Sons and Daughters, Not Products: The Morality of Embryonic Gene Editing
“Genetic manipulation becomes arbitrary and unjust when it reduces life to an object, when it forgets that it is dealing with a human subject, capable of intelligence and freedom, worthy of respect whatever may be their limitations; or when it treats this person in terms of criteria not founded on the integral reality of the human person, at the risk of infringing upon his dignity.”
― Pope St. John Paul II, Address to the World Medical Association, 1983
Earlier this month, a team of researchers at Columbia University, led by the geneticist Dieter Egli, announced that they had rewritten the genetic code of human embryos at the earliest stage of life, when each tiny human being was still a single cell.
The team used a newer tool called base editing, which rewrites a single letter of the genetic code rather than slicing through both strands of DNA, as the more familiar CRISPR (or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) does.
The appeal of this method is precision. As the New York Times explains, “Rather than chop out a segment of DNA [as in older CRISPR technologies], base editors made a tiny nick in one strand. They could then guide the cell to fix the mutation.”
The Newest Form of Eugenic Ideology
It’s important to keep in mind that all experimentation on human embryos involves the creation of human beings, and then their deliberate destruction. This is the horror that unites all experimentation on human embryos, and renders the practice universally morally repugnant, no matter the intention of the experiments.
But there is a special horror in these recent experiments: namely, the way they advance humanity one step further down the path of normalized, commercialized, profit-driven eugenics.
The New York Times notes bluntly that the new experiments are “an achievement that could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics.”
While the technology can theoretically be used to cure genetic conditions, the Times notes, “it might also be used to select desired traits – a practice that some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics.”
Indeed. This is eugenics, pure and simple. However, rather than the concentration camp or the forced sterilizations and abortions that were practiced so widely around the world in the early 20th century, this is a neater, tidier eugenics, covered over with the reassuring scientific respectability of the lab and the technician with the white lab coat.
Even Genetic Engineers Are Concerned
Interestingly, however, some of the strongest expressions of alarm at the experiments have come from within the field of genetic engineering itself.
Alexis Komor, who helped develop base editing, warned that the study broke a longstanding “gentleman’s agreement” among researchers and amounts to a “gateway to embryo editing to do enhancements” that “kind of opens the floodgates.”
Fyodor Urnov, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, was blunter: What the team had really produced, he said, was a how-to manual for “baby improvers,” instructions “for forays beyond the ethical pale.”
As Futurism reports, the research is supported by a company called Nucleus Genomics, which attracted considerable controversy back in July of 2025. As Scientific American reported at the time:
An understandable ethics outcry greeted the June announcement of a software platform that offers aspiring parents “genetic optimization” of their embryos. Touted by Nucleus Genomics’ CEO Kian Sadeghi, the $5,999 service, dubbed “Nucleus Embryo,” promised optimization of traits like heart disease and cancer resistance, as well as intelligence, longevity, body mass index, baldness, eye color, hair color and left-handedness. It also promised to weed out what makes someone an alcoholic.
These latest experiments are simply the next step towards developing so-called “designer babies.” Except this time, researchers are developing technologies not just to “weed out” embryos deemed “unfit,” but are going one step further: actually “designing” the genetic code of an embryo at the precise level of the individual gene.
As the chief clinical officer of Nucleus Genomics openly and enthusiastically told the Times, base editing technology “gets us closer” to being able to optimize embryos before implantation in IVF (In vitro fertilization is an immoral action that violates the dignity of human life, treating children as commodities instead of as gifts to be received.).
The Evolution of the Eugenic Mentality
In a way, none of this is particularly new.
As I wrote just last week, our culture already routinely identifies the preborn children it deems defective and destroys them. In the United States, roughly two of every three preborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome before birth are aborted. In England the figure approaches nine in ten; in Iceland it is all but total.
In China and India, meanwhile, the preference for sons over daughters has produced, through sex-selective abortion, populations skewed by tens of millions of “missing” women.
And, as Scientific American pointed out when reporting on the dystopian “genetic enhancing” services offered by Nucleus Genomics, eugenic genetic selection of embryos is already commonplace around the world:
Parents-to-be have utilized preimplantation genetic diagnosis as part of in vitro fertilization for decades. After a set of fertilized embryos are created by IVF, a sample of DNA from each is extracted and tested. The parents can then select which embryo or embryos to implant based on their genetic profiles.
Scientific American noted that this practice has become so routine that, “there is little ethical handwringing about parents who use the technology to prevent transmitting a horrific disease to their child, or who opt not to implant an embryo that might not develop.”
