Resist the Conception Machine

The almost complete lack of reflection on the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies for producing children is a telling sign of the unseriousness of our age. The transformation of our typical thoughtlessness into an aggressive boosterism on behalf of these technologies is a more foreboding sign for the human future. Modern technology realizes a superhuman aspiration to project human power beyond a human scale. The ancients recognized the tragic irony inherent in such ambitions: In seeking to become more than human, we risk becoming less than human. It is essential to modern technology, as the superhuman magnification of human power, that our power should exceed our knowledge or our wisdom. We can do things—to the world, to ourselves, and to our posterity—that we do not know how to think about and cannot ultimately control.

Our power and our stupidity are proportionally, not inversely, related. This unhappy paradox is built into our prevailing form of reason—analytical, pragmatic, and thus technological in essence—and is a structural element in the exercise of its power. The combination of new possibilities and grave ignorance is bad news in a technocracy, a regime in which the right to rule is granted to those in possession of expertise. The problem cannot be remedied by more science and technology, nor will we be delivered by the social sciences or journalism, disciplines that are themselves implicated in this mode of pragmatic, results-oriented reason. This, too, is unfortunate, since these disciplines compose the language in which technocracy talks to itself. There are simply questions, human questions, that we are rapidly forgetting how to ask, questions that sociological analysis cannot ask, much less answer. And the more we double down on our technical expertise, the more humanly incompetent we become. We thus move ineluctably, like a frog brought slowly to a boil, toward a posthuman future, the implications of which will not be fully visible until after it has become an accomplished fact and our capacity to recognize its debasements has been all but destroyed.

It isn’t just that our pragmatic empiricism cannot cognize a profound question or distinguish between the true and the factual, functional, or feasible. The user of technology ceases to be the author of his deed almost as soon as it leaves his hands. The new processes, products, and procedures quickly become veritable necessities; the technological “can” becomes an existential “must.” This dynamic is one reason, no doubt, for the sense of powerlessness that accompanies our unprecedented power.

Technological interventions elude both the foresight and the control of those who initiate them. What Harry Truman called “organized science” in his encomium to the atom bomb is more aptly called “self-organizing science,” an artificial ecosystem of complex, semi-directed interactions rather than a top-down affair. The true import of a particular technology is usually recognized only in retrospect, once its range of uses has become evident and often after it has effected a vast social transformation. When Jack Dorsey and his friends set out to create a new platform for group messaging back in 2006, they doubtless did not expect and certainly did not intend to create a means for controlling the public square and manipulating entire populations. They discovered only after the fact what this immense new power was for. But once a new technology has established itself as a normal part of our artificial regime of necessity, the difficulty of comprehending the meaning of our deeds is typically compounded by our unwillingness to think seriously about them. The more necessary the technology seems—the more it strikes “close to home”—the more unwilling to reflect we seem to be.

Virtually every great technological achievement of the last two centuries conforms to this pattern. But perhaps none exemplifies it more perfectly than our present regime of fertility medicine, which exceeds even Aldous Huxley’s imagination. The fact that in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ISCI), gamete donation, commercial surrogacy, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and cryopreservation have succeeded in less than half a century in establishing themselves as routine and even necessary demonstrates, if nothing else, the remarkable capacity of human beings to adapt and accept as normal the most bizarre and inhumane of circumstances.

However Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe understood their achievement when they perfected IVF in 1978, whether they sought merely to supply a technical solution to the problem of infertility, were simply heeding the irresistible call of the technological imperative that what can be done must be done, or even considered the ethical implications and future research possibilities, it is safe to say that they could not have understood the magnitude of their deed or foreseen all its consequences. They could hardly have guessed that they were launching a global “fertility industry,” now estimated at a value of $22 billion and responsible for some twelve million births worldwide, a commercial practice that includes paid gamete donation (sperm and eggs) and gestational surrogacy; fetal farming and fertility tourism; and thousands upon thousands of “spare” embryos frozen away in cryopreservation chambers awaiting death, delayed implantation, or various commercial and scientific uses.

They almost surely did not anticipate that IVF, genetic science, and ever more comprehensive forms of preimplantation genetic diagnosis would combine to create what Robert Sinsheimer called the “new eugenics,” a regime for producing, testing, and selecting embryos with “quality control” standards so promising that many biotech enthusiasts insist IVF will supplant natural procreation as the “responsible” method for producing children. Doubtless they did not foresee that the production of embryos would be an indispensable component in a range of downstream research projects, from biomedical cloning research to embryonic stem cell research to mitochondrial replacement therapies and so-called “three parent” embryos to eventual germline manipulation. They probably did not think deeply about the fact that children born of IVF would be the unwilling subjects of a vast science experiment, since it is impossible to collect longitudinal data about the effects of this technique on its subjects prior to conceiving them. And so Edwards and Steptoe probably did not pause to consider the effects of their work on the moral sensibilities of a society that consents to this experiment—that these practices might dispose us toward subjecting children to further experimentation, as is happening now under the euphemism of “gender-affirming medical care.”

