Eugenics, from Victorian to Postmodern

^{Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw127193
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 but then they are pitched to the wealthy. 

Is this eugenics? Well, every parent wants what’s best for their children – but some define that not just as being healthy and beautiful but also smart, as in “high-IQ.” And the rich, according to the Federal Reserve, are getting significantly richer. They likely want their children to be “the best” and so they will give them the best education and the best genes. (Some of them may think they themselves should be cloned, like polo horses.)

Francis Galton, the English intellectual who coined the term eugenics, began to popularize the concept in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, published in 1883. He became honorary president of the Eugenics Education Society, later the Eugenics Society; in 1960 it was renamed The Galton Institute and in 2021 the Adelphi Genetic Forum. Wikipedia has an instructive list of prominent members. They included several Prime Ministers, Margaret Sanger, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Davenport and many more.

Galton was notably sexist (a woman is inevitably “capricious and coy,” he pontificated), inescapably classist and by modern standards absurdly, even obscenely, racist, though he wouldn’t use that terminology. He and many of his contemporaries would undoubtedly support 21st-century technological developments, “so far as that knowledge might affect the improvement of the race.” That points to a key distinction purveyors of embryo ranking technologies make between what was envisaged by Galton and what is being sold today. The current approach focuses on individual families; Galton took a racial view, apparently based on the generally-accepted view in his circle that the English are best.

While most people selling or purchasing embryo ranking would disavow any connection to “race betterment” or projects to define racial hierarchies, there is clearly a through line from the focus on “better babies” that characterized “positive” eugenics from the very start.

Modern high-tech reproduction techniques rely upon in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology, which was pioneered by the British scientist Robert Edwards, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2010. The centenary of his birth is on September 27th, and the British Progress Educational Trust (PET) is hosting a free online event. 

One significant part of Edwards’ life has been essentially airbrushed out of his biography: his long-standing service as a trustee of the aforementioned Eugenics Education Society. Osagie Obasogie (a professor of law and public health at UC Berkeley who has long-standing connections with CGS) uncovered the records of his involvement and published an article in Scientific American, October 4, 2013. He quotes Edwards as saying in 1999:

“Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”

Not just quality, but apparently quantity too. This is more than just one of Elon Musk’s obsessions about the future, though he is notoriously concerned about de-population. PET recently published an article loaded with official government statistics with the uncharacteristically downbeat headline:

UK fertility rates are the lowest ever recorded 

That followed an August 26 essay by Dr Thanos Papathanasiou, who is CEO & Medical Director of the Bourn Hall Clinics (where Edwards used to work), citing the same stats:

Forget ‘one in 32 children from IVF’ – we should aim for one in ten

He’s not just hustling for trade, he also noted their financial value to the nation:

UK research estimates each IVF-conceived child contributes over £100,000 in net lifetime taxes versus an effective public cost of around £13,000–£16,000 per live birth. Funding three cycles (£15,000) still yields a strong return on investment.

The idea is not new. As long ago as 2008, a group of academics published in The American Journal of Managed Care a “Lifetime Tax Calculation” of the Long-term Economic Benefits Attributed to IVF-conceived Children:

An IVF-conceived child … represents a net positive return to the government. Based on an average employed individual born in 2005, the projected net lifetime tax contribution is US $606,200. Taking into consideration IVF costs and all direct financial interactions, the net present value is US $155,870.

This argument for increasing the quantity of IVF babies, based on assessing the potential long-term profit to the government, overlaps in insidious ways with Edwards’ comment about the quality of children.

And that brings us back to those genomics firms that are selling what they claim is the ability to select the best from among several embryos generated in the lab from the sperm and eggs of the prospective parents. Ethicist Arthur Caplan and Philosopher James Tabery published at the end of July in Scientific American:

The Myth of the Designer Baby—Why ‘Genetic Optimization’ Is More Hype Than Science

A genomics firm saying they can help parents with “genetic optimization” of their embryos is tone-deaf Silicon Valley marketing trampling over legitimate science. Parents should be wary.

Publicists, however, love to find new ways of promoting their product. Two very different operations recently announced variations on “Manhattan Project.” Neither of them has anything to do with atomic weapons research but both presumably want to stress urgency and grab headlines. Cathy Tie and Eriona Hysolli, as noted here in August, launched Manhattan Genomics without much of a splash. 

The Heritage Foundation jumped in with their own five-page executive summary of a forthcoming position paper titled “We Must Save the American Family,” which the Washington Post obtained, perhaps via a deliberate leak: It calls for a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family” by inducing couples to have more babies, though not particularly with modern technology. For much more on that, see Can Trump's IVF Policies Please His Pronatalist Base?

President Trump is well known to be a firm believer in eugenics — good German stock and his uncle was a professor at MIT, as you may have heard, thus proving the President’s vast intellect. He has also claimed that he would make IVF free, and be the “fertilization president.” Perhaps the Federal Government might consider investing in modern IVF. Would Trump be swayed by the long-term possibility of profit to the government? Not likely. But, hmmm, that does seem like something Galton would have understood.