Embryo screening and the new reproductive divide

Embryo screening for behavioural traits is no longer speculative. If you want to become a parent in the USA today, you can pay to use pre-implantation polygenic testing (PGT-P) of in vitro fertilization (IVF)-created embryos. PGT-P promises to optimize offspring outcomes by ranking IVF embryos using polygenic indices developed to predict human disease and behaviour. This has been criticized on the grounds that our current scientific knowledge is too limited for the implications to be meaningful: even for physiological and disease-related traits, polygenic predictions for complex traits have limited accuracy¹ and portability².

Going beyond questions of scientific validity, we argue that PGT-P commercialization presents a new source of stigma and pressure for parents and will widen reproductive inequalities, regardless of whether it can deliver the results that customers are seeking. Specifically, we see three immediate risks of commercialized PGT-P: (1) promotion of selective pronatalism, (2) individualization and commodification of reproduction, and (3) transformation of the moral burdens of parenthood.

First, the availability of PGT-P may encourage selective pronatalism: that is, policies and discourses that encourage childbearing among...