October 21 2024 - 11:50am
An American start-up is now offering embryo screening for IQ, plus ‘the other naughty traits everyone wants’ to know about, including sex, obesity, and propensity to mental illness. The company, Heliospect, is the latest in a wave of offerings that promise parents the power to engineer their own offspring: a prospect that raises a host of new philosophical, political, and interpersonal questions. Meanwhile, the origin of the story, in footage recorded as part of an undercover investigation by the Guardian and ‘antifascist’ doxxing ring Hope Not Hate, points toward a new conservatism of the Left — albeit one that will likely prove as futile in the face of technological change as its Right-wing predecessor.
Heliospect’s product is, according to the report, still in ‘stealth mode’. While it doesn’t provide IVF services, it promises ‘pre-implantation genetic screening’ of existing fertilized embryos based on data supplied by prospective parents. The news of a commercial company offering this service has triggered fears on both Left and Right, concerning human stratification via the ‘rise of the superbaby‘, as well as the objectification implicit in treating humans as plastic material for engineering: Hope Not Hate’s report warns of ‘a new age of eugenics’.
We might also ask: how would such expensive interventions affect the parents’ relationship to, or expectations of, the resulting child? There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between genetic code and genetic expression, meaning we’re not ‘programmed’ by our DNA, as some popular accounts suggest. Instead, DNA reflects a range of possibilities that may or may not be expressed, depending on complex contextual factors.
In turn, this suggests that you could select your embryo for IQ, and then find they still turned out to be more the sporty type. If you were so keen to optimize your kids for success that you spent thousands on tweaking their DNA ahead of gestation, would you still love them if they turned out a bit average? You can hardly send your 10-year-old back to Heliospect for a refund.
But importantly, too, the reporting reveals how radical a challenge such advances pose to contemporary Left-wing ideology. The Guardian quoted a progressive bioethicist who warned that such technology ‘reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes’. This echoes a broader Left-wing dogma, according to which the problem with eugenics isn’t biological — that is, Left-wingers don’t believe it actually stratifies the human species — but ideological, in that it ‘naturalizes socioeconomic inequality‘ and hence creates a political obstacle to tackling the (in reality, social) causes of inequality.
Yet if ‘naturalizing socioeconomic inequality’ is bad enough, the likely impact on Left-wing dogma is still more seismic if baby engineering works. In effect, Leftist arguments against eugenics amount to an assertion that egalitarian blank-slatism is so morally and politically sacred that we shouldn’t even go there — an assertion repeated still more forcefully in relation to research on genetics and what is euphemistically referred to as ‘human biodiversity’.
While a conservative might see nothing wrong in principle with mobilizing religious arguments against technologies perceived as crossing a moral line, it is a little ironic to see the Left in this position having spent the last half-century on the other side of the argument, in relation to Christians concerned with the downstream impacts of reproductive technologies. And the historic failure of the Christian rearguard action against reprotech in turn suggests how a Left-wing one against baby engineering will likely play out.
The most strikingly common tone across all the reports, regardless of where on the political spectrum the publication lies, is ambivalence. The subtext is that given the resources to do so, who wouldn’t want to do everything they can to ensure their child is bright, attractive, and slim? Preferring your own genetic offspring is the oldest and most intractable moral instinct of all. And given the volume of Leftists who denounce selective education while sending their own kids to private schools, it’s a safe bet that mapping this tension onto genetic embryo-optimization will swiftly reveal the same preference.
Nepotism runs deeper than ideology; against this, the moral objections of conservatives and Leftists alike will have to adapt or die. For at least at elite level, baby engineering is already here. We’ll just have to hope, for their own sake, that the resulting pre-optimized children live up to their parents’ expectations.
