"Science Vs. Luck" was the title of a sketch by Mark Twain about a lawyer who got his clients off from a charge of gambling by recruiting professional gamblers, who convinced the jury that the game was more science than luck—by playing it with the jury and cleaning them out! Of course, there was more going on than met the eye, as professional gamblers back then had some tricks up their sleeves that the innocents on the jury wouldn't have caught. So while the verdict of science looked legitimate to the innocents, there was more going on than they suspected, and the spirit of the law against gambling was violated even though the letter seemed to be obeyed.
That sketch came to mind when I read an article by Abigail Anthony, who wrote on the National Review website about a service offered by the New York City firm Nucleus Genomics: whole-genome sequencing of in-vitro-fertilized embryos. For only $5,999, Nucleus will take the genetic data provided by the IVF company of your choice and give you information on over 900 different possible conditions and characteristics the prospective baby might have, ranging from Alzheimer's to the likelihood that the child will be left-handed.
There are other companies offering services similar to this, so I'm not calling out Nucleus in particular. What is peculiarly horrifying about this sales pitch is the implication that having a baby is no different in principle than buying a car. If you go in a car dealership and order a new car, you get to choose the model, the color, a range of optional features, and if you don't like that brand you can go to a different dealer and get even more choices.
The difference between choosing a car and choosing a baby is this: the cars you don't pick will be sold to somebody else. The babies you don't pick will die.
We are far down the road foreseen by C. S. Lewis in his prescient 1943 essay "The Abolition of Man." Lewis realized that what was conventionally called man's conquest of nature was really the exertion of power by some men over other men. And the selection of IVF embryos by means of sophisticated genomic tests such as the ones offered by Nucleus are a fine example of such power. In the midst of World War II when the fate of Western civilization seemed to hang in the balance, Lewis wrote, " . . . if any one age attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power."
Eugenics was a highly popular and respectable subject from the late 19th century up to right after World War II, when its association with the horrors of the Holocaust committed by the Nazi regime gave it a much-deserved bad name. The methods used by eugenicists back then were crude ones: sterilization of the "unfit," where the people deciding who was unfit always had more power than the unfit ones; encouraging the better classes to have children and the undesirable classes (such as negroes and other minorities) to have fewer ones; providing birth control and abortion services especially to those undesirable classes (a policy which is honored by Planned Parenthood to this day); and in the case of Hitler's Germany, the wholesale extermination of whoever was deemed by his regime to be undesirable: Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and so on.
But just as abortion hides behind a clean, hygienic medical facade to mask the fact that it is the intentional killing of a baby, the videos on Nucleus's website conceal the fact that in order to get that ideal baby with a minimum of whatever the parents consider to be undesirable traits, an untold number of fertilized eggs—all exactly the same kind of human being that you were when you were that age—have to be "sacrificed" on the altar of perfection.
If technology hands us a power that seems attractive, that enables us to avoid pain or suffering even on the part of another, does that mean we should always avail ourselves of it? The answer depends on what actions are involved in using that power.
If the Nucleus test enabled the prospective parents to avert potential harms and diseases in the embryo analyzed without killing it, there would not be any problem. But we don't know how to do that yet, and by the very nature of reproduction we may never be able to. The choice being offered is made by producing multiple embryos, and disposing of the ones that don't come up to snuff.
Now, at $6,000 a pop, it's not likely that anyone with less spare change than Elon Musk is going to keep trying until they get exactly what they want. But the clear implication of advertising such genomic testing as a choice is that, you don't have to take what Nature (or God) gives you. If you don't like it, you can put it away and try something else.
And that's really the issue: whether we acknowledge our finiteness before God and take the throw of the genetic dice that comes with having a child, the way it's been done since the beginning; or cheat by taking extra turns and drawing cards until we get what we want.
The range of human capacity is so large and varied that even the 900 traits analyzed by Nucleus do not even scratch the surface of what a given baby may become. This lesson is brought home in a story attributed to an author named J. John. In a lecture on medical ethics, the professor confronts his students with a case study. "The father of the family had syphilis and the mother tuberculosis. They already had four children. The first child is blind, the second died, the third is deaf and dumb, and the fourth has tuberculosis. Now the mother is pregnant with her fifth child. She is willing to have an abortion, so should she?"
After the medical students vote overwhelmingly in favor of the abortion, the professor says, "Congratulations, you have just murdered the famous composer Ludwig von Beethoven!"
Sources: Abigail Anthony's article "Mail-order Eugenics" appeared on the National Review website on June 5, 2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mail-order-eugenics/. My source for the Beethoven anecdote is https://bothlivesmatter.org/blog/both-lives-mattered.
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