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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.
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.”
[T]he 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.
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?