Messing with Imago Dei

Authors: John Stonestreet and Shane Morris

Should we “optimize” human beings? That was the question Anna Louise Sussman addressed recently in The New York Times, describing a new process that allows fertility services to bring only the healthiest, least disease-prone children into the world. Polygenic embryo screening uses AI to find genes with statistical correlations to disorders such as diabetes, autism, heart disease, cancer, and schizophrenia. 

The founder of one company that offers this “service” told Sussman her motivation came from watching her own mother lose her vision to a genetic condition. To help others avoid this fate, her company offers parents “a risk profile on each embryo’s propensity for conditions.” In addition to the altruism, she also hopes to change how baby making is done. “Sex is for fun,” this founder said, “and embryo screening [through IVF] is for babies. It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things.”

“Screening,” of course, will mean the many human individuals conceived through IVF will never be born. As Pascal Emmanuel Gobry wrote on X, each supposedly “optimal” embryo requires the creation and disposal of many supposedly “suboptimal” ones. Once again, the promised disability-free world is only possible by killing people with disabilities.   

Interestingly, Sussman also conceived a child through IVF. Sharing a time-lapse footage of her daughter as an embryo, she wondered aloud in her article about the embryos she discarded. “I previously joked that my daughter was ‘the embryo that went the distance,’” she wrote, “but now it no longer seemed like a joke.” 

One doctor who advocates for this technology admitted that if his parents had had access to it, he would not have been born because of his diabetes. Perhaps that’s why purveyors of polygenic screening tend to “not dwell, publicly at least, on the fact that you cannot eliminate some diseases without eliminating the people who carry them.” Nevertheless, the public, fully conditioned to artificial reproductive technologies, is poised to embrace polygenic screening and baby-optimization. According to one survey cited by Sussman, most Americans have no moral objection to using the technology to identify medical issues, and four out of 10 said they were “more likely than not” to use it if doing so could improve their child’s chances of getting into a top college.  

Once again, things begin to look like the plot of movies like Gattaca, in which most citizens are genetically engineered for perfection and the few conceived the “old-fashioned” way are treated as subhuman. As one bioethicist warns in the article, the message parents get from polygenic screening is not only that we can have the better children, but “we should have the best children that we can.” If that means not only selecting against diseases, but for enhanced traits like height, intelligence, and attractiveness, so be it. Such selection will rapidly become the norm, and failing to screen will rapidly become a moral failure by parents. 

This will happen even if the promises of perfection prove hollow. A doctor quoted by Sussman warned against the “genetic determinism” these services promote in the public imagination. Would-be parents, he said, would learn to obsess over DNA and ignore more critical factors, such as nutrition, education, and “a loving and stable family environment.”  

An Oxford professor of genomics described the promise of polygenic screening as unscientific, since so many “genetic” diseases also depend on non-genetic factors. Screening to decide which embryos live is, she said, “about as likely as a coin toss to deliver the outcome desired.” That’s because, as Gobry pointed out, we still do not fully understand the relationship between our genes and who we are. The most “interesting” biological traits are not on/off switches, but complex tradeoffs. In fact, selecting against an “undesirable” trait can even increase the likelihood of another. 

Human beings are mysterious symphonies of genes, experiences, choices, and habits that work together to produce an irreplaceable, unrepeatable individual. To imagine that we can control this process, even in a lab with AI screening, denies what we know about ourselves. As David Bentley Hart once warned, optimization is supposed to select the best traits in humanity but actually selects the worst, an attempt to “reach the divine by ceasing to be human, by surpassing the human, by destroying the human.” 

Perhaps why Sussman’s New York Times piece is so uneasy about the future of human reproduction is the present. It’s already abundantly clear that we do not know what it means to be human, which is why we just can’t say “no” to promises as unscientific as they are immoral.