Majority of Americans across political divide wary of eugenics

Four in five Americans are leery of embryo genetic screening practices that select fertilized eggs based on health, intelligence and physical traits, according to a new study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

“We all want people to be able to have babies, but there’s a right way and a problematic way to do it,” EPPC fellow Patrick T. Brown told The Lion in an interview, saying everyday Americans are hesitant toward genetic screening and selection of embryos.

“I think this definitely leads in that latter direction, where we’re basically asking people to choose the kind of children they want to create and be parents to. That’s a really troubling world.”

World-leading Silicon Valley technological advancements have enabled genetic screening as an additional step for in vitro fertilization, which artificially imitates the process of fertilization and conception in a petri dish.

“Backed by billions of dollars of funding from Big Tech, multiple startups in Silicon Valley purport to give parents the ability to screen the embryos they have created to ascertain their propensity for intelligence, appearance, health conditions, personality, and more,” the study explains. “While the technology is still unproven, its backers promise an era of ‘responsible’ parenthood, when parents will create and select embryos according to their preferences.”

Ultimately, Brown said fertility clinics want to implement these advanced technologies as simply another step of assisted reproduction, or the IVF process.

One organization, Herasight, offers an “embryo screening tool,” which allows parents to enter their genetic heritage and measure the risk for certain cancers or diseases. Statistically, the risk lowers the more embryos a couple creates.

“It’s almost like Tinder,” Brown said. “You’re projecting what you want your embryo to be created like.”

Herasight calls such screening “parental autonomy,” claiming that even intelligence – as a correlate to greater income and success – could be considered a “health trait” and could ensure “psychological and physical well-being.”

California IVF Fertility Center argues genetic screening allows doctors and parents to ensure an embryo is “genetically normal” before transferring that life to a woman’s womb.

“All these tools turn parenthood from receiving a gift of a child and loving them unconditionally to turning it into a product that you’re choosing on the open market – that you’re trying to procure a child that matches your specifications, for IQ, for what they look like, for how good they are at sports, for any other number of things,” Brown said.

EPPC’s report surveyed 1,100 American voters and was analyzed based on gender, age, race, education, and 2024 presidential vote choice.

On average, women were more concerned with overall genetic screening than men, demonstrating roughly a 10 percentage-point gap.

“I think men are drawn to those fields, and they might be more inclined to these technological tools that are coming out,” Brown said. “I think women because, ultimately, they’re the ones who are going to be having the babies, might have a little more sensitivity around things that turn a personal, biological, very intimate processes into essentially trying to hack reproduction – becoming this hyper scientific optimization of genetic engineering.”

The study also divided respondents by political affiliation according to their votes in the 2024 Presidential election.

While those who voted for Kamala Harris were more open to embryo genetic screening, roughly 40% said screening for intelligence or physical traits should be illegal, and roughly 50% of Trump voters said the same. The only category that gained majority support was screening for genetic diseases, disorders or disabilities: only 17% of Harris-voters and 37% of Trump-voters opposed such testing.

“It’s important to remember: this is not that we’re healing these diseases,” Brown said. “We’re saying ‘no, those people are never going to be born. We’re going to make sure that our population is weeded out of anybody who doesn’t fit a perfectly independent, able-bodied, highly intelligent mold.’”  

Brown argues such thinking is problematic because it arrives at the conclusion that accommodations, assistance or healing for certain disabilities or diseases are no longer necessary because those embryos should simply be discarded.

“If you don’t have a sense that human life has sort of inherent value, and you’re not concerned about a future of eugenics, and you actually welcome it, because you think it’s breeding out the unfit … why wouldn’t you champion some of these things as allowing the creation of a future superhumanity?” Brown theorized.

Brown calls the fertility industry the “Wild West” because no bioethics legislation currently regulates these practices or the potential of future advancement. He says Americans’ hesitancy regarding the morality of genetic screening should awaken Congress to implement necessary guardrails.

“The problem is, if you don’t do it with sufficient guardrails, you open the door to these real bioethics concerns that we’re talking about,” he said. “So let’s start that conversation. Let’s figure out if there’s something that can be done either on a bipartisan basis, or pro-life members of Congress who want to try to build an apparatus to constrain some of this.”

The report suggests amending the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to either ban or limit tests that screen for physical characteristics, as well as expand monitoring through the Centers for Disease Control that requires reporting of the number of embryos discarded. Additionally, federal regulations should require safeguards against “non-health related screening” for all hospitals, clinics or research centers nationwide, the report says.

“The goal should be to whatever degree possible, constraining the use of these screening tools,” Brown said. “Because once you allow them and they become part of the mass culture around fertility treatments, this could be a huge profit motive for people to want to ensure that they’re still available, even though they do pave the pathway to eugenics.”