Healthier babies, fewer cruel diseases, a better start for every child: it all sounds irresistible. This week, the Times reported that gene-editing techniques are now being considered for routine use in human embryos. Each step is presented as modest and benign, yet beneath the soothing language lies a shift that takes us from caring for the sick towards treating children as projects to be optimised.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband are now backing a contentious new venture that intends to use genetic engineering on babies to eliminate inherited diseases. The start-up, Preventive, says it hopes to “correct devastating genetic conditions” and insists that successful gene editing could become one of the major medical breakthroughs of this century. The company has already raised $30 million from private investors and established its headquarters in San Francisco.

At first glance, the idea sounds uncontroversial. Who objects to sparing children from hereditary diseases or preventing suffering? Yet in the name of scientific progress we are drifting towards a worldview in which the child’s body becomes raw code to be rewritten and human limits are treated as problems to fix. We are reassured that the changes will be small and focused on disease, but the path being laid does not end with curing illness. The same technology inevitably opens the way to cleverer and better-looking, genetically enhanced babies. One moment we are treating illness; the next we are weighing up desirable traits. The “cruel disease” argument seems to be the gateway drug to the “optimal child” paradigm. The transhumanist dream imagines that we can move beyond ordinary humanity altogether.

A glimpse of this future appeared in 2018 when the Chinese scientist He Jiankui claimed he had engineered twin girls, born to a healthy mother and an HIV-positive father, to be resistant to HIV. He later disclosed that a second woman had also been pregnant with a gene-edited baby. He lost his post, received a three-year prison sentence for practising medicine illegally and, after a brief return to academia in Wuhan following his release in 2022, appears to have been dismissed again. Reports last year suggested he had relocated to Hainan, a Chinese medical tourism hub, where he opened a new lab.

Although creating a gene-edited baby is illegal in the United Kingdom, the United States and many other countries, Preventive is pressing ahead with plans for the first birth from an edited embryo. Executives have hinted that a couple affected by a genetic condition has already shown interest. The Wall Street Journal reports that Preventive is searching for a country where genetically engineering babies is permitted, with the United Arab Emirates mentioned as a possible option.

These developments raise uncomfortable questions. What happens when the engineered baby becomes a difficult teenager? Will parents feel cheated if the traits they selected fail to deliver, or feel their love weaken when they know those qualities were created in a lab? And how will the child make sense of traits chosen for them?

We have already seen how quickly children can be treated as commodities. We do not yet know what genetic enhancement disappointment will look like, but surrogacy disappointment has already shown how harsh the reality can be. Just a decade ago, an Australian couple left a surrogate-born boy with Down’s syndrome in Thailand and returned home with only his healthy twin sister, leaving the surrogate mother to raise him alone.

All of this leads to deeper philosophical concerns. An infant cannot consent to being part of an experiment, and we have no idea how lab-engineered traits might be experienced from within. The better baby may not be the happier baby, and in pushing for perfection we risk losing qualities that make us human. Why do we create poetry, music or art? What drives love between two people? Perhaps the most inherent aspect of being human is our fallibility. What happens when we attempt to engineer that out of existence?

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Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist and bestselling author. She is Founder-Director of Genspect, an international organisation that advocates for a healthy approach to sex and gender.

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