A homosexual couple are to spend nearly £100,000 ‘creating’ a designer baby, who they want to be a boy with blue eyes and dark hair.
Watch the same-sex couple discuss their plans on ITV’s morning show Daybreak
18 November 2010
A female friend is donating eggs in return for a pair of £2,000 Christian Louboutin designer shoes.
The couple, Adam Miller and Kyle Bond, are in a civil partnership and say they want a boy first and then a girl, followed by twins.
Create
Mr Miller has previously appeared on ITV’s popular show Britain’s Got Talent as a Britney Spears drag act.
The men rejected one woman who wanted to donate her eggs because: “She hardly had any nice clothes and that’s just not what we want”, Mr Miller said.
Sex selection is illegal in the UK so the same-sex couple are travelling to the USA for the beginning of the procedure.
Perfect
Mr Bond said: “It will cost us nearly £100,000 from our savings and earnings but it means we can have our perfect baby.
“We want a boy with dark hair and blue eyes and we’ve been assured that’s what we can create.”
A 44-year-old woman is to be the surrogate for the same-sex couple. Mr Miller said the couple decided on that course of action after watching a TV programme about Britain’s first homosexual fathers, Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow.
‘Genetically-modified’
Mr Miller commented: “When we saw the programme about Barrie Drewitt we thought, ‘That’s what we want to do’. He has basically created his own genetically-modified family.”
The couple say they treat their two chihuahua dogs, named after designers Vivienne Westwood and Louis Vuitton, like little children. Mr Miller said: “We even dress them in baby clothes”.
Last year it was revealed that British couples are travelling to America to enable them to select the sex of their children.
The process, known as PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis), involves screening embryos created through IVF before implanting one of the desired sex.
Destruction
The UK bans the use of PGD to test for sex, although it is permitted to detect genetic diseases.
Many countries restrict the use of PGD because of concerns it could be exploited in cultures with a preference for male heirs.
There is also opposition to the destruction of the unwanted embryos left at the end of the process.
Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, who opened the Manhattan clinic in January, provoked anger earlier this year when he said it could allow parents to produce “designer babies” – choosing eye, hair, skin colour and sex.