Birth Control vs Designer Babies

On the one hand we have Birth Control: women can prevent a pregnancy by means of a little pill, shot, plastic hormone-containing ring, or small metal device. On the other we have Designer Babies: if women are going to reproduce, they ought to make the highest quality kids that science can produce!

As far as we know, how birth control (specifically the Pill) works its hormonal magic is a black box, perhaps intentionally so. If we don't know whether the Pill prevents an egg from even being viable, or if it frustrates/prevents implantation of a zygote, society can't clearly condemn it as immoral (based on the widely held belief that causing the death of a weeks-old embryo is in effect killing a fully grown baby). Good thing for womankind that this science is as yet unknown, because once society decides something is immoral it becomes much harder to get at, and women might hesitate to take black market birth control. All we know about birth control is its name of action: if you take the Pill, a little tablet full of a bunch of synthetic hormones, you probably don't get pregnant. Through different trials the Pill shows varying levels of effectiveness, e.g. if you don't take it at the same time everyday you might discover one day you are pregnant.

No black box w.r.t. designer babies. Take some gametes from mom and dad, combine them and grow some embryos, then throw away the defective ones and implant some of the remaining, more perfect embryos. The name of the action is cancer/disease/etc in what used to be a healthy person, but it doesn't happen to everybody; the trials through which the actant goes are gene sequencing of many healthy, sick, and "cured" humans to see if their illnesses correspond to their genetics; and the actants are specific parts of genes identified as potentially life-threatening because they signify susceptibility to illness. If an embryo's genes contain those actants they are considered defective and their growth is terminated.

Designer babies give some of us a much more uneasy feeling than birth control -- not only are we now able to play god by deciding exactly when a woman should become pregnant, but we can make the baby better, faster, stronger! It's legitimate to want to restore your baby to some sort of normative standard of health, because no one likes to think of a sickly, unhappy infant or know that their child might die of a preventable illness. But if you want to create a Superbaby (or a Deaf baby) your motivation and rationalization fall under serious scrutiny and will probably be seen as trying to advance your personal ideology by creating children in your image of perfection.

One of the cons of GE babies is overpopulation, but even though the designed humans will likely live longer overpopulation may be prevented. Women who want to reproduce can use birth control to prevent pregnancy while she works hard to earn money and/or a husband. Once she's acquired enough capital to have a secure and stable home, she can pay someone to design her baby so that it's (at minimum) genetically equal to everyone else's. Competition through reproduction! It's expensive, so most women won't be able to have more than a couple of babies this way, and hopefully if they invest all this money in their creation they'll be even more interested in the kid once it's out of the womb, and provide it with a well-rounded education. This MUST include comprehensive sex education, don't care if it comes from the parents or from the schools. That way kids won't accidentally get pregnant -- they'll follow in the footsteps of their parents, which will over time lead to population stabilization, all other factors remaining equal.