A new age of genetic screening is coming — and we don’t have any rules for it
By Dalton Conley,
The Washington Post
| 06. 14. 2021
New ‘polygenic’ screening techniques open a Pandora’s Box of ethical issues.
After the coronavirus baby bust is over and fertility clinics are booming again, increasing numbers of new parents will bring home a generation of infants prescreened to perform better at school or basketball, resist heart disease or be less likely to have schizophrenia.
It may not be common yet, but the ability to screen embryos for any number of traits is here now, and improving every day. And this brave new world of genetic prediction I’m describing is not just about selecting babies during in vitro fertilization. It could also involve life insurance companies swabbing your cheek before issuing you a policy, preschools and colleges scoring your DNA as part of their admissions process and dating sites asking for your genetic profile before offering you a match.
But with this new technology comes countless ethical questions. Is embryo selection a good thing or a bad thing — or both? How do we balance potential inequities created against potential lives saved or improved? Do we want to keep genetics from becoming destiny, and what does that even mean? We desperately need...
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In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...