How far are we willing to go in the name of “progress”? Picture a menu like you might find in.We should consider promoting the natural alternative of restorative reproductive medicine over a technology that poses a real danger to the future of humanity.
How far are we willing to go in the name of “progress”?
Picture a menu like you might find in a restaurant, but instead of choosing your next meal, you’re selecting your baby’s characteristics. Blue eyes or brown? Dark or light hair? Your nose or your spouse’s?
The field of genetics may not have reached that point yet, but it’s getting close.
If we continue down the path we are on, the task of deciding the world’s genetic winners and losers will eventually fall to someone. Who will get that honor?
Genetic testing is already a standard practice for couples exploring in vitro fertilization, or IVF, to grow their families. Embryos created in labs are routinely screened for various genetic abnormalities and then culled based on the results. Meanwhile, calls for loosening ethically based restrictions on germline genome editing — the genetic engineering of human beings — have already begun.
“There are no sound reasons to delay the use of genome editing due to excessive caution,” bioethics and genetics researcher Kevin Richard Smith asserted in a July 2024 article in the Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics.
“Starting genome editing sooner will allow future children to experience its benefits earlier,” Smith wrote. “As the practice becomes more widespread, we can expect rapid technological advancements, leading to future generations of people benefitting from avoidance of, or reduced susceptibility to, the myriad of disorders that presently afflict humanity.”
Of course, the concept of genetic cleansing is nothing new. The eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, popular among elites, fueled Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s push for widespread access to birth control and abortion and the Nazis’ genetic experimentation throughout their concentration camps.
Notably, just two months ago many on the Left went into a tizzy over a denim ad they bizarrely swore was a revival of Hitler’s Aryan supremacy. Yet the same people fuming over actress Sydney Sweeney’s “great jeans” would likely only have positive things to say about IVF, a process through which human beings are created in petri dishes and then selectively implanted according to their genetic code.
The truth is we are already halfway down the slippery slope to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But how far are we willing to go and when is it too late to turn back?Playing God
On Sept. 27, the scientific community celebrated what would have been the 100th birthday of Robert Edwards, the man often heralded as the father of IVF.
Edwards’ Nobel Prize-winning research led to the birth of the world’s first “test tube baby,” Louise Brown, in 1978, marking the dawn of a new era in assisted reproductive technology. But one unfortunate truth of Edwards’ legacy that his admirers often omit is his affiliation with the eugenics movement.
