IVF Embryo Screening for Depression Raises Eugenics Concerns

Researchers at Herasight, a biotech company that offers services to and calculate the odds of successful services for individuals, released a pre-print of a paper about its new predictor of major depressive disorder. As the Herasight team explained in a blog post, the purpose of the predictive tool is to assist “couples undergoing IVF who want to lower their future child’s risk of depression.” Here’s how the company concludes its post:

Although IVF is often branded as a harmless technology that helps loving couples have a child, it is in practice a eugenic tool that helps parents birth a particular type of child at the expense of others. I suspect that most people are instinctively repulsed by the hypothetical scenario of a couple qualitatively evaluating their teenage kids, then killing whichever ones are supposedly unfit — be it on the basis of depression, lung health, height, intelligence, or any other trait. But that is effectively what occurs in IVF clinics: Parents buy the opportunity to choose among their children with respect to preferred characteristics, and those that are considered “poor quality” are eliminated. And though we might instinctively assume that “” targets individuals with severe conditions that make life more difficult on a day-to-day basis, Herasight shows us that even manageable and treatable unpleasantries like depression will become deciding factors for whether a child is considered desirable and thus deserving of the chance to be brought to term. It is not hard to imagine, should we continue along the current trajectory of supposed human refinement, that acne or a gap tooth or even a 130 IQ will be deemed inadequate.

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Abigail Anthony

Abigail Anthony is a staff writer at National Review.

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Researchers at Herasight, a biotech company that offers services to and calculate the odds of successful services for individuals, released a pre-print of a paper about its new predictor of major depressive disorder. As the Herasight team explained in a blog post, the purpose of the predictive tool is to assist “couples undergoing IVF who want to lower their future child’s risk of depression.” Here’s how the company concludes its post:

Although IVF is often branded as a harmless technology that helps loving couples have a child, it is in practice a eugenic tool that helps parents birth a particular type of child at the expense of others. I suspect that most people are instinctively repulsed by the hypothetical scenario of a couple qualitatively evaluating their teenage kids, then killing whichever ones are supposedly unfit — be it on the basis of depression, lung health, height, intelligence, or any other trait. But that is effectively what occurs in IVF clinics: Parents buy the opportunity to choose among their children with respect to preferred characteristics, and those that are considered “poor quality” are eliminated. And though we might instinctively assume that “” targets individuals with severe conditions that make life more difficult on a day-to-day basis, Herasight shows us that even manageable and treatable unpleasantries like depression will become deciding factors for whether a child is considered desirable and thus deserving of the chance to be brought to term. It is not hard to imagine, should we continue along the current trajectory of supposed human refinement, that acne or a gap tooth or even a 130 IQ will be deemed inadequate.