Sons and Daughters, Not Products: The Morality of

Embryonic Gene Editing

Source:   Human Life International   

Shenan J. Bouquet - June 22, 2026

Excerpts from the Article & Link are below

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"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."

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"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.

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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.”

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"Interestingly, however, some of the strongest expressions of alarm at the experiments have come from within the field of genetic engineering itself."

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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.”

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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.

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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.​

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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.  Tiffin Right to Life encourages you to
CLICK HERE for a link to the entire article​​. We must understand the dangers of genetic editing and how it changes society's views on the value of a human life.

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