Another new in vitro fertilization startup has emerged, this one with explicit intelligence parameters to play with as a feature of its website.
But does it draw people to what children are, or what they are not? The company, called Herasight, recently went public with product promotion, having “already screened hundreds of embryos” for genetic preferences. It’s not entirely bad — preferences are unavoidable, even good — but its mechanism, technologically and societally, is.
There’s a relationship between gene editing and embryo freezing that is inherent to IVF. Highly exacting options such as Herasight might reduce the number of embryos used for a given round, but it maintains the abuse of life perpetrated through prodding the embryos with needles and suspending them in ice. At that, it maintains IVF as not only necessary, but as the default.
One of the many problems with this sense of a “right” to in vitro fertilization is the misplaced control. First, by reordering the priorities and workings of the married relationship. Second, by the dehumanization and commodification of “test tube” babies. Yet most of society does not recognize embryos as full human beings, anyway, and rejects the concept of marital unity that would make IVF unconscionable from the get-go. These are both symptoms and causes of broad, uncritical acceptance of it.
By necessity, it translates to a “right” to children, not just to IVF. That posture is best expressed by the practice of surrogacy, similarly waved about as a right, especially with regard to homosexual couples. Such a “right” to having a child is understood that women sell off their bodies, sever the mother-child relationship, and allow wholly unchecked parties to buy the child. There are whole industries dedicated to it.
It very often ends up that these children fall into the hands of pedophiles. Most often, these are gay couples posing as parents. A recent example came to light just this month after one of the gay men in a previously celebrated IVF-surrogacy placement, Brandon Keith Mitchell, turned out to be a convicted child sex offender. The infant currently remains with the couple because, as LiveAction has reported, “Pennsylvania law bars sex offenders from adopting children — but not from having children through surrogacy or ART [assisted reproductive technology].”
Raising a child is not going to solve Mitchell’s problems in the way that it might solve a normal, lazy guy’s problems. They are not the same problems, and better yet, not the same proposed solutions. Still, child-rearing by gay couples has been propped up as a fundamental experience.
But that is the primary issue: The burden of responsibility, which is the usual solution for young men, is placed on surrogacy- and IVF-conceived children. In these circumstances, the adults are rather the helpless and vulnerable ones, to whom society feels it owes some debt of healing. Little children have become that debt.
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When a company includes desired IQ and embryo count as a slider tool on its webpage, children are expected to meet such outcomes. In some sense, their parents’ desires for them are dependent on how well they can do so. Children end up self-help experiments, or in other words, objects of use for their parents.
Herasight and its peers perpetuate the cycle because, no matter how confined genetic screening is to the 1%, it is inextricably linked to surrogacy’s pedophile rings, all by the same, deeply disordered principles.