The social and political effects of reproductive technologies have been no less vast than the scientific effects. The technical capacity to analyze and separate the undivided act of procreation into a series of discrete and fungible steps variously redistributed among different combinations of adults has led to a radical redefinition of fundamental human archetypes: mother, father, marriage and the family itself. We now commonly distinguish between these archetypes’ “merely biological” aspects and their “functional,” “affective,” or “cultural” dimensions. “Motherhood” and “fatherhood” are paradigmatic examples. Nursing a child is not merely a biological act, or a caregiving function, or a social construct. It is an undivided human act. True, it can be parsed into these various aspects. But our philosophical ancestors knew better than to confuse a distinction in thought with a division in being. In a bifurcated view of reality, one made possible by the technological disaggregation of what was once a unitary reality, we are instructed to speak of “biological, dual-gendered parenthood.” The mother is disaggregated, in practice and in thought, into the technologically contrived functions of “gamete donor,” “gestational carrier,” and “caretaker,” while the father is reconceived as the “supplier of genetic material” and “parenting partner.” The excluded human elements—mother and father—are then superimposed back onto the newly contrived reality, while the original, unitary form is judged wanting as “exclusionary.” From the vantage point of biotechnology, “conception” is what happens under a microscope, and sometimes it just happens to take place inside a woman’s body. The pioneers of this brave new world are unlikely to have foreseen all this, much less the totalitarian exercise of judicial power and political force required to inscribe this posthuman and subhuman vision into law.

Our society considers analytic science to be the paradigm of rationality, to the exclusion of a more comprehensive conception of reason. As a consequence, attempts to account for the unity, interiority, form, and finality presupposed and excluded by scientific cognition—to say nothing of the “naturalness” of those aspects of our reality now credited to the “affective” or “cultural” side of the ledger—can only appear, and will probably be, a sentimental, religious, and thus irrational imposition on a purportedly more basic “biological” reality. This reductive, mechanistic gaze and its exclusion of any moral outlook otherwise founded are built into artificial-reproduction techniques, regardless of how one thinks or feels about the embryos in the petri dish. The act of removing conception from the body, and the regime of preimplantation diagnosis, genetic screening, and embryo selection, already treat embryonic life as if it were a mere artifact, an aggregation of component parts to be controlled, selected, and worked upon. The unborn life receives his humanity only at some later point, either with the emergence of certain “essential” characteristics or whenever those who contracted with the reproductive industry develop an emotional attachment. That we have accepted this brave new world as normal is astounding.

We should not be surprised that IVF has installed itself so easily in our regime. The disincentive to thinking about its moral and human costs is massive. There is, first of all, the poisonous legacy of Roe v. Wade. For much of the population, particularly the political class, any serious thought about the nature and origins of life is ruled out a priori as a threat to “reproductive freedom.” This freedom is jealously guarded in a plutocracy of politicos, pundits, and programmers. They wish to retain the option to obtain a child (or not) at the time, place, and with the partner (or not) of their choosing. Unwanted children are to be aborted, wanted children are to be engineered if need be.

Infertile couples who have recourse to assisted reproductive technologies obviously do not intend to bring about the brave new world. They only want a child, and their desperation blinds them to the incalculable gravity of the technological means for having one. Some of us have friends or family who have resorted to assisted reproduction, and it is difficult to question the technology without seeming indifferent to their suffering. Some of us know and love children who were conceived by means of IVF. Questioning the ontological violence inherent in their conception seems like a questioning of their humanity, though in reality it is a defense of it. In speaking or writing on this subject, one risks unknowingly offending someone conceived through artificial reproduction. To speak of moral right and wrong in this context seems to cross the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate thought and speech.

Difficult as it may be for critics to express the truth of the matter in public, the burdens are infinitely greater for the parents and children implicated in these technologies. For the weight of superhuman deeds cannot be humanly borne. Those contracting to gain children when their bodies are not equal to it can rarely admit the ambiguity inherent in the procedure, to say nothing of the ontological violence, without introducing an element of doubt into the foundation of their own lives, or worse, into the life the child loved more than their own selves. But violence against the order of nature has consequences, whether we face them or not. Suppressed questions return, often with a vengeance. Search “what to tell children conceived through IVF” or visit the Anonymous Us website. You will find a world of anxiety, guilt, denial, and consternation, which becomes more disconcerting the further you move from the natural norm. Those implicated in the industry of baby production live in a world of questions that can scarcely be posed, let alone answered. What do you say to the teenager who asks why it was he who was selected from among his five embryonic siblings? That he was a boy? That he had the best genetic profile? What do you tell the child who spent five years in cryopreservation so that his embryonic twins could be born first? What do you tell the son of a single professional woman, conceived with donor sperm, when he asks about his father? What do you say to the girl with “two dads,” born from an egg donor and a gestational surrogate who was paid to disappear, when she asks who her mother is?

