Martín Varsavsky, Argentine-Spanish entrepreneur known for founding technology companies such as Jazztel, Ya.com and the assisted reproduction firm Prelude Fertility, celebrates his sixth unicorn. The Swiss pharmaceutical company Ferring has signed an agreement to acquire Gameto, the fertility company he co-founded in 2020, for an amount that could reach 1,382.5 million dollars. Sixth unicorn, if we count Ya.com, sold to T-Online in 2000 for 550 million euros, and if we consider as collected money that still depends on future targets.
The agreement is subject to closing conditions and development milestones, regulatory approval and commercialization. The acquisition has not yet been completed. Fertilo, Gameto’s main product, remains experimental in the United States and has not received approval from its health authorities.
Fertilo promises to reduce the hormonal treatment prior to egg retrieval from about two weeks to two or three days. It achieves this through a technology that uses ovarian-type cells derived from reprogrammed stem cells to promote the maturation of immature eggs in the laboratory.
These cells, by themselves, do not require the destruction of human embryos. The moral problem arises in what comes next: the mature eggs are fertilized using the usual assisted reproduction techniques.
The innovation lies in how the egg is obtained. In vitro fertilization remains the same.
The embryos the industry calls “surplus”
It is worth pausing to consider what an in vitro fertilization cycle means.
In the United Kingdom, according to an official response from the Department of Health to Parliament, between August 1991 and December 2019, 3,106,319 human embryos were discarded. During that period, another 2,056,449 were transferred to the uterus.
For its part, the British fertility regulatory body, the HFEA, counted around 390,000 children born through fertility treatments since 1991.
These are magnitudes that do not measure exactly the same thing, but their comparison allows us to understand the scale of the problem: millions of discarded embryos versus hundreds of thousands of births. More than seven embryos eliminated for every child born in that historical balance.
In Spain, the accumulation of cryopreserved embryos constitutes another of the major problems of assisted reproduction. More than 668,000 remain stored in liquid nitrogen, according to figures collected in the debate over their fate. Some have been waiting for years for a decision that their parents have not made or that the clinics have been unable to obtain.
The industry has a reassuring word for them: surplus.
John Paul II had already described this mechanism in 1995. In number 14 of the encyclical Evangelium vitae, he warned that artificial reproduction techniques, although presented as serving life, can become instruments against it.
The Pope denounced the production of embryos in numbers greater than necessary for implantation and the destruction or use of the remainder in research as available biological material.
The industry can improve its procedures, reduce injections and increase the chances of pregnancy. What does not disappear is the question about the human beings conceived who do not come to be born.
The pronatalism of the test tube promises more children. But its usual operation allows the production, selection, freezing and discarding of others.
The “second sexual revolution” that Varsavsky promised
The Gameto operation does not appear out of nowhere. It is part of a business and cultural project that Varsavsky has been defending for more than a decade.
At the end of 2015, during the presentation of Prelude at Campus Madrid, the entrepreneur spoke of a “second sexual revolution.” According to the magazine Emprendedores, his proposal consisted of completing the separation between sexuality and procreation begun with the expansion of the contraceptive pill.
If the first sexual revolution had allowed sexual relations without having children, the second promised having children without the need for sexual relations.
Reproduction was turned into a process organized in stages: freezing of young gametes, subsequent fertilization, analysis of embryos and selection of those considered suitable for implantation.
The proposal was presented as an opportunity for different forms of family, including same-sex couples.
But there was another consequence: embryos could be subjected to genetic testing and those showing certain alterations could be excluded from the reproductive process.
The business logic thus incorporated an operation that Catholic doctrine has been denouncing for decades: deciding which human lives deserve to continue developing and which do not.
Genetic selection of embryos has a name in the magisterium: eugenics
In 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published the instruction Dignitas personae.
Its number 22 expressly addresses preimplantation genetic diagnosis, used to analyze embryos obtained through artificial fertilization before transferring them to the uterus.
