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While the Sweeney jeans add is clearly an overreaction to fake eugenics downthread, it does seem like real, hard, embryo selection eugenics is here, or at least right around the corner. Scott Alexander's article released yesterday, Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection, says:
The gist of the article is that while the science is still in its infancy and there are a lot of challenges to overcome, these companies are not just selling vaporware. There's real embryo selection based on traits happening, that is going to be significant for babies being born now.
Of course this article is just another confirmation of science fiction becoming reality, but it's still shocking to see from my perspective. You'd think we would at least have a discussion as to whether this should be legal or not, but unfortunately given how crippled out legislative apparatus is, tech companies continue to just push ahead with zero fear of regulatory change. They're willing to take the risk.
Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:
While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.
The culture war lines here would've been pretty clear a while ago, but now it's muddled. Will the religious right be able to turn their coalition against this? Will the left see this as inequality on steroids? Will an uneasy alliance be made to ban this technology from the light of day? Only time will tell.
From a consistently pro-life perspective, I think the gravest moral concern here is the potential to normalize and expand IVF.
In vitro fertilization involves creating more embryos than you intend to implant and then destroying the rest. If you are, as I am, a consistent prolifer, you recognize those embryos as people. IVF as practiced is therefore already a moral nightmare. If you were to fertilize one or two embryos and then implant them with a level of safety similar to natural conception, the moral valence of IVF would change dramatically.
Embryo selection does just the opposite. It doubles down on creating and destroying embryos – people – to select the one that seems to have the best genes.
As bad as current IVF practices are, they are mostly restricted to couples who cannot have children naturally. Embryo selection changes that dynamic. It encourages any couple who can afford it (at apparently less than a year’s college tuition!) to produce ten children and then slay nine of them. That’s why Scott’s reassurance rings hollow:
I share some of your ethical concerns around IVF. But the wilful misrepresentation of how IVF works does not help pro-life arguments. IVF superstimulates the ovary in order to collect many eggs in one go. Of these, only a proportion fertilize, and only a proportion of those start developing, and only a portion of those become embryos, and only a proportion of those are genetically viable. The 'many embryos used up to make one child!' faux-statistic is because of natural attrition, because human reproduction is dicey and inefficient. Not because someone arbitrarily decided to discard them. If there are any surplus embryos at the end of this gauntlet they would normally be frozen for later use.
I think you misunderstood me. Most of the concern in my post is directed at the unimplanted embryos at the end of the process. That is also where polygenic screening becomes a focus of discussion.
I do think that the post-fertilization attrition rate is morally relevant insofar as it compares unfavorably with natural conception, and I said so, but that's not what I meant by destruction.
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