Charles Camosy’s brilliant article on the sad and ancient history of designer babies

Image credit: Jonathan Borba via Unplash

A brilliant article this week from Charles Camosy discusses the sad and ancient history of designer babies, where society would actively discard any babies deemed invaluable, and likening it to the increasing attitude in secular society resulting from the acceptance of abortion and IVF.

Featuring in UnHead, Camosy discusses the major concerns amongst attitudes in secular society that are seeing a selective bias and the out casting of babies who are considered unwanted or undesirable, comparing this to pre-Christianity times where such attitudes were the norm. In this fantastic piece, he explicitly refers to a documented letter from a pagan migrant worker from 1 BC, Hilarion to his pregnant wife Alis, telling her that if their child is a boy, to keep him, but to “cast it out” if it’s a girl.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Camosy points that whilst becoming an increased attitude in society, this is sadly not a new thing in human history, as has been discovered and shown by historians such as Nadya Williams.

“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,” he said.

However, it was the coming and growth of Christianity that countered this attitude towards innocent little babies and “insisted that these little children, as the least among us, bore the holy face of Christ in a special way.”

“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,” he explained.

Yet, Camosy highlights that as we see Christian attitudes lessen in today’s Western society, we are also seeing an increase of the very attitude that devalued some human lives over others that Christianity sought to erase.

“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.”

Camosy further makes an excellent point to answer the question on whether we can compare the disregard of a born baby during the time of Hilarion, to that of an embryo which is being disregarded in today’s society. That answer being, we are all human beings from the moment of conception.

“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.”

Sadly, companies such as Orchid and Nucleus are currently developing technologies that will allow them to further create “designer-babies”, where parents can more explicitly choose what type of children they want in their family and what children they want to “cast out”, with the CEO of Orchid vocally expressing her view that sex and procreation are separate – a attitude that can lead to a disregard to the natural procreation of precious innocent children.  

“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,” he continued. “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.”

Camosy also argues that the natural consequence of promoting such technologies with such attitudes could lead to a class division in society where it is the wealthy who are able to avail of these technologies, whilst those of lower class will not and thus less abled, less intelligent and disabled people will be considered amongst the lower class. Yet, as the promotion of such technologies increases, prices will be cheaper, everyone can use them and those who choose to conceive in a more natural way will be considered as “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,” he concluded

Sandra Parda of the Life Institute commented, saying: “This is an excellent piece by Charles Camosy and serves as a stark warning of the drastic consequences of the devaluing of human life to the point of accepting abortion, IVF and surrogacy. All this has done is reduce the life of the child as mere object to please parents as opposed to recognising the intrinsic value of the individual unique person that deserves to be respected as equally as any other human.”

She added that whilst it is concerning to see the increasing consequences of accepting abortion and IVF, “these attitudes have been overcome in the past, and with the pro-life community continuing to unite against this kind of evil in society, we can overcome this attitude once again.”