«Have Your Best Baby»: The new advertisement in the New York subway that offers children à la carte
by INFOVATICANA |
Desde November 17th, the biotechnology company Nucleus Genomics has plastered New York with the slogan: Have Your Best Baby (“Have your best baby”). Under this eye-catching slogan, it promises “the new way to bring your baby home”, presenting the future child as an on-demand improvable product. The advertising campaign presents this service as something “clinical, advanced, and data-based”, but with an almost playful user experience. For a generation accustomed to personalizing everything—from shopping algorithms to diet plans—the idea of “designing” a baby is as appealing as it is disturbing.
-1% risk of Alzheimer’s, -9% risk of type 2 diabetes, +4% chance of gaining inches in height… «longevity begins at birth». The startup offers a kind of interactive embryo questionnaire, allowing future parents to select preferences for their child: eye color, height, approximate intelligence quotient, and even risk level for diseases like cancer or diabetes. With more than 2,000 possible combinations, the system analyzes embryos obtained through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and predicts which one would come closest to the desired “ideal profile”. In other words, it’s like ordering a child à la carte.
Additionally, Nucleus has developed its own AI: Origin. It is an artificial intelligence developed and trained with 1.5 million genomes and more than 7 million genetic markers that marks a new chapter in the field of eugenics. Its promise: predict the longevity and diseases of a human being even before birth, based on the analysis of embryonic DNA. Although it is presented as an advance in the service of generational health, the truth is that it transfers human selection to a phase prior to existence, normalizing the idea of discarding lives for not meeting statistical expectations.
This genetic optimization proposal “treats children as marketable commodities” normalizing the idea that some babies could be “better” than others for having been genetically selected. What is presented as concern for health reveals a search for superiority: choosing not only a healthy child, but the most intelligent, the tallest, the most perfect. In short, we are facing a new form of soft eugenics, disguised as high-tech and marketing, but eugenics nonetheless.
Dignitas Personae: the voice of the magisterium
The Catholic Church has been firmly denouncing this trend. Already in 2008, the Vatican instruction Dignitas Personae warned about Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)—precisely the technique proposed by Nucleus. This diagnosis, necessary to “predict” the embryo’s characteristics before implanting it, is always linked to artificial reproduction, a practice “intrinsically illicit” in itself according to morals.
And what is the purpose of PGD? Basically, to select only “defect-free” embryos or those with desired traits, discarding the others. Dignitas Personae qualifies this procedure as a form of qualitative selection with destruction of embryos, which is equivalent to an early abortion.
This sad reality, often silenced, is entirely deplorable, insofar as «the various techniques of artificial reproduction, which might seem to be at the service of life and which are frequently practiced with this intention, in reality open the door to new attacks against life». (Dignitas Personae, 15)
What does all this mean for our society?
Undoubtedly, a loss of the sense of fatherhood and motherhood as human pillars. The family ceases to be the sanctuary where life is welcomed for its own sake, to become the last link in a biotechnological assembly line. The culture that could emerge from such practices is one in which children are not conceived, but produced; not accepted, but chosen. It is the very negation of fatherhood understood as loving service to life, replacing it with a pseudo-fatherhood of the laboratory governed by genetic probability calculations.
From a Christian perspective—and, we would say, simply human—this implies a dramatic impoverishment: parents and children would no longer relate primarily through unconditional love, but through predetermined expectations and prior conditions. The “perfect” child thus obtained runs the risk of not being loved for himself, but for the qualities he satisfies, which introduces a serious distortion in the experience of family love. And, paradoxically, this obsession with controlling and perfecting could generate more frustration and injustice: what will happen if the “optimal baby” does not meet the projected expectations as an adult? Who will bear the guilt or disappointment? Will someone who, despite genetic selection, develops a disease or does not achieve the expected success be considered a “defective product”? We enter here into deeply anti-ethical territory, where the intrinsic dignity of the person gives way to a utilitarian and perfectionist mentality. In the name of quality of life, we would end up emptying life itself of value, especially that of the weakest.
An non-negotiable defense of human dignity
Faced with this panorama, the response from Christian ethics—and, specifically, from the Magisterium of the Church—is firm and clear: not everything that is technically possible is morally licit. Scientific progress, however valuable, must never trample the intangible dignity of the human person. The shiny advertising of “having your best baby” cannot deceive us: human life admits no surnames or gradations, because each life is an absolute good in itself, not a means to achieve something else.
“A dictatorship of relativism is being built that recognizes nothing as definitive and leaves as the ultimate measure only one’s own ego and its desires” (Benedict XVI).
We thus live in an era of relativism where we run the risk that even fundamental values become negotiable for selfish ends; but the dignity of innocent life is not negotiable. Instrumentalizing human life—whether that of the embryo in a test tube or the sick person in a hospital bed—means violating the basic commandment of love for neighbor and, ultimately, rebelling against God Himself, giver of life.
Family planning, from a Christian ethical perspective, will never mean planning what type of child deserves to live, but planning generously for the well-being of each child that God sends, respecting the natural and moral order. In this sense, initiatives like that of Nucleus Genomics must be challenged with truth and love: truth to denounce what they have of objectification of life, and love to remind that the path to family happiness does not pass through genetic laboratories, but through hearts open to love without conditions.
