‘Dystopian society’: Academics develop tool to help IVF parents decide which embryos to destroy

Scholars are behind a tool that claims it can predict a human-embryonic child’s chances of developing diseases including gout and glaucoma years into the future. However, it has come under scrutiny from a bioethicist who said genetic testing in order to pick which embryo to destroy will create a “dystopian society.”

Former Duke University lecturer Jonathan Anomaly helped start the company called Herasight, which developed the tool. He criticized accusations that the company promotes eugenics, despite previously using the term favorably in another sense. He argues that couples using in-vitro fertilization are already seeking out the information.

IVF is a process in which scientists combine sperm and egg in a laboratory before implanting the embryo in a woman’s body. Typically, scientists will harvest around 15 to 19 eggs from a woman. About six eggs will reach the blastocyst stage. From these, parents will intentionally kill at least three due to a perceived medical defect based on testing, according to Reproductive Medicine Associates, an IVF provider in nine states.

Anomaly said his company is about “giving people information,” not coercing people.

“There’s a big difference between murdering people in gas chambers, and, you know, giving people information about their embryos,” Anomaly said in a phone interview with The College Fix.

“Maybe you don’t like that,” he said, “but stop with the crazy allegations.”

Anomaly wrote a paper in 2018 titled “Defending Eugenics” as part of a debate. Anomaly says he used the term as part of an academic discussion to mean informed choice.

However, if eugenics means forced sterilization of “dumb people having kids,” then the term does not describe modern genetic testing, Anomaly told The Fix.

“Eugenics can be thought of as any attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that enable them to thrive,” the paper’s introduction reads. “Nearly everyone agrees that parents should provide an environment that promotes the welfare of their children. Advocates of eugenics add that we should also manipulate biology to promote well-being, provided we can do so without imposing undue risk on our children or on other people with whom they will share the planet.”

Anomaly told The Fix in an email: “People who are doing IVF can either choose an embryo at random to try to implant, or they can use information of the kind we provide to increase the chance that their future child will have a low risk of disease and generally good prospects.” 

“If you object to IVF itself, then the whole enterprise is wrong,” he said via email.

“But if you are doing IVF — perhaps because of an injury that left you infertile — I tend to think most people would want information about their embryos so they don’t deliberately implant one with a devastating disease,” he said. “That’s the real value of what we’re doing.” 

In addition to Herasight, bioethicists have previously criticized Orchid Health, a company that uses similar methods. Orchid’s tool enables couples to select which embryo to implant based on its genetic makeup.

However, during the phone interview, Anomaly distanced Herasight from Orchid and the worldview that suggests all human reproduction should occur through IVF. Anomaly referenced Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui’s line that “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.”

“That’s not our view. Our view is, look, if you’re doing IVF, and you’re probably getting some testing anyway, we can give you more information,” he said during the phone interview. “We absolutely do not want to promote it as something that everyone should do, or mandate that states make you do it, or anything like that.”

Other academics involved in the project include Professor Alex Young from the University of California, Los Angeles. He did not respond to requests for comment.

A medical doctor and ethicist with the Ethics and Public Policy Center criticized the screening of embryos.

“I do not consider this tool ethical,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, the director of the Bioethics, Technology, & Human Flourishing Program, told The College Fix in an email. Moreover, he explained that the “morality of the model does not depend on how accurate it is.”

Kheriaty provides the reasons for his analysis in his recently authored brief for the Heritage Foundation and EPCC. In the brief, he outlines the dangers of genetic testing before the use of IVF, including “discriminatory eugenics practices.”

Kheriaty writes that when researchers use tools like Herasight’s to determine the likelihood of genetic disease in a particular embryo, the human-embryonic child in question won’t be healed of its disease but destroyed. The entire field of testing genes before implantation leads to a “dystopian society” that manufactures its children, he argues.

While these tools are “sometimes described as a ‘treatment’ for genetic diseases, it is important to note that the method does not actually treat an individual affected by a disease.”

“It merely identifies that individual and discards him or her, denying that human being in its earliest stage of development the opportunity for continued existence,” he said.

According to Kheriaty, using these tools to target embryos that are likely to have a particular disease is just the beginning.

These methods of genetic testing “could be used not only to eliminate those with diseases or disabilities but to select for ‘desirable’ traits—to produce bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, or more physically attractive children—or simply children with a particular hair or eye color.”

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