Everyone is against eugenics; no one will cut its lifeline

The new eugenics depends on IVF

Anyone who has ever read an old-fashioned fairy tale knows the chill of existential fear that goes down the spine when the king and queen make a pact with the old hag in exchange for a child. Don’t do it! we want to yell at the pages. But they will do it…

Today the irresistible prize is not only a child begotten in the moral darkness (not the good and holy darkness of the intimate marital embrace), but one chosen from an array of siblings, the rest of whom will be sacrificed to that evil abyss.

In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is the modern analog of what the old stories tried to depict; the new eugenics are its inevitable sequel.

Genetic testing has been around for a long time. I can remember, almost 30 years ago, being offered a comprehensive “screening,” the old, clunky method of searching for defects in the DNA in order to eliminate the child.

Today, the ability to see the child as it develops in the petri dish (there are literally videos of each “specimen” to watch) means eugenics can take a great leap forward in terms of the timeline. The babies are all tested and their features or deficiencies catalogued. The parents can choose the embryo optimized for intelligence and congenital illness freedom. It isn’t new to pick and choose, but it is new to be able to hone in so precisely on exactly which features one would like to choose for.

“Nucleus Embryo is the first-ever genetic optimization software that helps parents give their children the best possible start in life — long before they’re even born.”

Feeling the chill down your spine?

Everyone can tell this is bad. (The comments on the company’s tweets demonstrate the universal disapproval.)

But everyone also knew that conceiving babies in petri dishes was bad.

I can remember as teenager hearing about it and feeling my whole body recoil, the way you do when you hear of a moral monstrosity you had no inkling of until that moment. I knew that the baby belonged inside its mother and that only an evil generation would try to put it elsewhere. And this was before I even knew anything about how the sperm was obtained from the father.

The thing is, most people got used to it. And now the logical next step is to take what is already standard practice in the OB/GYN world and deliver, but much more efficiently, a high-quality product, one free of defects, killing the ones that don’t meet the criteria.

It’s the bottom of the slippery slope. It’s where you get when you ignore the mire at the top, telling yourself you’re doing something good for those who suffer, in this case, the infertile. And then you land at the bottom. That’s where the dead babies are, the surrogate mothers, the degraded fathers, the women whose little fertility they had is damaged, the live babies used for research…

There is only one way to avoid the horror of eugenics, at least on this industrial scale:

We must insist that conceiving a baby outside its mother’s womb cannot ever be allowed, for any reason.

IVF is a relatively new procedure and industry. It’s been almost 47 years since the first IVF baby was born. Abortion, on the other hand, has been part of the human condition since the Fall; there probably has never been a time that some woman, somewhere, has tried to rid herself of the effects of conception.

It’s only been a little more than 50 years, though, since abortion was legalized. In that time, it has become an industry that undergirds a way of life: not only to escape pregnancy when contraception fails or isn’t used, but also to provide material for research for all the products we consider to be important or necessarily frivolous in our advanced consumer society.*

*for a list of products that use and/or contain aborted fetal cells, go here.

Rolling back abortion has proven to be extremely difficult. Sophisticated rhetoric coupled with its ubiquity (in some form) has made it seem indispensable. If we’re honest, we can admit how unattainable eradicating abortion is. Certainly, when our main energy is used to try to convince people not to allow aborting fully formed babies at the very end of pregnancy, we can see our failure.

I hope we have learned, too, that a large part of the failure is how long we waited to stop being taken in by the narratives that put us on the defense, rendering us impotent. Long ago, we needed to reject the silencing that comes from the defensive posture.

I believe IVF is different.

IVF isn’t a sad part of the human condition. It is entirely new, relatively speaking, and entirely opportunistic. Its demeaning aspect — especially for men — is apparent to anyone who gives a little thought to it, even though masturbation is broadly accepted (another conditioning effect with its origins in mid-century society).

Most people still understand, at some visceral level of consciousness, that babies are best made the old-fashioned way.

Everyone can sense the danger of eugenics and the threat to civilization of being able to select for characteristics that serve the elites (indeed, the whole enterprise reeks of elitism).

But there is an important reason why even those who see its evils have not yet brought themselves to declare that the whole thing must be stopped, even though stopping it — making conception outside the womb illegal — stops all its reprehensible outcomes.

That reason is this: Those who could influence others themselves have either used IVF or know someone dear to them who has, or feel beholden to those who use it or know those who use it.

No one wants to seem to reject the humanity of their niece or grandson. No one wants to admit to having done something deeply immoral, depriving their own child of its right to originate in the sanctuary of the mother’s womb.

The God-given way to conceive a child is in the marital embrace. That way has two opposite violations: Rape is the hot, violent transgression; IVF is the cold, scientific one.

Civilized people affirm the humanity of the child conceived in rape, while abhorring the process and event that brings that child to this world. We must claim and proclaim the equivalent for those conceived via IVF. We absolutely can and must deplore this way of begetting. It is wrong.

Time is short.

Very soon, many forces will bear on procreation to favor IVF. Those who marry, embrace, and bring forth a child the normal way will be called reckless and antisocial. (See “Choosing to skip sex and go straight to IVF.”) Those who donate or sell their “imperfect” offspring on the icy shelves at the clinic will be society’s benefactors.

Men of good will must call for the eradication of conception outside the womb, regardless of short-term social cost.

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