Everything is Eugenics and Human Trafficking, Except Actual Eugenics and Human Trafficking

(Which is fine, apparently)

Apologies in advance for anyone who followed me for my recent content about dating and sex. We love sex, don’t we folks? You might be looking at this article and wondering what the fuck you got yourself into. Look, you’re getting five pieces of content a week! You can handle the occasional “huh?”

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How else would I start an article, other than extrapolating from a viral Twitter post? Anyway, this week, a tweet went viral when someone slammed a mother for posting about her IVF “twins” (embryos frozen from the same batch but birthed at different times) who were born 13 years apart. I would post the full thing for context, but since it includes photos of children I’d rather not—anyway, just take my word for it that the response was bonkers.

I get that some people are opposed to IVF on religious pro-life grounds. I’m not going to argue with those people because it’s just not productive or helpful. People are entitled to their religious and ethical beliefs, and although I don’t think it should be illegal, I understand the moral opposition to willfully discarding viable embryos. I understand the “reproduction in a lab commodifies life” thing a whole lot less, but whatever. Not interested in a religious debate.

What struck me about the “twins 13 years apart” thing was that a great deal of the opposition was vaguely right-wing, but not necessarily religious. None of these people like IVF, but the fact that the “twins” (who were almost definitely fraternal) were born at very different times seemed to just distress them in a way that felt very visceral and illogical. It was creepy, it was new-age, it was Gattaca. As my four-year-old said about the animated film, Bad Guys, “It’s scary and I want it off.”

They react similarly to other forms of reproductive technology, where no harm can be proven, but it nebulously distresses them nonetheless. I theoretically understand the moral opposition to surrogacy (not that I agree) particularly on the grounds that the surrogacy industry can prey on vulnerable women, especially internationally. But in the case of a (theoretical) artificial womb that allows a woman with recurrent miscarriage to carry her own biological baby to term, they still hate it. They just find it “dystopian.” They can’t articulate why, without getting poetic and esoteric. Perhaps they take issue with the idea of predatory men using it to create a bunch of children to abuse, but still oppose it even if it were only to be used by infertile couples. It’s scary and I want it off!!

Religious concerns about discarded embryos aside, I noticed quite a few secular (or at least not explicitly religious) arguments against IVF and other reproductive technology from the vantage point of being “anti-human trafficking.”

Some people also accuse IVF of being eugenics because parents have the ability to filter embryos with chromosomal issues that are nearly guaranteed to cause miscarriage (the IQ and height filtering is reserved only for that weird woman with the Harry Potter glasses and bonnet.) I also saw someone refer to IVF (including with your own egg/sperm) as human trafficking because the embryos are at some point, physically transferred into a lab and back into a body (when I tweeted about this, people joked that schoolbuses were also human trafficking, but the people who believe this shit about IVF also believe it about public schools, unironically.)