IVF is Healthcare, not Gattaca
IVF is too much of a pain in the ass for it to become the "new normal" or to create a world of designer humans.
Typically, I enjoy engaging with comments and restacks, even ones that disagree, but I may have to sit this one out, because it’s a topic about which I have a hard time being “chill” for obvious reasons. You’ve been warned! Also, I would be remiss not to link to Ann Ledbetter’s great piece which addressed IVF from a somewhat adjacent perspective.
Recent headlines around IVF and the use of super high-tech embryo selection methods have people worried that the future will basically look like the 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca, set in a dystopian future where it’s standard for parents to engineer genetically perfect children. And sure, there are people (usually in the combined pronatalist-tech world) trying to do that. They don’t just want healthy kids—they want tall kids, high-IQ kids, and likely, blue-eyed kids with weird Roman statue avi names. Some people will do IVF specifically for the purpose of selecting their preferred gender. And most people—including myself, an IVF mother—see these stories and get the ick. Even if there are no immediate “victims,” even if you don’t believe IVF is tantamount to abortion (let alone murder), even if you don’t have religious objections to it, the vast majority of people do not love the idea of using it to generate a master race or create a new standard about how humans are made.
Where I part with the narrative is the gloomy and unreasonably confident declarations that this is the future—that someday, everyone will just be reproducing through IVF specifically for the purpose of eugenics, and that we need to just put an end to the whole song and dance before it goes too far and we start “doing Gattaca.” I also reject what this narrative is doing for the reputation of IVF and the people who use it for reasons that have nothing to do with beauty or IQ (aka, almost all of us.) For the vast majority of IVF patients, IVF is healthcare—something that enables them to have biological children because of medical conditions that otherwise prevent reproduction. And having done IVF a few times—three retrievals and three transfers, to be specific, culminating in two live births—I find it very hard to believe that a sizable amount of people would voluntarily choose this hard road for a spurious promise of a 130 IQ baby when they could simply take some backshots for three minutes instead and risk the outcome of a midwit baby.
Before I continue, I will address the fact that a lot of people reading this will probably be religious Catholics who have faith-based opposition to any form of IVF—a cohort extremely prevalent on Substack. I don’t expect to change their minds, and the same way I wouldn’t write an article enticing Muslims to try a dirty martini, I would not attempt to make Catholics turn pro-IVF. Whether or not a couple has a medical issue preventing reproduction wouldn’t matter to them anyway, and I have a feeling they view a woman with severe endometriosis with the same moral lens as a fertile woman who wants to guarantee an “optimized” baby. To them I say: feel free to read this, but I don’t expect you to agree, and convincing you was never my desired outcome.
Anyway, the rest of this piece will not address IVF from a religious lens, given that I’m not Catholic and don’t have religious opposition to it, but it felt silly not to at least address it. I’m talking about the apolitical, secular belief that IVF is “getting out of hand” because it’s barreling toward a future of high-tech eugenics, or that IVF is just another way of “commodifying children,” akin to buying a luxury vehicle or a new Hermes bag.
For the vast majority of people who do IVF today—and I would venture the vast majority of people who are doing IVF in ten or twenty years, perhaps as long as IVF will exist—it’s about remedying severe infertility where all other options have been exhausted, not about creating an army of Aryan superheroes with Chadly chins.
