Photo:IVF Centre in Gurgaon; Author:Cloudnine Hospitals; Lic.:CC BY-SA 4.0
Eugenics, once understood as the Nazi horrors of forced sterilization and racial purity—is staging a quiet comeback under the benign label of “preventative medicine,” particularly in IVF clinics. This “neo-eugenics” is being driven by libertarian tech bros and startups like Nucleus Genomics. They see the market of embryo screening as cutting-edge health care—but it’s really just modern eugenics disguised with progress-obsessed language.
These companies boast about detecting “rare, pathogenic markers” in embryos and offering features like naming embryos and rating them—effectively enabling parents to choose which lives deserve to live and discarding the rest. This isn’t benign prevention—it’s Orwellian selection, straight out of a eugenics dystopia. The embryo becomes a product to optimize, judged by genetic desirability, not a child to nurture.
We as Christians and conservatives must speak the truth that true medicine treats the sick; neo-eugenic screening, by contrast, eliminates the “undesirable” lives before birth. That’s not science—it’s moral monstrosity masked as progress. Society is sleepwalking into a world where human worth is determined at conception, echoing the racist and coercive eugenics programs of the early 20th century.
Let’s trace the history together. The infamous Buck v. Bell decision legitimized forced sterilization in 1927, and Nazi Germany’s mass murder of “undesirables” followed similar logic. Today’s versions may lack overt state coercion, but they rely on consent under cultural pressure, and they compound inequality by letting wealthy parents engineer their “perfect” child. This practice is simply pagan. Discarding babies for convenience sake was, after all, the practice of the pagan Romans, which the early Christians immediately countered by rescuing abandoned infants. Now the pagans are back, wielding new and terrible technologies.
It’s time for us to call upon all Christians and conservatives to recognize and resist this pagan, neo-eugenics movement. America must wholly reject embryo selection based on genetic traits. Allowing IVF clinics and tech bro investors to decide who’s fit to live, threatens the intrinsic dignity of every human life, from conception forward.
This post originally appeared at https://phyllisschlafly.com/family/ivf-eugenics-in-disguise/
Phyllis Schlafly