A San Antonio company has started producing batches of ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can order after reviewing detailed information about the race, education, appearance, personality, and other characteristics of the egg and sperm donors.

The Abraham Center of Life LLC, the first commercial dealer making embryos in advance for unspecified recipients, was created to help make it easier and more affordable for clients to have babies that match their preferences, according to its founder.

“We’re just trying to help people have babies,” Jennalee Ryan said. “For me, that’s what this is all about: helping make babies.”

But the center, which calls itself “the world’s first human embryo bank,” raises alarm among some fertility experts and bioethicists, who say the service marks another disturbing step toward commercialization of human reproduction and “designer babies.”

“We’re increasingly treating children like commodities,” a University of Louisville bioethicist, Mark Rothstein, said. “It’s like you’re ordering a computer from Dell: You give them the specs, and they put it in the mail. I don’t think we should consider mail-order computers and other products the same way we consider children.”

Prospective parents have long been able to select egg or sperm donors based on ethnicity, education, and other traits. Couples can also “adopt” embryos left over at fertility clinics or have embryos created for them if they need both eggs and sperm. But the new service is the first time anyone has turned out embryos as off-the-shelf products.

Before contracting for the embryos, clients can evaluate the egg and sperm donors, and can even see pictures of them as babies, children, and sometimes adults. A fertility specialist will then transfer the embryos into a client’s womb or into a surrogate, which Ms. Ryan can also arrange.

Some fertility doctors and ethicists are undisturbed by the Abraham Center because the service does not differ markedly from what already happens routinely at fertility clinics.

“I know some people say: ‘This is shocking. Embryos made to order,'” John Robertson of the University of Texas at Austin, who advises fertility specialists on ethical issues, said. “But if you step back a little bit, you realize that people are already choosing sperm and egg donors in separate transactions. Combining them doesn’t pose any new major ethical problems.”

But others condemned the process as the unsettling culmination of recent objectionable developments, including the payment of egg and sperm donors and the growing tendency to try to select traits such as sex, intelligence, and appearance.

“This is just more evidence that we haven’t been able to restrain this move toward treating human life like a commodity,” a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Robert George of Princeton University, said. “This buying and selling of eggs and sperm and now embryos based on IQ points and Ph.D.s and other traits really moves us in the direction of eugenics.”

Ms. Ryan dismissed the complaints. “People can say, ‘Oh, this is the new Hitler.’ That’s not the case,” she said. “I don’t take orders. I say, ‘This is what I have’ and send them the background. If they don’t think it’s right for them, they don’t have to take them.”

So far, the embryos Ms. Ryan has created have been from white donors, but she said that was because most of the couples that have contacted her are white. Among the more than 150 couples on her waiting list are African-Americans, and she plans to create embryos for them, as well as in other races.

Ms. Ryan is, however, using only egg donors who are in their 20s and have at least some college education and only sperm donors who have advanced education, such as a doctorate or law degree. All must undergo a standard round of health tests required for all egg and sperm donors, as well as screening to make sure they have no criminal record or family history of mental illness.