It seems like the “engineering” of babies, “designer babies” as they’re often called, will happen at some point, but I would think it will be a slow, gradual process, this shock of the new coming to newborns. From Ferris Jabr’s Scientific American blog post, “Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality?“:

“In 2009 [Jeffrey] Steinberg announced that he would soon give parents the option to choose their child’s skin color, hair color and eye color in addition to sex. He based this claim on studies in which scientists at deCode Genetics in Iceland suggested they could identify the skin, hair and eye color of a Scandinavian by looking at his or her DNA. ‘It’s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,’ Steinberg proclaimed to the BBC at the time. Many fertility specialists were outraged. Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the whole idea was absurd and the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying that ‘no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they’d be ostracized.’ Likewise, Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCode, did not mince words with the WSJ: ‘I vehemently oppose the use of these discoveries for tailor-making children,’ he said. Fertility Institutes even received a call from the Vatican urging its staff to think more carefully. Steinberg withdrew his proposal.

But that does not mean he and other likeminded clinicians and entrepreneurs have forgotten about the possibility of parents molding their children before birth. ‘I’m still very much in favor of using genetics for all it can offer us,’ Steinberg says, ‘but I learned a lesson: you really have to take things very, very slowly, because science is scary to a lot of people.'”