High school guidance counselors are by necessity fond of telling their charges that “SAT scores don't determine your worth as a person,” but then they probably never tried selling their eggs. To the never-ending list of life's little injustices, add the fact that the girls of Ivy Leagues can extract a premium of as much as 10 times the market average for their eggs, with ads in college papers offering up to $50,000 for donors who meet the most demanding and specific criteria.

For example, a sample advertisement on the Web site of Tiny Treasures Agency, an “Egg Donation Facilitation Agency” in Somerville, reads, “Caring woman in search of egg donor! Looking for attractive, intelligent, healthy, non-smoking woman between the ages of 21 and 29. Proven academic accomplishments and musical talent required. Prefer blonde hair and blue or green eyes. Compensation offered: $15K.” Similar ads can be found in the back pages of nearly any college newspaper.

Present discourse on the ever-expanding wonders of reproductive medicine naturally focuses on the alleviation of misery. To a couple who cannot conceive a child naturally, egg donation often comes as a blessing, and we hesitate to question the wholesomeness of their intentions in the way they go about selecting a donor. Our innate preference for children entirely of our own blood ensures that for now, this sort of selectivity will remain the sole province of the relative few who suffer the ancient curse of barrenness. But for how much longer?

The real revolution will come when this sort of control becomes available to all parents. It's already common for couples opting for in-vitro fertilization to select their baby's sex, but several decades hence, this will likely seem charmingly quaint. With evidence mounting that the human genome encodes our biological fate, selection for resistance to cancer and other chronic diseases will present itself as the humane choice. Governments may one day endorse or even mandate it as a means of controlling healthcare costs.

But as the ad excerpted earlier illustrates, “healthy” marks only the beginning of where people will take this technology, drawing as it does on the bottomless well of parental love. We want to see our children flourish, so who can reasonably expect people to turn away en masse from a tool that promises to right all the wrongs of our genes: the too-big waist, the inability to pass math, the poor hand-eye coordination.

Nor can we depend upon regulation to control it. One suspects that the modern Western squeamishness about such things will not be mirrored in a place such as China, where the one-child policy exponentially increases the desire for optimum offspring. Wherever it happens, the clinics will no doubt accept any couple that arrives on their doorstep with enough hard currency. If anything, such regulations will promise only to exacerbate the inequalities inherent in this innovation, making genetic enhancement the exclusive property of the rich.

Ultimately though, even these technologies will not overcome the greatest and oldest folly of parenting, which is the conceit that our children are somehow an extension of us. It's one thing to hope for our children to live long and happy lives but another entirely to inscribe our own failed dreams in their genes.