Designer Babies as The Conquest of Nature

How the logic of eugenics is alive and well and awful

Photo by Picsea on Unsplash

Anna Louie Sussman has written a compelling article for the New York Times on preimplantation genetic testing for I.V.F. that raises a number of questions about how we understand human life, sex, and procreation. The process, P.G.T. for short, allows parents to “screen” embryos for diseases that can be “traced to a single genetic variant” and (debatably) more complex “defects” like heart disease, shortness, low intelligence, obesity, and so on. The article focuses on Noor Siddiqui who founded the company Orchid to screen for defects in embryos so that women give birth to the most healthy and flourishing babies possible. Multiple embryos are harvested, tested for positive genetic characteristics, and the “best” is chosen and the rest are put in storage. If that sounds ethically problematic, that’s because it is. First, because the embryos are persons (see here for an explanation of that). Second because the doctors aren’t restoring the broken genetic code of an embryo. They are picking “elite” embryos (as defined by the parents) and putting the rest in storage. This, Sussman notes, is referred to as “liberal eugenics.” A eugenics not mandated by the State, but chosen by socially conscience citizens who just want the best for everyone. I’m reminded of lines from Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock”: “O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”

The long history of humanity’s conquest of Nature is not too pretty to look at. It reveals in us a discontentment with our natural bodies and our Creational Design—a denial of the telos of our lives and the order of the cosmos. But it’s also “tiny, meaningless and sad-making,” to use my favorite Salinger phrase. There is a desperation to overcome the fallenness of the world through technique, which of course is never possible.

Siddiqui uses the example of her own mother, who had a genetic disease that left her blind, to show why we need such screening. In one tweet reacting to the article, she writes, “The true moral question isn't whether we should use this technology, but whether we can justify withholding it when it could prevent needless suffering.” Of course, if this technology had been used on her mother’s embryo to “prevent” the “needless suffering” of her mother’s blindness, Siddiqui herself would never have been born, but this doesn’t seem to bother her. There is a moral power to her argument: the prevention of needless suffering. And Sussman notes that she’s not alone in thinking this way: “Proponents of procreative beneficence, such as the bioethicist Julian Savulescu, argue that the parental duty to give a child as many advantages as possible makes a strong case for technologies such as polygenic embryo testing.”

A problem with this “liberal eugenics” (other than the fact that it’s still eugenics!) is that it wrongly assumes that the absence of State mandates means that individuals won’t be pressured to use the technology. But we know from other issues that parental pressure to compete with other parents in giving their children “as many advantages as possible” is a powerful force. Parents, particularly middle and upper-class parents, feel pressure to have their children in multiple sports and extracurricular activities, give them elite experiences to use on their college entrance exams, and use the right parenting techniques to ensure their kids are well-adjusted. If Siddiqui’s logic is correct, this isn’t a “personal” issue between parents and their doctor. It’s a moral imperative that we use these techniques to choose the optimal child for birth! And parents who choose to have children naturally, particularly when it results in children with genetic diseases, will be viewed as negligent by society and shamed accordingly. That sounds a lot like coercion to me.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, he considers the power of contraceptives as a technology and argues that it is in effect the power of some people over successive generations:

There is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. (55).

Without wading into the contraceptive debate (which, in my opinion, is adjacent, but distinct from the ethics of I.V.F. and selecting embryos), I think Lewis speaks directly into Orchid’s mission. What Lewis fears that contraceptives do, Orchid literally does: selective breeding. Some lives are chosen over others. In Sussman’s article one couple uses a spreadsheet to make their choice! And in practice, this means that parents exercise their power over the life and “storage” of human persons based on their preferences. Ideally, a couple creates one embryo and it is tested and turns out to be perfect. But Nature doesn’t work that way:

According to a case study from Genomic Prediction, one couple who created five chromosomally normal embryos in their first round of I.V.F. decided not to transfer any of them after receiving their polygenic risk scores, as some showed elevated risks of breast cancer. The parents eventually created 33 embryos in their quest to have several children.

What happened to the unwanted embryos is left unsaid.

As I said, there is a desperation in efforts like those of Orchid that are understandable even if they are perverse. For instance, there is the desire to see the results of the Fall undone. Maybe by selecting the ideal babies to give birth to we can root out Adam’s Curse, too? Not wanting to see your child suffering from severe disabilities or get cancer is understandable. But disfiguring the natural, God-designed means of procreation in the name of “healing” is not reducing suffering in the world. It’s reducing people in the world. It’s also understandable to desire to have children when you struggle with infertility, and I.V.F. seems like an effective method for having children. But there are serious ethical questions about I.V.F. that Christians should wrestle with. I recommend this article co-written by Matthew Anderson and Andrew Walker. If you have gone through I.V.F. or someone you love has, you may be troubled by this article. I hear that and I understand why you would feel that way. I would encourage you to prayerfully consider it and not take it as a personal attack, it’s not. It is certainly not an attack on the human dignity of those who are born through I.V.F. But it does address some challenges. If you have questions about it, address it to those authors, not me. I didn’t write it.

Later in the article, Sussman discusses a related I.V.F. technology called “time-lapse microscopy” which allows parents to watch as their embryos develop “a clump of cells.” Sussman writes that “the ability to visualize embryos at frequent intervals using time-lapse microscopy has not just given us new insights into their development; it has also shaped our feelings about them.” It’s those “feelings” that interest me. Nature reasserts herself. Even though the images are really just cells dividing, it’s clear that you are witnessing something—no—someone alive. And some parents who watch these videos feel a sense of attachment to their child starting with just “a clump of cells.”

“I felt like it was, it was a baby,” one 29-year-old patient, finally pregnant after eight years of trying, told Dr. Perrotta and a research co-author. “It sounds really weird, but it felt like I was looking at a potential baby there, and watching it move and do all the stuff, and I just looked, it looked — I know it wasn’t just cells for me.”

Near the end of The Abolition of Man, Lewis states that “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion” (68). And here I think we find an example. Here in this petri dish, a symbol of humanity’s conquest of Nature, we find someone moving, a baby. The parental instinct to love a child, which is part of the Creational Design, overcomes humanity’s attempt to conquer Nature by reducing human life into “a clump of cells.”

I believe that Creation (Nature as God designed it) will always reassert itself in one way or another, no matter how hard humans try to numb themselves, manipulate themselves, conquer their nature, recreate themselves, or program themselves through propaganda.

But I also believe that humanity will not stop trying to pervert that Creation and conquer it until Christ returns. In an article for Vox, Sean Illing interviewed Tech pioneer Jaron Lanier on AI. And in the middle of the interview, Lanier mentioned that “many, many people” believe that an AI future without humans would be better for us:

Just the other day I was at a lunch in Palo Alto and there were some young AI scientists there who were saying that they would never have a “bio baby” because as soon as you have a “bio baby,” you get the “mind virus” of the [biological] world. And when you have the mind virus, you become committed to your human baby. But it’s much more important to be committed to the AI of the future. And so to have human babies is fundamentally unethical.

Whether you believe that it’s unethical to give birth to a sub-optimal human baby or it’s unethical to give birth to a human baby at all, both are a denial of one basic truth: God’s Creational Design will reassert itself, always, in one way or another. The only question is, how much will it cost us?