The year is 1 BC, and Hilarion, a pagan migrant worker, has found a good job in Alexandria. His colleagues are heading home, but Hilarion wants to stay a bit longer and earn extra money for his pregnant wife, Alis. Concerned that she might worry about his not coming back with them, he writes Alis a letter begging her not to worry and assuring her that he’ll send the money soon. Regarding the unborn child, Hilarion instructs Alis to keep it if it’s a boy — but if a girl, to “cast it out.”
The letter — an actual document from the ancient world that survives to this day — reveals a man capable of deep feeling. The fact that Hilarion could be so flippant about discarding an unwanted newborn, all the same, may seem shocking to us today, but it reveals much about the pre-Christian pagan culture that formed him. The pagan Greeks and Romans had no trouble dehumanizing newborns, and they thought nothing of making choices about which babies should live and which die, based upon their own needs and desires.
Fast-forward two millennia, and we come face-to-face with an ascendant worldview not all that different from the one that guided Hilarion. It, too, carelessly wields the power of life and death over children depending on parents’ desires. Only, it does this with much greater sophistication and at a potentially industrial scale: through reproductive technologies that allow would-be parents to choose their preferred embryo based on intelligence and other characteristics. All from the comfort and familiarity of an app.
Swipe right, and your high-IQ embryo is allowed to become a human being; swipe left, and the less intelligent or otherwise less desirable child is discarded. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a high-tech reversion to Hilarion’s and Alis’s pagan mindset. The only question is whether our civilization can muster the resources to resist it, as the Church stamped out the original.
As the historian Nadya Williams has shown, Greece and Rome offer proof that the parental quest for quality control over offspring is anything but new. Indeed, the popular stories of the era vigorously affirmed such practices. From Thetis dipping Achilles into the river Styx to render him invulnerable, to Hera throwing her newborn baby, Hephaestus, off Mount Olympus because he was so ugly and deformed — ancient pagans were taught by their culture to pursue biological optimization. In the realm of philosophy, thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca lent moral support to parents’ refusal to raise newborns with disabilities.
These mythic and philosophical teachings informed concrete social practices. The Spartans discarded sickly babies unlikely to grow into strong warriors. Roman fathers regularly invoked the right of paterfamilias to decide whether or not to welcome a newborn child into the family.
Yet this would all change as the ancient world was transfigured by Christianity, a faith which insisted that these little children, as the least among us, bore the holy face of Christ in a special way. The Didache, an ancient Christian catechism dating probably to the late first century, reveals a faith that not only rejected abortion and infanticide (thought to be related), but also welcomed discarded children into early Christian homes. Early Church fathers like Tertullian (late second century) and Lactantius (early third century) were among those who held up these countercultural practices as evidence of the superiority of Christian culture over the pagan.
Eventually, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, pagan reproductive practices such as infant exposure were formally outlawed, and the Church established monasteries and orphanages to care for unwanted newborns.
Today, however, amid the waning of Christian influence in the West, a neopagan revival has filled the void, particularly in medicine. The field increasingly shrugs off a Christian anthropology and thus no longer has the resources to explain why all human beings are equal in dignity. In order to count (morally and legally), human beings now need to have certain traits: autonomy and independence, brain development, and the like. Human beings don’t share these traits in equal measure, and a good number lack them altogether. Do such people deserve the right to exist? Are their lives worthy of life?
The champions of the new technologies and their media and academic allies answer: no.
As with the pagans, the reproductive practices of the consumerist neopagan West are focused not on welcoming children unconditionally as a gift from God — but on optimization and quality control based on the customer’s desires for a product purchased like any other in a marketplace. Indeed, just as people of Hilarion’s day could choose to keep or discard their human offspring based on whether they wanted a boy or a girl, for many years a customer has been able to use in-vitro fertilization to create a certain number of embryos and implant only XY or XX embryos, while “casting out” the rest.
But aren’t there important moral differences between an embryo being discarded as medical waste and the newborn daughter of Alis being discarded as unsuitable for the family? The latter was very clearly one of us. But how can something with only eight cells be one of us?
