(LifeSiteNews) — In an insightful article in The Spectator, Louise Perry cautions of “The quiet return of eugenics.”[1] She is referring to the advent of PGT-P – preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. By providing a genetic profile of (IVF produced) embryos, PGT-P promises to detect a range of conditions, both desirable and not. While genetic screening for chromosomal or single-gene disease processes (such as Down’s Syndrome, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, Huntingdon’s chorea and Tay-Sachs disease) has been online for some time, PGT-P will potentially identify vulnerabilities to multiple disease processes, and be able to predict a variety of “physical and psychological traits: height, hair colour, athletic ability, conscientiousness, altruism, intelligence.”[2]
As suggested by the article’s title, Perry identifies this biotechnical development as a (subtle) rebirth of eugenics. But she attempts to qualify this new eugenics as distinctively different from the eugenics movements that emerged towards the end of the 19th century. “For one thing,” she suggests, “the new eugenics will be far more scientifically sophisticated.” The old eugenics had neither the knowledge of genetics, nor the technology to change them. It was, she notes, rooted in factual errors and moral prejudices. The new eugenics is also distinct from the old in terms of its implementation.
“Unlike the first eugenics movement, which attempted to harness the power of the state to determine who should and should not be encouraged (or forbidden) to reproduce, the new version will not concern itself especially with government policy. Rather, it will mostly take the form of private individuals quietly opting for new commercial services like polygenic screening – and, in the future, more radical biotech. These individuals will typically spend large sums of money on these services because they will have reached the conclusion that socially desirable traits such as intelligence and beauty are heavily influenced by genetics.”[3]
While technology has undoubtedly changed the face of eugenics, I fundamentally disagree with Perry that the eugenics that we face today is new. In the first place, I would contend that we are not witnessing a ‘rebirth’ because eugenics never really went away. It has simply changed its guise. In place of the coercive, public policies of the 1930’s, eugenics has survived and is flourishing as a privatized or free-market eugenics going by the name of ‘reproductive autonomy.’ The development of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs), and the routine screening of embryos produced by their means, is rooted in a mentality in which only the best and the fittest survive.
In its critique of ARTs, the Church, from the beginning, drew attention to eugenic links. The 1987 Instruction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Donum vitae, noted that the explicit domination over human life that is integral to in vitro fertilization (IVF) “can lead to a system of radical eugenics.”[4] Pope Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical Evangelium vitae (1995), highlighted the eugenic mentality implicit in techniques of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While acknowledging that such technologies might be used for good, he lamented that “it not infrequently happens that these techniques are used with a eugenic intention which accepts selective abortion in order to prevent the birth of children affected by various types of anomalies. Such an attitude is shameful and utterly reprehensible, since it presumes to measure the value of a human life only within the parameters of ‘normality’ and physical well-being.”[5] The Instruction Dignitas personae (CDF, 2008) confirmed this eugenic link.[6] Perry herself witnesses to this eugenics in practice, noting that the “success” of prenatal testing for Down’s Syndrome in Scandinavian countries means that “there are simply no more people with Down’s to be seen on the streets of Iceland and Denmark.”[7]
The advent of new technologies such as PGT-P will, therefore, simply expand the existent eugenic potential of reproductive autonomy or choice. In Perry’s words, polygenic screening will allow individuals “to choose the very best children, according to their own preferences, almost entirely removing the role of luck in the normal genetic lottery.” This capacity to choose the ‘best’ child aligns with Oxford scholar Julian Savulescu’s principle of ‘procreative beneficence.’ Stated simply, the principle dictates that “Couples (or single reproducers) should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information.”[8]
In advancing the idea of procreative beneficence, Savulescu does not shy away from its eugenic underpinnings. However, he attempts a qualification. While the old (bad) eugenics used public policy to manufacture a better population or superior race, procreative beneficence, according to Savulescu, is essentially a “private enterprise”, aiming “at producing the best child, of the possible children, a couple could have.”[9] In aiming at the best life, procreative beneficence encourages prospective parents to use genetic testing to select for non-disease states that would enhance the child’s chance of a good life. Rather than abandoning the prospects of future children to chance, it is encouraged to positively aim at conceiving enhanced offspring.[10]
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However, critics of procreative beneficence are not convinced by Savulescu’s distancing himself from the old eugenics. They suggest that the principle of procreative beneficence itself moves in the direction of coercion, if not directly, at least implicitly. But even in the absence of coercion, the new eugenics shares attitudinally with the old. In this context, Michael Sandel contends that eugenics is not primarily an issue of public policy and state coercion but is deeply rooted in an attitude that views human life as a commodity. It is a more subtle form of coercion that penetrates to the very heart of our thinking about others. “The problem with eugenics and genetic engineering is that they represent the one-sided triumph of wilfulness over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of moulding over beholding.”[11]
Robert Sparrow, in his debate with Savulescu over procreative beneficence, agrees that the objection to the old eugenics was not simply due to the coercive means used, but more fundamentally concerned its hubris and arrogance in attempting to stand over human lives. As he writes: “There is something fundamentally misguided in the belief that one can determine which are the best human beings.”[12] What does it say about us, as individuals and societies, that we wish to mold our children according to what we find desirable? In posing these questions we go beyond the ethics of technologies like PGT-P. It is a question of ideology. The new eugenics, like its past incarnations, betrays a fundamental attitude towards the goodness of being itself. As Sandel writes, the distortion “lies less in the perfection it seeks than in the human disposition it expresses and promotes.”[13] It is a disposition of standing over the being of another; of failing to appreciate their givenness in their contingency and uniqueness.