The document notes that these tests are usually accompanied by the elimination of embryos considered carriers of genetic or chromosomal defects, or that do not meet the desired characteristics.
The instruction classifies this destructive selection as an “early abortive practice” and denounces the eugenic mentality that seeks to measure the value of a human life by criteria of normality or physical well-being.
It is not an objection against medical knowledge. It is an objection against the power attributed to those who decide that a human life can be discarded because it does not meet certain expectations.
Genetic selection also does not offer the absolute certainty that its commercial presentation may suggest.
Since 2024, U.S. in vitro fertilization patients have promoted lawsuits against companies related to aneuploidy genetic testing. Among the issues discussed is the possibility that certain results classify as anomalous embryos that could have led to viable pregnancies.
The accusations must be distinguished from judicial conclusions and scientific evidence on each test. But the ethical problem precedes the margin of error.
Even a perfect test would still leave intact the fundamental question: by what right is a human being eliminated because of his or her genetic characteristics?
When diagnostic uncertainty also exists, the risk is aggravated.
From the selected embryo to the edited embryo
Selection is only the first step in a technological race that already contemplates genetically modifying human embryos.
In 2023, Varsavsky participated in a conversation on natality and new reproductive technologies in which issues such as embryo selection, the possibilities of CRISPR and the genetic modification of human traits appeared.
The aspiration to control biological inheritance has a history prior to current laboratories.
Francis Galton, one of the main promoters of modern eugenics, defended at the beginning of the 20th century the possibility of deliberately guiding human reproduction to obtain the results that nature produces without planning.
Today the tools are different. The language too. It is no longer necessarily about improving the race, but about preventing diseases, optimizing reproductive outcomes or expanding the possibilities of parental choice.
But when the technique moves from treating diseases to selecting which persons should be born, the underlying question remains the same.
Some of the investors related to Gameto have also shown interest in the genetic editing of embryos.
Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase and one of the early funders of Gameto, publicly expressed in 2025 his willingness to promote a company dedicated to this field.
Subsequently, The Wall Street Journal reported on his links, along with other technology investors, to Preventive, a company focused on research on genetic editing of human embryos.
The company has stated that its activity is limited to preclinical research and has denied that it is preparing the implantation of edited embryos. This distinction is important: researching embryonic editing is not equivalent to having initiated pregnancies with modified embryos.
But the direction of the investments shows how far a part of this industry intends to go.
The laboratory, human embryos and the dream of the “best baby”
Research on embryonic genetic editing continues to advance.
At Columbia University, researcher Dieter Egli’s team has worked on techniques aimed at increasing the precision of genetic modifications in human embryos.
In June 2026, new results obtained with zygotes and two-cell embryos donated for research were disseminated. The development of these techniques raises the possibility of extending experiments to later phases of embryonic development.
Also appearing in this sector are companies dedicated to genetic selection, such as Nucleus Genomics, whose advertising campaign in the New York subway used the slogan “Have your best baby.”
The advertising of children selected through genetic testing turns into a commercial argument an unsettling aspiration: that parents can choose certain biological characteristics of their children.
The Church does not need to wait for the birth of the first genetically designed child to formulate its moral judgment.
Dignitas personae warns against interventions in the human germline because of their risks to offspring and rejects genetic engineering aimed at improving human characteristics according to particular preferences.
Evangelium vitae, for its part, condemns the use of human embryos as objects of experimentation.
From the Catholic perspective, the fact that an embryo has been conceived in a laboratory does not reduce its dignity nor authorize its destruction in the name of scientific progress.
The dream of the egg manufactured from skin cells
The technological race does not end with genetic editing.
One of the most ambitious objectives of reproductive research is to obtain human gametes from ordinary cells of the organism, such as those of the skin.
In September 2025, a team from Oregon Health & Science University presented experimental results on obtaining eggs through cellular reprogramming procedures.
The researchers fertilized 82 oocyte structures obtained through this technique. Most of the resulting embryos presented chromosomal anomalies or stopped their development in the first cell divisions. None were cultured beyond the blastocyst stage.