The short answer to this somewhat complex (though definitely answerable) question is that all of us were once an embryo. A new member of the species Homo sapiens comes into existence after fertilization. It is true that our neopagan, autonomy-obsessed, quality-control-addicted culture has been formed in ways that make it difficult to see human embryos as one of us. But we should not find that surprising, especially given how difficult it was for ancient pagan cultures to see newborns as one of them.
Add capitalist profit-seeking to such practices, and the picture becomes even grimmer. Firms like Orchid and Nucleus have developed new technologies they claim can help customers be even more choosy about which of their children will be welcomed into a family and which children will be cast out. Nucleus allows customers to accept or reject these least of our brethren based not only on height, hair color, and eye color — but also intelligence and the likelihood of the child developing certain mental illnesses.
Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui, meanwhile, has been quite outspoken about the kind of cultural changes her company heralds. In a recent video she shared on X, she claims that “sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies. It is going to be insane not to screen for these things.” A New York Times article covering the rise of these designer-baby companies suggested that by “these things,” Siddiqui “presumably refers to conditions like obesity and autism, both of which Orchid says it can screen for.”
It is interesting that she foregrounds the radical disconnect between sex and procreation — a separation the Catholic Church has lamented since the advent of the Pill — as inherent to the vision of reproduction undergirding her company’s rise. Second-century pagans may well have said something similar: “Sex is for fun. Infant screening is for babies. Those Christians who don’t screen their infants are insane.”
In an interview with Siddiqui, Times columnist Ross Douthat tried to make the case for a Catholic vision of procreation. He read aloud a beautiful poem about the unchosen gift of children born of sexual union, regardless of the quality and consumer value. Reading the poem left Douthat visibly choked up, but Siddiqui responded with a blank look on her face: “What do you mean?” She went on to explain that his view — the poem’s view, the Catholic view — has already been left in the dust. Our culture has already severed the tie between sex and procreation. What she and her company are proposing is simply the next logical step.
She’s right.
I suspect that Siddiqui and her colleagues live out many praiseworthy virtues, as Hilarion did. I have little doubt that they were originally motivated by a desire to help others and reduce suffering. But also like Hilarion, their souls have been shaped by a pagan culture that makes it impossible for them to see that they are recklessly discarding those we should be valuing and caring for the most. They aren’t moral monsters — though they are promoting, on a massive scale, morally monstrous practices.
And these practices are likely going to get worse before they get better. Soon we will be able to coax virtually any somatic cell to become an egg or sperm cell, with the result that single rounds of IVF will produce, not 15 embryos, but 15,000 of them. And assuming companies like Orchid and Nucleus will be around, they will undoubtedly use sophisticated AI technologies to screen this much larger set, pick the desirable one or two, and discard the rest.
At first, it will no doubt be the wealthy who avail themselves of the opportunity, given the high expense. Our society’s already wide class-based inequalities will be compounded by the biological advantages accruing to the children born on the upper social rungs. Class (defined by one’s place in the social production process) will be reinforced by new conditions of biological caste, giving rise to a new biopolitics: having a child with a disability or a less-than-sculpted body will consign people to the lower castes. Later on, as these practices become cheaper and more widely available, a sort of soft compulsion will likely bear down on all parents to optimize their kids (health insurers might decline to cover claims associated with non-optimized children). Having children the old-fashioned way will be the mark of a few “insane” religious fanatics — freaks and outcasts.
Which is exactly how Christians were viewed by mainstream pagan society in the faith’s early days. Even so, a child-centered, Christian understanding of procreation defeated and replaced the ancient pagan culture’s understanding of reproduction. Could it happen again in our time? Perhaps the excesses coming into view will cause enough ordinary people to freak out, demand that politicians press the pause button, and look around for alternatives.
Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, is on the move again, especially among pockets of the young in the United States and Europe. One of the hallmarks of the ancient Christians was their resistance to pagan reproductive practices. Dare we hope that one of the hallmarks of the 21st-century Christian revival will also be resistance to the neopaganism of the Siddiquis of the world? It may be the only force that can stave off dystopia.
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Author: Charles Camosy
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