For the first time in history, we are able to manufacture children for whom there is no natural answer to these questions and certainly no answer that would satisfy a serious person. Better, then, not to be serious. What does one say to the adolescent suffering from cancer, early cardiovascular disease, or an epigenetic disorder, conditions thought by some medical professionals to be associated with assisted reproductive technologies but which we do not seem to want to know much about? “The results of the experiment are inconclusive” is a true response, but it is not a humane one. Questions of such existential importance cannot be answered by appeals to sociological surveys comparing the suicide rates or Ivy League admittance statistics for “natural families” and “alternative family structures.” Are we then to decide that a perfectly normal question—Who is my mother?—is meaningless? Are questions of origin and kinship, or the way one’s parents presided over one’s admission into existence, to be suppressed? Are such relations incidental to human identity and flourishing? It is telling that our society embraces the anodyne language of “lifestyle choice” to describe the immensely consequential decision to give over the procreation of one’s children to an industry, as if one were shopping or filling out a profile for a dating app.

Not long after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, I attended a Future Tense symposium at the New America Foundation on the future of reproduction. The symposium featured an impressive group of geneticists and fertility specialists, stem cell and regenerative biology experts, feminists, activists, and journalists—in other words, a typical meeting of technocratic minds. There was a woman whose mother had carried her own granddaughter to term as a surrogate and who had started a foundation to secure financial support for people seeking to start families by means of assisted reproductive technologies. There were even a couple of comedians responsible for lightening the mood and deflecting our attention when we began to feel “uncomfortable.” I was there merely as an audience member, God’s spy, so to speak. It was obvious otherwise that philosophy and theology were excluded from the organizers’ working definition of “reasonable deliberation.”

After a full day of watching the participants rigorously avoid every serious question—that is, every question about the human meaning of this brave new world for the children of it—I posed a question to the last panel, hoping to confront them with the possibility that there might be more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in reproductive medicine and gender studies programs. “If you were to discover as an adult that you had been frozen as an embryo for an extended period of time [I paraphrase], would it bother you? And would you be right to be bothered?” Taken aback by the question, the panelists sputtered and changed the subject.

The social and political questions raised by the emerging biotechnical regime are as serious, and as unthought, as the existential questions. No totalitarianism is so total as that which subjects the meaning of nature to political control. Obergefell, Bostock, and other Supreme Court decisions have determined moral and metaphysical questions of truth by force of law. The haughty disregard for nature, which is overwritten by man’s decree, marks a decisive step away from the constitutional republic we imagine ourselves to be and toward the biotechnocracy we are rapidly becoming. The medicalization of all human phenomena, which legitimates the subsumption of every facet of life under the rubric of public health, has been underway for decades. But it is no coincidence that the biotechnocrats have flexed their muscles in a more visible and aggressive way in the aftermath of Obergefell, the decision that redefined marriage, the fundamental institution built on the primordial difference between male and female. We are now being pushed to normalize “gender affirming medical care,” the next step in the technological and legal conquest of human nature. During the COVID pandemic, natural social relations were suspended. Of course, we had already been told by judges (see Lawrence v. Texas) that there is no such thing as “natural relations,” and to think otherwise is to risk the logical conclusion that there are “unnatural relations.”

Beneath the sexual revolution lies the technological revolution. It serves as the theoretical and practical condition for liberation from fertility, the natural reality of the sexual act. Same-sex marriage would have remained permanently unimaginable without technological means of conception, just as we would never have imagined that a man might really be a woman without the biotechnical means of turning him into one. Various techniques of artificial reproduction advance these revolutions by making once natural relations within the family into artificial ones that admit of endless reinvention. Everything from sperm donation to embryo selection bifurcates the “natural” and the “human” into merely biological aspects on one hand, and affective socio-cultural aspects on the other. This division destroys the foundation of moral reason, which is found in the unitary reality of our humanity as embodied and social beings. The way is thus opened to reconceiving parenthood and the family as functional rather than natural realities. Though same-sex marriage advocates sometimes rested their case on a “companionate” conception of marriage, companionship is only half the story. True “marriage equality” depends on the equal possibility of having children. As the Perry court put it in striking down California’s Proposition 8, “California law permits and encourages gays and lesbians to become parents through adoption . . . or assisted reproductive technology.” And after Obergefell, there seems to be no principle by which a provider or insurer could extend fertility benefits to the “medically infertile” while denying them to the “structurally infertile,” to quote just one of the many Orwellian terms of art employed to conceal the annihilation of reality.

