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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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The cool form of transhumanism would have that baby being born in a medical pod.

I think this vision of the future suffers from the fact that we humans are very squeamish when it comes to experimenting on humans, especially children. The idea of "decanting" children is both itself rather dystopian (literally Brave New World) in how it rends the family, but the development of the technology itself seems likely to leave a trail of miserable, short lives for children born with severe birth defects when the technology is less than perfect. Like self-driving cars, I think the technology would need to be much safer than natural human reproduction to convince people to switch, but unlike cars, there isn't really a viable simulacrum or small-scale ethical model that could be tested. I suppose you could decant monkeys or something, but how would you know if they end up the equivalent of 15 IQ points lower than naturally-born specimens? I can't see how you'd convince your IRB, nay, the public at large, that you're not going to be remembered as the second coming of Josef Mengele for bringing a bunch of broken humans into the world.

There have been a number of papers showing heightened rates of certain conditions with IVF ranging from certain childhood cancers to long-term general health (admittedly, no better than the rest of medical scientific research, aka trash), and it's a topic that's very hard to broach publicly without seeming to Hate Babies.