Biotech promises perfect babies. The family hangs in the balance.

Emma Waters is a proud, Christ-centered patriot. The 28-year-old bioethics researcher at the Heritage Foundation lives by a strict six-word mantra: “Love God, get married, have babies.”

She married young and recently welcomed her third daughter while working from home in Pennsylvania. When she’s not raising her kids, Waters devotes her time to exposing what happens when human reproduction stops being a natural byproduct of family life and becomes a high-tech engineering project.

The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.

Waters has made it her mission to expose one of the most seismic shifts in modern medicine. Doctors have moved beyond merely helping desperate couples conceive; now clinics try to control which children are (and aren’t) born, who carries them, and what traits they possess. Waters consistently raises alarms about commercial surrogacy, embryo selection, and a fertility business that treats parenthood like a shady concierge service. Her concern is justified.

The most fascinating fight over this issue isn’t between traditionalists and the iconoclastic, often idiotic left. The real battle line lies squarely on the political right, dividing old-school social conservatives from Silicon Valley’s tech-driven pronatalists. And the battle is growing increasingly ferocious.

Can babies be solved?

Both sides agree that falling birth rates pose an existential threat to America. But while traditionalists want more babies born into married homes, tech titans want to manufacture them using IVF, surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, and artificial wombs. Essentially, Silicon Valley wants to code a way out of demographic winter. Traditionalists think the answer lies in simple, un-automated human commitment.

Silicon Valley wants to solve the fertility crisis in the lab. Traditionalists want to solve it with marriage. And in truth, the traditionalist approach makes far more sense. If young people stop getting married, inventing ever more sophisticated ways to make babies only treats the symptom while leaving the family crisis untouched.

Technology itself isn’t inherently evil, nor is every fertility treatment misguided. Modern medicine performs genuine miracles by healing broken minds and bodies. The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.

The pitch of the modern fertility industry is pure, unadulterated control. If a couple can’t conceive, technology intervenes. If a woman wants to delay motherhood, she freezes her eggs. If parents want to select specific embryos, technicians run tests. If adults want someone else to carry the burden, they hire a surrogate.

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The cultural message has shifted dramatically over two generations. Society used to tell young people that the biological clock actually ticks and that building a life with a special someone matters early on. Modern culture now tells them not to worry because science will grant extra decades. That promise sells a dangerous illusion. It tricks people into believing they can outrun the human body’s limits forever. And once people believe technology can overcome every natural limit, the next question becomes obvious.

Why stop at conception?

When parents screen, rank, and discard embryos based on calculated disease risk, physical attributes, or predicted intelligence, parental love starts looking like a trip to an online retail shop. Historically, a child arrived as a gift to be welcomed and cherished unconditionally. The tech-enabled model treats a child like a product customized before checkout.

For 50 years, Western society systematically dismantled the traditional family structure. Contraception severed physical intimacy from reproduction. Abortion severed pregnancy from parenthood. IVF severed conception from marriage. Donor eggs and surrogacy severed genetics from motherhood.

Now society is facing the consequences of that perverse experiment. Reproduction is becoming an expensive, institutionalized service completely independent of marriage and even pregnancy.

The demographic crisis facing the United States and the West is, in many ways, the logical result of modern incentives. Long-term commitment is treated as an unnecessary drag on personal mobility; marriage is now delayed until every career milestone is unlocked; and having children is viewed as something between a hindrance and a hazard. Silicon Valley can build all the productivity tools it wants, but innovation can’t offset a society increasingly uninterested in its own continuation.

Eugenics on demand

The tech industry naturally focuses on the paying customer, including the adults writing six-figure checks for surrogates and genetic testing. Nobody asks what the child wants. An infant doesn’t choose anonymous genetic donors, years spent in a cryo-preservation freezer, or half-siblings scattered across three continents. The fertility lobby endlessly preaches reproductive freedom for adults, completely ignoring the basic rights of the person being created.

No Nazi uniform is required to revive eugenics. Simply give parents enough data, enough options, enough cash, and a well-stocked dish of embryos, and biological selection quickly becomes good parenting.

Eventually, this dynamic introduces a brand-new form of inequality, far more consequential than the type blue-haired liberals whine about. Wealthy urban couples will screen hundreds of embryos to secure cognitive and physical advantages for their offspring, while working-class families struggle to afford baby formula. The political left spent half a century agonizing over income gaps, but conservatives ought to ask what happens when the stinking rich can literally buy superior genetics at a boutique clinic.

It’s a question occupying Waters’ mind, and the answer should concern anyone who cares about the future of America.