The elevation of assisted reproductive technologies to an archetypal form of conception entails—indeed, requires—a purely functional conception of parenthood and family, a conception necessary if we are to manufacture the legal sameness required for “marriage equality.” Of course, the difference between, say, being a man and a woman or a mother and a father is not principally a difference of function; it is a difference in kind—a difference in what things are. To hold that natural and artificial “procreators” are “similarly situated” and thus ought to be treated the same (which of course means being thought of as the same—to think otherwise is to court discrimination) is to take the odd position that what things are can make no cognizable difference, either in life or law. The manufacture of cultural and legal sameness between natural and artificial “procreators” depends, in turn, on the negation of what makes them different—namely, reality itself. Artificial reproduction does that in practice. We are doing it in law as well. The way is thus open to a politics uncircumscribed by reality. We are embracing two terrifying, totalitarian principles: that “all things are possible,” and that it is the responsibility of the state to make them actual. As ever, the path from possibility to necessity is a short one.

Progressive legal theorists (inadvertently?) reveal the totalitarian implication of this nihilistic exaltation of possibility. Law professor Courtney Megan Cahill maintains that the “radical, and truly transformative power” of Obergefell extends far beyond marriage into realms like procreation and the family, dramatically “unsettling” traditional family law. The brave new world precludes any appeal to nature as grounds for regulating assisted reproductive technologies, not even the possibility of “accidental incest” among adult children of third-party reproduction. Under the new regime, such a concern is dismissed as a wedge argument for reestablishing the natural family. Such a limitation is wrong, says Cahill, “not just because it forces individuals to conform to a particular familial norm, but also because it allows a particular familial norm to flourish at all.” Citing Naomi Cahn, Cahill argues that “phrasing a connection [between donor-conceived individuals] in familial terms, such as sibling, rather than biological terms, such as shared genetic material, already suggests the appropriate legal and cultural frameworks.” Once the political order has obliterated natural relations; the only “real” relations are legal relations. There are no siblings, no parents, no families, until the state defines these relations and assigns them. And what the state giveth, the state or its medical and educational proxies may take away, especially when it judges that the “functions” that now define the family are being inadequately performed.

In a better world, say, one without thousands of undead embryos already frozen away in an artificial limbo, the decision by the Alabama Supreme Court recognizing the humanity of embryonic human beings would have been received as an invitation to think more deeply about what we are doing. There is much to think about. We might have paused and reflected on the mystery of the human organism, the indivisible unity, interiority, form, and finality that make the human being the source and not just the product of its own development. Not only might we conclude that this mystery is entitled to some measure of respect, we might also be led to consider the nature and limits of our native pragmatism, its inadequacy in confronting our most profound questions and problems, and the myriad ways that liberal public reason forces us to confront those questions through proxy arguments about rights. Perhaps we would have acknowledged the injustice of submitting nascent life to a genetic meritocracy as a condition of admission into being, or of making our children the subjects of science experiments for which no one can be held accountable. We might have considered the dangers of conjoining political ideology with science and the power of the state, or contemplated the totalitarian consequences of submitting the totality of meaning to political and scientific control. We might have developed a measure of humility in the face of enormous powers that elude our foresight and control, powers that threaten to enslave us, and asked whether we are really up to the task of being the artisans of our own nature. At the very least, we might have examined our collective conscience and recognized not only the violence we have visited on human life at its very origin but the violence we have done to ourselves, darkening our reason, destroying our natural human affections, suppressing our repugnance, and fatally fracturing our body politic—all these evils tolerated so that this science fiction fantasy might become our normal and indispensable reality. We did none of these things. Instead, politicians clamored to reassure the public that absolutely nothing would be done to slow assisted reproductive technologies and their conquest of human nature.

The eugenics atrocities of the last century come to mind as a salutary warning against the fusion of state power and ideological science. The writings of the Bush administration’s President’s Council on Bioethics, chaired by Leon Kass, which future historians will surely judge the high-water mark of American public documents, offered a fine example of natural and moral philosophizing that might have tamed the technological imperative. But these invitations to reflection were rebuffed. An enforced unthinking swirls in the wake of our progress. The animating principle of the interminable hysteria surrounding the possibility that some limits—any limits—might be imposed on artificial reproduction seems to be that embryos become less human, the less humanely we treat them. Now, thanks to the cunning of history and the fecklessness of Republican politicians, the backlash after the Alabama court’s decision will almost certainly have the effect of further insulating IVF and our biotechnocracy from serious thought, and, with thought, any real limits. I fear that our minds are already the servants of our power and that our darkened reason is a feeble instrument for apprehending the light. The only question is whether anyone will notice.

Michael Hanby is associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America.

Image by Philip James de Loutherbourg, in the public domain. Image cropped.