In the United States, despite more than $1 billion invested in fertility-focused start-ups in the past decade, there is remarkably little regulation or even basic public scrutiny of what practices are acceptable. Instead, venture capital and private equity firms have spurred the creation of technologies and innovations in the field, with no mechanism in place for oversight.
Today the United States is known for its wide range of available services, which include sex selection and even eye color choice, as well as polygenic embryo screening, and has become a destination for fertility patients from around the world.
[Advocates] believe widespread adoption of [genetic] screening could be a boon for public health by lowering health care spending on heritable diseases and, more controversially, for social ills such as violent crime by raising a society’s overall I.Q. “Societies that have more intelligent people will have lower rates of crime, of rape, of violence, because intelligence correlates negatively with those societal blights,” Ms. Collins told me. Such population-level engineering, when done by a parent as opposed to the state, has been called liberal eugenics by its advocates.
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