Why is it important to preserve contingency? What is the threat of genetic determination? The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas insists that contingency is not simply essential to uphold life’s giftedness, but for “being oneself” and for assuming ownership of one’s life. Accordingly, he deems that the prospect of parents genetically determining their children to constitute an inequality that would diminish the child’s autonomy, self-understanding, and dignity; would compromise their moral subjectivity, and adversely affect their ability to take possession of their lives and to own their choices and actions.
Since genetic selection touches the very core of the person, it is essentially distinct from other forms of parental conditioning. It is not simply a matter of parental expectations for the child, but that in the case of genetic engineering such expectations are “one-sided” and “unchallengeable.” They are fixed, inscribed into the core of the child’s being. Unlike the overbearing attitudes of parents who attempt to control their child’s environment, the child who is the product of genetic programming is denied “an opportunity to take a revisionist stand.”[14] Unlike the psychological effects of a controlling parent, the once-for-all nature of genetic manipulation cannot “be revised by ‘critical appraisal’.”[15] The child who is the product of genetic engineering cannot undo what has been done. “The genetic program is a mute and, in a sense, unanswerable fact.”[16]
Habermas also suggests that the knowledge of being genetically determined affects that child’s ability to be “at home” in his or her body, which is essential in order to be able to differentiate between oneself and others, and to assume responsibility for one’s actions. He insists that in order for people to identify themselves with their body, the body should be perceived as something natural: “as a continuation of the organic, self-regenerative life from which the person was born.”[17] While genetically engineered individuals would experience their bodies as the only ones they had ever known, and in that sense would perceive them to be “natural,” nonetheless the knowledge that it existed as the result of the deliberate design and intention of another would be more likely to render their body the continuation of an alien intention, rather than as something organically their own.
Habermas also suggests that the knowledge of having been genetically engineered by one’s parents would be similar to the experience of a clone, “who, by being modelled on the person and the life history of a ‘twin’ chronologically out of phase, is deprived of an unobstructed future of his own.”[18] Like the cloned child, the genetically engineered individual would feel restricted in his or her choices and future possibilities, limited by parental hopes and expectations, and by an exaggerated and crippling relationship of dependence. According to Habermas, autonomy is not simply an instrumental faculty but also demands mutuality and symmetry, which is in turn dependent on “reversibility” within interpersonal relationships. But it is precisely this reversibility that is lacking in cases of genetic engineering. The relationship between parent and child is asymmetrical, forming what Habermas calls “a specific type of paternalism.”[19] It is a paternalism that has its roots in a eugenic mentality.
Within her article, Perry asks us to consider how we should respond to the prospect of genetic selection of children: “Should we welcome a new kind of commercial product that will allow some people – mostly rich ones – to have healthier, happier and cleverer children?”[20] From what I have suggested in this reflection, we should not be focused simply on the end (of healthier, happier and cleverer children – although even that is not assured), but of the means chosen and the attitude that underlies those chosen means. Genetic selection is intrinsically eugenic, and thus oppressively paternalistic in its attitude towards emerging human life. And for this reason, it must be exposed and opposed at every step.
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This article was originally published in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024. Edited and republished with permission.
[1] Louise Perry, “The quiet return of eugenics,” The Spectator June 15, 2024. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-quiet-return-of-eugenics/
[2] Perry, “The quiet return of eugenics”.
[3] Perry, “The quiet return of eugenics”.
[4] CDF, Instruction Donum vitae (1987), II.
[5] John Paul II, Encyclical Evangelium vitae (1995), n. 63.
[6] CDF, Instruction Dignitas personae (2008), n. 22.
[7] Perry, “The quiet return of eugenics”.
[8] Julian Savulescu, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children,” Bioethics 15 (2001), 415.
[9] Savulescu, “Procreative Beneficence,” 424.
[10] Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane, “The Moral Obligation to Create Children with the Best Chance of the Best Life,” Bioethics 23 (2009), 276.
[11] Michael Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering.” in Human Enhancement, edited by Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom, 71–89 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 85.
[12] Robert Sparrow, “Procreative Beneficence, Obligation, and Eugenics.” Genomics, Society and Policy 3 (2007), 55.
[13] Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection,” 80.
[14] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 51.
[15] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 62.
[16] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 62.
[17] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 58.
[18] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 62–63.
[19] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 64.
[20] Perry, “The quiet return of eugenics”.