Big Tech Meets Big Fertility
When eugenics comes to America, it will come not as buxom blondes in ads for blue jeans, but wrapped in therapy-speak: “safety,” “optimization,” and “reassurance.”
Some, doubtless, welcome this future, envisioning a world with fewer kids born with congenital illnesses, fewer disabled adults, fewer surprises. Others dread it, concerned about a gradual slide toward ableism and less forbearance toward those whose characteristics, health conditions, and appearances don’t fit the typical mold.
Barring a deliberate change in course, this future approaches nonetheless. As tech billionaires continue to pour money into fertility tech, these advances will supercharge the logic of consumer choice when it comes to parenthood. One one hand, we see a push to see babies as products that should be optimized. On the other, an attitude that sees children as gifts received, as newcomers that deserve a society that is designed around them, with their vulnerabilities and needs, rather than vice versa.
New polling we conducted at the Ethics and Public Policy Center suggests many Americans sit somewhere between the two poles, wanting neither heavy-handed regulation nor an unencumbered wild west. Americans are divided on whether we should have any moral qualms over the destruction of embryos in their earliest stages of development (51 percent say this aspect of IVF concerns them either “a little” or “a lot,” while the rest have no concerns).
But set aside the questions over how we should treat embryos in law, and the broader ethical implications clearly trouble a wider swath of the public—and, as a recent survey of fertility clinic workers finds, even the people involved in the industry itself. More than three-quarters of respondents in our EPPC poll said they shared at least some concerns about the potential ramifications of widespread genetic screening.
Pretending these questions are merely technological ones, and don’t have a moral or ethical dimension, is a fool’s errand. If we can’t have a reasonable discussion about public policies that might slow or shape the advances of eugenic screening, it’s hard to see how Big Tech won’t launch us into the kind of future that novelists and philosophers have long warned about.
As Public Discourse readers will recall, one high-profile startup, Orchid, made waves last summer by offering parents the ability to “make an informed decision” by sequencing the genomes of their embryos created through IVF. They bill their services as a way to help parents avoid giving birth to a child with autism, Down Syndrome, or other abnormalities.
Another, Herasight, offer clients the chance to select their embryo for traits like intelligence, giving potential parents an online tool to calculate the “expected IQ outcome” of their child. Fertility clinics already routinely offer the ability to select embryos based on other physical attributes discernible from genetic testing, like eye color. Further advances appear on the horizon: The Wall Street Journal reports that tech billionaires have put money into a startup that would produce gene-edited babies, with the goal of one day “accelerating evolution.”
America is already known for having a fairly light-touch regulatory environment when it comes to fertility. We are one of only a few countries that allow parents to select their future embryo on the basis of sex. The intent may feel innocuous to some, but as Emi Nietfeld explored for Slate last year, the ability to proactively select gender very quickly opens the doors to uncomfortable conversations around misogyny or misandry. Guaranteeing individuals the choice of whether their future child will be a boy or girl injects the logic of individual preference into the act of begetting a new person; it wouldn’t take much in the way of cultural or social preferences for or against boys (or girls) to distort the future makeup of society.
And our polling suggests many Americans see the potential downsides clearly; roughly half (47 percent) of respondents who voted for President Trump in 2024, and one-third of those who didn’t, said they thought sex-selection of embryos during IVF should be illegal. The share of Americans who would be interested in sex-selecting their embryo, if given the option? Less than 15 percent.
Or take the promise of genetic screening, which offers would-be parents the ability to avoid giving birth to a child with chromosomal deficiencies or other inherited defects. Assume, for the moment, that the technology works as advertised, and “responsible” parenthood in the future includes ensuring that your child is screened for Trisomy-19, congenital heart defects, or other inheritable diseases.
No one would ever seek to force a child to suffer from these conditions; hearts rightly break at the pain and suffering incurred by those little souls. But the promise of Orchid, Herasight, and other start-ups is not that children born with those conditions will be cured. Rather, they seek to ensure children with genetic abnormalities are never born in the first place. In a world in which pre-implantation screening becomes widely practiced, will there be support and research funding for parents of children born with those disabilities? Or will those parents face an undercurrent of suspicion and social approbation for having not been prudent enough to screen out their embryos carrying those genetic abnormalities?
While Americans in our poll were more open to screening embryos for signs of inheritable disease, proactive embryo selection for predicted intelligence or physical characteristics proved much more controversial. 45 percent of respondents thought that this type of screening should be banned outright; only 15 percent said they would want to avail themselves of the technology. The potential for these individual choices to dramatically reshape the meaning of parenthood and family means we should proceed with caution.
For from Aldous Huxley to Sayaka Murata, novelists have continually imagined what a society that broke the link between partnership and parenthood in the search of “optimized” reproduction might look like. In her 2015 novel Shōmetsu Sekai, recently translated into English as Vanishing World, Murata envisions a culture that has sought to eliminate risk and inconvenience in the act of bearing children, and as a result, lost emotional intimacy and the sense of belonging and personhood wrapped up in the act of procreation.
Maybe your prediction for how the world would look like when eugenic embryo screening becomes commonplace is less dystopian. But you cannot ignore the questions such a world would raise.
Big Tech has colonized so many areas of human existence that its aspirations of technologically optimizing human reproduction may well seem to be the next logical step. But the downsides of a life lived via algorithm have become increasingly apparent. It’s no longer solely anti-tech Cassandras who worry about what social media, short-form video, and the gamification of human interaction are doing to us. No social development can promise benefits with no tradeoffs, not least technology that allows parents to, quite literally, play God.
Debates over embryos and bioethics often feel frustratingly incommensurable. Conservatives, progressives, and those of neither political stripe will never agree on the moral worth of the embryo, or the asymmetric burdens that women must bear in bearing and giving birth to children that make abortion debates feel so frustrating.
But there are very real potential regulatory steps that both political sides of the aisle might find reason to haggle over. Even younger voters, who tend to be more open to some of these advances than older voters, share concerns about a world dictated by eugenics, no matter how compassionately described. Half of voters age 45 and under who voted for the president, and 40 percent of those who voted for his opponent, said they thought that it should be illegal to screen embryos for predicted intelligence or cosmetic traits.
Perhaps the greatest gift any parent can give their child is being able to tell them “I love you just the way you are.” By turning children into a consumer good like any other, our new era of eugenic embryo screening has the potential to introduce an element of contingency into that declaration, the uncomfortable undercurrent of concern that maybe, if your genetic profile had looked slightly different, your parents wouldn’t have selected you over the other embryos created at the same time as you.
The potential drawbacks of a future of humanity designed by the modern-day barons of the tech industry may just be vivid enough to reopen some of the bioethics debates once thought closed. If the future we want is one of “optimized” reproduction, then let us approach it with deliberateness, rather than have it be thrust on us without public debate. But if democracy means anything, it should mean some ability to take a deep breath before we permit Silicon Valley to hack baby-making in the same way it has remade so many other facets of our lives, with all the attendant unintended consequences.