MALE-ORDER EUGENICS

National Review

 

Mail-Order Eugenics

By Abigail Anthony

June 5, 2025 10:14 AM

 

Are you a wealthy couple trying to have a child? Are you hoping that the child will be healthy and intelligent? And do you lie awake at night shivering with the chilling fear that your child might be left-handed or, God forbid, acne-prone with seasonal allergies? Good news! For $798, you and your spouse can buy two test kits from Nucleus, a company that offers whole-genome sequencing. If you’ve requested the genetic files on your embryos that are frozen indefinitely at the local IVF clinic, Nucleus will sequence their genomes and present you with “much deeper insights into the complete genetic profile of [your] viable embryos.” The results will allow you to compare your unborn children with respect to their health risks, such as cancer, asthma, diabetes, celiac disease, and upwards of 900 hereditary disorders. You can also gauge information about each child’s personality by assessing traits like ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, insomnia, and — most importantly — migraines. Nucleus will also test for IQ, despite the fact that progressives reliably assure us that IQ is fake and disparate outcomes are entirely attributable to environmental factors, which is why we need to give more money to everyone all the time. And, with Nucleus, you don’t have to wonder what your child might look like. The results will tell you about an embryo’s eye color, height, hair color, male-pattern baldness, severe acne, and body mass index. Science really is amazing! Can you believe how much data, suspiciously similar to those of grown human beings, can be analyzed in just this curious little clump of cells?

 

“The choice is yours,” Nucleus states on its website in big letters, where there plays an endless stream of videos showing racially diverse parents holding infants. What choice is Nucleus offering? It is not the decision whether to have a child but rather the ability to choose what type of child you want to be born. And that means choosing which of your children you don’t want; those you deem undesirable based on genetics alone may remain frozen until you unceremoniously discard — meaning kill — them.

 

Here I am, writing at my kitchen table in Oxford with surgical scars on my stomach because I underwent surgery for stage 4 endometriosis two years ago. The reproductive disease caused me significant pain for many years. In the future, there may be fewer women who struggle with endometriosis — not because we’ve improved the diagnostic processes or accessibility of the treatments but because Nucleus allows us to screen embryos for endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Given the choice to live again with endometriosis or not at all, I’d do it all again. Yet as technology expands the choices parents can make in family formation, there remains a party whose choice is not considered: the children themselves. Nucleus can advertise its ability to provide us with “choices,” but it is just a nifty euphemism for “eugenics.”