Although IVF is often branded as a harmless technology, it is in practice a eugenic tool.
Researchers at Herasight, a biotech company that offers services to genetically test embryos and calculate the odds of successful IVF 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:
Because MDD-PGT kept its full predictive power between siblings, its accuracy in the population carries over to the choice between embryos. For couples without a family history of depression who are choosing among five embryos for a daughter, the expected lifetime risk of depression ranges from 13% for the lowest-scoring embryo to 27% for the highest-scoring one, a spread of about 14 percentage points that grows to 18 points with ten embryos. For a son, five embryos range from 6% to 14%. A family history of depression shifts these numbers upwards. These are expected values across many selections, not guarantees for any individual case, and they assume lifetime risks of about 19.5% for women and 9.7% for men by the age of 85.
In practice, depression is one of several conditions that parents may weigh when deciding which embryo to transfer. The results above suggest that a lower depression score also tends to go along with fewer anxiety symptoms, better sleep and better general health, so these goals point in the same direction.
A polygenic score is not destiny. Our predictor explains around 9% of the variance in depression liability, so most of what determines whether a child will develop depression lies elsewhere. But for a condition as common and as disabling as depression, a predictor that holds up between siblings and already predicts symptoms in childhood can meaningfully reduce the risk for families undergoing IVF.
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 “eugenics” 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.
When faced with this moral dilemma, some people suggest the solution is to legislatively regulate the reasons why an embryo can be elected for implantation. For example, the religious pro-life crowd and feminists might agree (albeit for different reasons) that couples should not be able to prefer an embryo on the basis of sex. Other people, hearing faint echoes of a German song, might say that we should not permit parents to pick an embryo with respect to hair or eye color.
These are insufficiently comprehensive. To have a choice at all allows for eugenics.