The New Eugenics: Biohacking, Fertility Startups, and the Future of Choice

When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like something safely locked in the past, an embarrassment we’ve collectively outgrown.

But I’ve come to wonder whether eugenics is really gone, or whether it has simply learned to rebrand itself. Instead of state-mandated sterilizations, we now have fertility startups promising “freedom” through egg freezing and embryo selection. Instead of crude racial hierarchies drawn by hand, we have sleek apps offering to optimize the “best traits” for future children. Instead of white-coated doctors backed by governments, we have DIY biohackers in Silicon Valley garages wielding CRISPR kits like toys, a reality underscored by widely available home gene-editing kits like those once sold by The Odin – a biotech company that markets CRISPR tools to hobbyists for as little as $150.

The vocabulary has shifted from “fitness” to “choice,” from “purity” to “optimization,” but the underlying logic feels hauntingly familiar: some lives...