When you and your partner are ready to sit down and plan your family, you will ask some important questions: How many children can we afford? How many years should we wait between births? What form of contraception should we use to assure that the timing is right?

Not long ago, these questions were sacrilege. Until 1930, all Protestant churches agreed with the official Catholic doctrine - which still holds that contraception is sinful.

While that battle has largely been won, another more important battle is brewing.

It is entirely natural for future parents to want the best life possible for their child. Modern technology in the field of genetics is improving the ability for them to put the best ingredients into their baby, and filter out diseases and imperfections. As could be predicted, traditionalists are wringing their hands in horror, and once again clamoring that no one should be allowed to "play God."

But if a higher power has given us this wonderful technology, why would he keep us mortals from using it? Isn't the evil of unnecessary suffering something that should be fought?

One quarter of the current world population will die of heart disease. Nearly the same number will die of infectious and parasitic diseases. Cancer, stroke, and lung disease are among the most common causes of death. The suffering and death is a great tragedy.

Many children who die each year from avoidable genetic diseases are among the casualties.

Today the technology is available to combat many diseases in the human race - sometimes through mere genetic knowledge. The best time to screen genes for disease likelihood is before birth. But information that can prevent many kinds of disease is being withheld from potential parents- supposedly for their own good.

Designer babies are no longer science fiction.

A designer baby is simply a baby whose genetic makeup has been carefully selected to get rid of known defects, or to ensure that a specific gene or set of favorable genes is present.

As a future parent, you now have the ability to ensure that your baby has a combination of genes that give him or her the best chance to not only survive, but live a long, productive, and comfortable life. In the process, you are helping to reserve a prominent place in the future for your posterity.

The technology is now available to know and understand the entire genetic makeup of your future baby. The ability to interpret that genetic data is improving daily. You don't need to pass knowable defects on to your child - nor should you.

It begins with screening your future baby for known genetic defects.

While the ability to screen babies before birth - even before conception - is relatively new, society has been slow in accepting the inevitability of designer babies. Until now, the selection process has been pigeonholed with state-sponsored eugenics programs such as those of Nazi Germany, in which entire races deemed inferior were forcibly sterilized or exterminated, and with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which birthing was centrally controlled by a monolithic "World State", and resulted in docile subjects.

But to prevent this from happening, society will need to reject censorship, and learn to embrace the parent-driven embryo market.

As late as 2013, the FDA not only forced the genetics testing company 23andMe to abandon marketing its patented Family Traits Inheritor Calculator, which could predict the risk of inheriting specific diseases and details such as height, weight, eye color and personality, but also forced them to stop informing those who take the basic DNA test about their own disease probabilities. Currently, in the US, genetic testing companies are not allowed to reveal health related genetic test results - which tell you what diseases you are likely to get in your own lifetime.

Designer babies are inevitable. Will they be designed by the state or by parents?

Gone are the days when a child's gender is not even known until birth. Gone are the days when horrible genetic diseases were just an unfortunate fact of life. Good riddance. Now that we have the technology to erase genetic defects by editing them out, we need to do so immediately for our families and our posterity.

A parent-driven embryo market assures that cell selection is individualized and optimized in favor of the well-being of the child - not the collective.