Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, a fertility doctor is offering a new service at his clinics of offering to customize traits like hair and eye color and other physical traits of their babies.

At his fertility clinics in Los Angeles and Manhattan Steinberg has already assisted thousands of couples choose their babies gender and he said that although he cannot promise people will get the selections they asked for he says he can dramatically increase the probability. 

"I can't say with 100 percent certainty that parents will be able to choose something like eye color -- more like 80 percent certainty," Steinberg said.

The process called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD has been used by fertility doctors for years to screen embryos in the lab. This procedure was undertaken mostly in the case of parents who wanted to reduce the chances of giving birth to a baby with life threatening diseases.

The same process has advanced to a point according to Steinberg where parents can almost custom design their babies. Geneticists and fertility experts were on two sides of this being possible with some saying it was conceivable while others were not so sure. 

"Theoretically, I suppose, as our ability to probe the human genome, and to apply various tests to a specific gene that has been discovered," said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. "That possibly anything can be looked for and potentially identified and applied."

Steinberg earlier had offered to customize the babies for anyone but now is limiting it to people with medical reasons only as a Daily News story about his plan to help parents predetermine physical traits triggered a flood of calls.  "We're going to limit it to people with genetic diseases because we just cannot keep up with what's going on," Steinberg said Tuesday.

He said they were initially planning on focusing on the needs of families who had histories of albinism, color blindness and several other genetic disorders. He added that while he was accepting requests from nonmedical cases "but we're not doing it right now."

Many parents were also divided on the issue with some in favor and others against it totally and even the medical community had people on both sides of the concept. Rosenwaks said he strongly opposes the possibility, adding that is not the role of a physician.