Embryo editing, then, is not so much some radical new development in science or culture. The door to eugenics was flung open decades ago, with the routinization of selective abortion based upon genetic testing, and the selection of embryos for IVF. Embryo editing simply moved the practice one step earlier.
The Temptation to Redesign Humanity
Once we accept that some genetic traits should be eliminated (as we already have), no clear moral boundary is left, and the logic shifts inevitably from preventing disease to designing preferred outcomes. Thus, the child ceases to be a person received in love and becomes an object of selection.
As Cardinal Robert Sarah, one of the Church’s most prophetic voices on these questions, wrote in The Day Is Now Far Spent:
Already techniques of artificial procreation, pre-implantation embryonic triage, and universalized prenatal diagnosis of genetic illness have little by little inoculated the popular mind with eugenic ideas. It is considered normal to eliminate embryos, in other words, very tiny human beings, who do not correspond to our norm. Who will set the norm tomorrow?… Does transhumanism seek to create a master race? These questions are terrifying and blood-chilling.
In the 1983 address quoted at the beginning of this column, Pope St. John Paul II foresaw this move towards transhumanism. He noted that the term “genetic engineering” is ambiguous. On the one hand, it covers “adventuresome endeavors aimed at promoting I know not what kind of superman,” and on the other it covers “desirable and salutary interventions aimed at the correction of anomalies such as certain hereditary illnesses.”
The second form of genetic engineering restores what was broken. The first sets out with the goal to create an “improved” human – a “superman.” These new experiments fall squarely into the first category.
The Human Person Is Not a Rough Draft
Beneath all of this lies a single, deeper error: the belief that the human being is a rough draft in need of correction.
The financiers pouring money into these ventures speak openly of “designing our own descendants.” This is the ideology known as transhumanism, which regards every human limit, including aging, suffering, and death, not as part of our nature but as a flaw to be engineered away.
In his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV reminds us that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it” (no. 9). A base editor in the hands of a company that sells genetic optimization is not a neutral instrument; it carries the purposes of those who sell it, who would reduce the human person to “a resource to be used and exploited,” valued only “on what they achieve or produce” (no. 51).
Against this, Pope Leo recovers a truth the upgraders have forgotten: our limits are not defects at all. “Humanity flourishes not despite limitations,” he writes, “but often through them” (no. 118).
The families who raise children with Down syndrome know this without being told. They received their children as gifts rather than projects, and were enlarged in soul by the ones the world would have screened out. The choice before us, Pope Leo says, is between building “a new Tower of Babel” and building “the city in which God and humanity dwell together” (no. 1).
Base editing of human embryos for eugenic reasons is but one more brick in the Tower of Babel that the transhumanists have been building for decades.
Children are Sons and Daughters, Not Products
A child is not a product to be optimized, a consumer good to be upgraded, or a project to be perfected. He is a son or a daughter of God, willed and loved by his Creator, stamped from his first hour with a dignity that no editor’s tool can raise and no diagnosis can lower.
This was the wisdom Pope St. John Paul II offered the world’s physicians in 1983: “first oppose everything harmful, then seek out and pursue the good.” We may, and we should, develop genuine therapies that heal the sick, exercising the gift of reason as God’s co-workers in creation. But we are not the masters of human life. “God alone is the master of human life and of its integrity,” he reminded those doctors.
As Cardinal Sarah put it in The Day Is Now Far Spent:
If we want to remain human, we must accept our creaturely nature and once again turn to the Creator. The world has chosen to organize itself without God, to live without God, to think about itself without God. It is in the process of making a terrible experiment: wherever God is not, hell is there. What is hell if not the privation of God? The transhumanist ideology illustrates this perfectly. Without God, nothing remains but what is not human, the post-human. More than ever the alternative is simple: God or nothing!
Our lawmakers must do everything in their power to keep these Frankenstein experiments from advancing.
The rest of us, meanwhile, must fill the world with love by receiving the children God sends as they come, the strong and the weak alike, the ones who pass every test and the ones who fail them all. And we must stand beside the families who opened their homes to the children the world told them to refuse.
The axiom that every human being possesses innate dignity from the first moment of conception, including those beset by illness, suffering, or who are less “useful”, is not a limit on scientific progress. It is the ground on which a “civilization of love” is made possible, over and against the technocratic reduction of the human person to raw material to be manipulated for extrinsic purposes, which produces the culture of death.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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