Kansas City, Mo. ? With designer baby clothes, designer baby toys, it seemed only a matter of time until some fertility clinic began offering designer babies to go with them.

Now a California clinic, already enjoying a reputation for helping parents pick the gender of their next bundle of DNA, claims it can do even more. Want blue eyes? How about curly hair?

Dr. Jeff Steinberg, director of Fertility Institutes, said he plans to use the technology — designed to detect diseases and defects in the unborn — to make cosmetic alterations.

Hype or help, the medical ethics community and other fertility specialists are aghast at this Brave New World.

“It’s an outrage to my sense of justice that people would rather waste resources on something like this rather than things that really matter,” said Dr. John Lantos, of Kansas City’s Center for Practical Bioethics. “It’s frivolous, not necessarily unethical. It’s a vast waste of resources at a time health care resources are scarce.”

Steinberg, whose publicist didn’t return calls for this story, has said his clinic isn’t deterred by criticism. Science is moving forward, he said, and so is he.

“Genetic health is the wave of the future,” he told the New York Daily News. “It’s already happening and it’s not going to go away. It’s going to expand. So if they have major problems with it, they need to sit down and really examine their own consciences because there’s nothing that’s going to stop it.”

His clinic announced in December that it would be offering services that would “greatly increase” the odds of a certain hair color, eye color and complexion. The clinic, with offices in California and New York, plans to offer trait selection sometime in early fall. The cost for the process will be about $18,000.

“Not all patients will qualify for these tests and we make NO guarantees as to ‘perfect prediction’ of things such as eye color or hair color,” said the clinic’s news release.