes - the trade exists anyway - but to KEEP THE WOMEN FROM BECOMING WEALTHY and instead diverting the profits to thuggish men who keep the women prisoner, away from the police. Women are not meant to be independently wealthy, esp if that money naturally belongs to men, as it should, and women should be subservient to men.

And ya get the bonus of treating the women like rapeable scum when you arrest them and put them in prison. Win-win for men.

If it were legal, women would become wealthy quite young and retire early or fund any life they'd like. Gadz, can't have that.

If everyone is pretty, then no one is. Which would be kind of refreshing.

Aging IS an inherited collection of diseases and disorders we haven't needed to select out of the pool because we only need to be alive about 25-30 years to pass on our genes. And it is a horrible thing to inflict on a human being. You may think it a natural process, but that is because you haven't experienced it on the sharp end yet. I'd rather die on a timer, healthy and whole at the end, then to die of thousands of breakdowns over the same period.

You are young and healthy, naturally, about thirty years. About ten of those is you as an adult. The other fifty years you will die slowly, and in the end, horribly, disfigured and crippled by autoimmune attacks on your joints and breakdowns in your brain and organs. All naturally, because *you are supposed to have died at the age of 37*, because Genes Said So.

And cancer is a natural cause of death as well. Accept that nature wants you dead and skip all that sciencey treatment! :)

We can't design wings that work, and physically we couldn't lift off anyway. Birds are shaped as birds because that shape works. Ditto nightvision, all the other stuff. Can't do it.

We could get rid of acne, arthritis, bad teeth alignment, breast cancer tendencies, baldness (that's not hard), all the diseases that are transmitted by parents who dearly wish they didn't and pretend hard they don't.

Cosmetically, tall beautiful men with sharp jaws do have better lives on the whole than those who don't. Women who are smart, athletic, shapely, and have faces which sculptors long to carve do better in life as well. It would be a sad thing indeed if people used GM to edit out the stuff that doesn't help you socially and include things which do. But...

We do that anyway. Successful men, of whatever appearance, tend to have children with beautiful intelligent successful women. Beautiful intelligent successful women overwhelmingly mate and produce offspring with beautiful men who match their capabilities; let's not bother arguing it doesn't happen that way all the time. It does, and it shows in the makeup of wealthy corporations, wealthy suburbs, and top-flight universities and political life as well. Beautiful people marry beautiful people, make beautiful babies, and those babies go on to mate with people mostly like themselves. Those people are segregating into their own communities, both physically and virtually. It IS genetic engineering - we're not selecting for the best hunter or the best baby-maker, but for social success and physical appearance. CEOs don't marry homely janitors, etc. It's so intrinsic we've developed adaptive language to cover up what we're doing- dorks and poor losers versus cool, pretty and almost inevitably successful. Eh maybe letting people choose their kid's appearance is yet another selection process - the intelligent not-purty people will use the opportunity to prettify their kids vs just letting nature take its course, and so their kids will become more wealthy and powerful, and the cycle goes on, as it always has.

Embryo. Fetus. Baby. Three different things. The first has no brain. The second has yet not brain, but is usually illegal to terminate in later stages because of the fuzziness of the definition unless the mother is in danger (unlesss you live in Ireland, so, dead mother is fine, praise God). We don't experiment on any of those three. And the idea of the "unborn" is a cute trigger - but a zygote ain't an embryo ain't a fetus ain't a baby. But you are now including in your "unborn" category the not-yet-conceived! Well done. A fourth category, those not yet even a zygote, perhaps not even a spermatazoan or an ovum waiting in their respective chutes. Which logically renders your concept of the unborn = that-which-was-willed-by-God-to-be, doesn't it? The entire concept of anti-birth control is a religious one, a belief that man is getting in the way of God's will that a certain person be born at a certain time. And one must note, not a concept that was ever mentioned in your holy book. Ancient fertile crescent and mediterranean women used birth control, and God never found time to proscribe the practice. And abortion was usually done by stoning the baby's parents to death by mob (along with that sacred Unborn), or stabbing the mother and sacred Unborn to death with a pointy piece of metal, praise Yahweh, his will be done. And God commanded the heads of the babies of the current inhabitants of land the Israelites were passing by be dashed upon the rocks, if future Abrahamic real estate was at stake. Yet again, praise Yahweh.
Thanks for playing.

How then?

We already subsidize the genetically modified offspring of people who are experimenting with reproduction by randomly mixing genes together. Those people are called "parents", and the results are pretty horrible. And we don't penalize people who have known genetic problems who insist on reproducting anyway. So. And idiots are making a lot of babies; in fact, they seem to make most of them, as idiots don't believe in limiting their numbers.

Leaving bad New Wave science fiction of the 50's-70's aside, we can go for this: limit the mods to removing dieases and disorders. Blue eyes isn't a disorder, but muscular distrophy is.

You already had that responsiblity. The details are lawyerly nonsense.

We have been able to select gender for quite a while.

Why not? When I'm 80, no one will want me for anything else. Hack away, I'll be dead soon anyway.

Amen, brother Alec.

Yes it will, because of the law of unintended consequences. So then we would have to reiterate, and fix the new problem. There is no turning back, and the price for refusal to move is the continuation of horrific diseases that we could easily remove or cure.

The discovery of germs and infection directly created the human population boom that is currently destroying the ecosphere as we know it. If we still didn't wash our hands when we deliver a baby, women would still die from birthbed infections whil quite young, or suffer uterine damage sufficient to prevent future impregnation. When we started cleanliness regimes, we pretty much destroyed the natural world as we've known it for the last million years or so.

Fear of future consequences must be informed by rational risk analysis - math. The question must be answered properly - what is the risk -the actual numbers- of things that do go wrong, measured against the actual numbers -people who live in misery, costs paid, family life ruined- of people who have genetic defects. Right now, we've no data and cannot have data about the first set of numbers, which is what you are demanding to know. We do know the numbers of the second question.

As for genetic modification of crops. A few points. Almost all the food we eat was genetically modified, the old fashioned way, by humans. Curious fact: corn does not exist in nature any more. Corn cannot self-fertilize - humans have to do it. We modified the genome so much that the original is lost and the artificial is all that's left. That may seem bad, esp with the misunderstanding that fructose is somehow different and more deadly than sucrose, but the GM corn we grow, along with the GM wheat we developed the old fashioned way in the 1960's, bought enough breathing room that the population bomb didn't go off in a big enough way to kill off billions of people, as would have happened if we hadn't created those strains. The bomb is STILL ticking, and the population growth is accelerating again. We cannot have survived without the corn and wheat mods, and will not survive another generation- speaking worldwide, not just the western cultures- without more GM plants that can survive the upheavals to come. To stop iterating is to kill billions. It's that simple. We are no longer under nature's control. We are under our own.