The Center for Genetics and Society brings social justice and human rights to the center of public and policy discussions about human genetics and assisted reproduction.

Featured

Eugenics, from Victorian to Postmodern

By Pete Shanks | 09.24.2025
Biopolitical Times

Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia

As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...

Policies

Can Trump’s IVF Policies Please His Pronatalist Base?

By Emma McDonald Kennedy | 09.25.2025
Biopolitical Times

In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.

The response to the...

Policies

A New Eugenics Gold Rush? From designer babies to not-quite-designer jeans

By Katie Hasson | 08.21.2025
Biopolitical Times

If you’ve been online or caught the news in the past few weeks, you’ve probably come across Sydney Sweeney, her...

Human Genetic Modification

The quest to create gene-edited babies gets a reboot

By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 08.06.2025

Aggregated News

A Chinese scientist horrified the world in 2018 when he revealed he had secretly engineered the birth of the world's...

Genetic Selection

Biopolitical Times

Experimental Human Cell Division Does Not a Baby Make

By Pete Shanks | 10.22.2025

Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]

On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science...

Assisted Reproduction

Can Trump’s IVF Policies Please His Pronatalist Base?

By Emma McDonald Kennedy | 09.25.2025

In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment...

Policies

Chimeras: The Genetic Modification of Nature

By Pete Shanks | 09.25.2025

GeneWatch UK has prepared a briefing on the genetic modification of nature for the International Union for Conservation of Nature...

Animal Biotechnologies

News

Under a Mask of AI Doomerism, the Familiar Face of Eugenics

By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025

The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...

Society

He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer’s 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn’t He?

By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025

Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.

First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...

Genomics

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

By Jallicia A. Jolly, Sydney Curtis and Nicole Sessions, Ms. Magazine | 10.17.2025

Pronatalism is an old idea with roots in eugenics and nationalism, that is now fashionable among far-right influencers and policymakers. They talk of “moral decay” and see low birth rates as a threat to the future of humanity. In the mainstream media...

U.S. Federal

The race to create the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess

By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025

Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...

Genetic Selection

Video
Reproduction and Family Formation: The State and the Market
Use Gene Editing to Make Better Babies | Debate | Intelligence Squared U.S.
The 'Perfect' Baby?: The Dangers of Gene Editing in Assisted Reproduction