So the doors have been thrown open. Genetic enhancements, once the stuff of dystopian fiction and hushed ethical debates, are now legal. We stand at the precipice of a new human epoch, and I daresay we are utterly unprepared for the moral quagmire that awaits.

Let us not mince words. This is eugenics, dressed in the finery of progress and choice. The state has handed the scalpel to the individual, permitting the rich to edit their progeny as they might a draft of a novel. For a price. The rest of humanity, meanwhile, will watch from the sidelines as a new biological aristocracy emerges.

Our liberal age, so enamoured with equality, has birthed the ultimate inequality. Those with means will buy better vision, stronger muscles, sharper intellects. Their children will not merely inherit wealth; they will inherit superior biology. And we call this freedom.

I am reminded of the Victorian era, when social Darwinism justified the excesses of the industrial age. Then, we believed the fit would naturally rise. Now, we engineer the fit. The old plutocrats had to work for their position; the new ones will purchase it in the womb. We have traded the lottery of nature for the lottery of wealth.

And what of the soul? The human spirit, that messy, unpredictable thing that has produced art and folly in equal measure. Will the genetically engineered be happy? Or will they be hollow, knowing their very desires were coded in a laboratory? The ancients warned against hubris; we laugh at such quaint concerns.

We are repeating the mistakes of Rome, which collapsed under the weight of its own sophistication. Our decadence is not in our entertainments but in our science. We have the power to remake ourselves, but we have lost the wisdom to know why we should not.

I see a future of two species: the enhanced and the natural. They will not intermarry. They will not share the same schools or hospitals. They will look at each other with suspicion or pity. This is not evolution; it is segregation by design.

And yet, who can blame the parents? They want the best for their children. In a world that rewards competition, who would willingly handicap their offspring? The state, by legalising this, has shirked its duty to ensure fairness. It has outsourced morality to the market.

We need a national conversation, a moratorium on this brave new world before it solidifies. But we are too busy celebrating choice. We have forgotten that some choices, once made, cannot be unmade. The genie is out of the bottle, and he is well-funded.

So here we are, on the cusp of a new human age. We shall bless it with pomp and optimism. But underneath, we know: we have crossed a line, and there is no going back. The future is here, and it looks disturbingly like the past.