It was not a clinical technique capable of producing births, but experimental research with important biological limitations.
However, among the future possibilities mentioned by its researchers is that same-sex persons could come to have offspring with a genetic contribution from both members of the couple.
The project thus raises a horizon in which the production of gametes would no longer necessarily depend on obtaining eggs through the usual procedures.
And the greater the capacity to produce gametes, the greater may also become the capacity to create embryos destined for testing, selection or experimentation.
The problem is not only how far the technique can advance. It is what limits it is willing to recognize.
Eugenics did not begin with totalitarian regimes
In 2019, geneticist George Church responded to criticisms directed against his proposals for genetic selection in personal relationships by pointing out that eugenics implies coercion.
It is a convenient definition for the industry: if the decision is voluntary, selection ceases to be eugenic.
But the history of eugenics is more complex.
Harvard’s own magazine published in 2016 a review of the role played by professors and former students of the university in the development of the American eugenics movement.
During the first decades of the 20th century, eugenics was defended by scientists, academics and social reformers who presented it as an instrument of progress.
Harvard’s former president Charles Eliot went so far as to speak against certain marriages between ethnic and religious groups, including those of Irish Catholics with Protestants.
Those ideas were not born solely from state imposition. They first circulated through universities, scientific societies and intellectual circles.
Then came the laws of forced sterilization.
This does not mean that all current genetic research is equivalent to the eugenic policies of the last century. It means that the absence of coercion is not enough, by itself, to resolve the moral question of selecting human beings by their biological characteristics.
The freedom of parental choice does not turn the child into a product.
Varsavsky denounces the birth crisis while investing in separating procreation from marriage
The contradiction becomes even more striking when Varsavsky speaks of the Western demographic crisis.
In June 2026, during a conversation on the podcast The Real Talks alongside Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, the entrepreneur linked the decline in birth rates to the loss of national pride and the weakening of the social prestige of the family.
He also pointed as a contrast to societies in which religion and the family institution retain an important influence.
It is a diagnosis that a good part of Catholic thought can share: natality does not depend solely on economic aid, but also on a culture that values marriage, family and the transmission of life.
But the remedy that Varsavsky promotes in business belongs to another logic.
Catholic doctrine does not consider that the demographic problem can be solved by definitively separating procreation from the conjugal act and transferring to the laboratory the decision about the origin and destiny of children.
In 1987, the instruction Donum vitae rejected that scientists and physicians could attribute to themselves the faculty of deciding on the origin and destiny of human beings.
And in June 2026, Leo XIV, during a meeting with the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, warned against a medicine that subjects human dignity to technical and selection criteria.
Varsavsky’s demographic diagnosis may partially coincide with that of those who defend the traditional family. His reproductive proposal does not.
One thing is to recover a culture favorable to children. Another is to turn the generation of those children into a technological service subject to market decisions.
Begotten, not made
The Creed that the Church has confessed since Nicaea proclaims that the Son is genitum, non factum: begotten, not made.
The formula refers to the eternal generation of the Son and was not conceived as a teaching on assisted reproduction. But it expresses a distinction that allows us to illuminate the anthropological problem: the difference between begetting a life and manufacturing an object.
The Christian tradition has defended that children are persons who are received, not products that are ordered according to certain specifications.
Children born thanks to Fertilo will have exactly the same dignity as any other human being. Their value does not depend on the procedure through which they have been conceived.
Those embryos that remain frozen in liquid nitrogen also have it. And so did those that were discarded.
The sale of Gameto may make Varsavsky an even richer entrepreneur. It may accelerate reproductive research and expand the in vitro fertilization market. It may even reduce some of the physical burdens that women bear during these treatments.
But none of these advantages answers the essential question: what happens to the human beings conceived who are not chosen to be born.
Begotten, not made. What is made is controlled, improved and, if it turns out defective, thrown away.
No test tube will save the West.
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