Image: WaPo, July 16, 2025

Amid the torrent of 191 Executive Orders, 47 memoranda, and 78 proclamations that Trump has enacted since January 2025 that systematically target, criminalize and undermine the existence of immigrants, racial/ethnic minorities, and gender and sexual minorities - to name a few - you may have missed the focus on defining (and redefining) family held within the current administration’s policy efforts. These efforts are primarily, and somewhat confusingly, held within an Executive Order to increase access to IVF (in vitro Fertilization) to promote the ability of “loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,” and in particular “precious, little, beautiful bab[ies].” 

Indeed, as the self-proclaimed “King of IVF” quipped at a White House “Women’s Day” event in March touting the ‘wins’ of sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic policies (and just before cutting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance Team) – “I’ll be known as the fertilization president.”

If ever there was a doubt that reproduction is a national project, or indeed that “all politics are reproductive politics,” this pronouncement should serve as a troubling wake up call that what many consider to be intimate and self-determining practices of family formation are actually deeply embedded in racist, sexist and heterosexist policies that profoundly determine who can and should reproduce - and how. 

Who are these beautiful babies? And, if IVF and other forms of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) are not only critical to support the one in ten women aged 15 - 44 who use fertility services in the US - but are indeed necessary for many LGBTQ+, single-parented, and/or other non heteronormative families who wish to have genetic children - what is wrong with increasing access to these reproductive technologies? 

I write here to signal a reproductive warning that, in this rhetoric of reproductive governance that explicitly defines the nuclear family as “the greatest form of governance known to mankind” (sic) and the varied pronatalist policies espoused by this administration so far - including what will likely be selective availability and uses of IVF - we are seeing a dangerous re-invigoration of eugenic policies and practices at the national level - namely, those practices that utilize selective breeding to direct human evolution in the interests of white heteropatriarchal supremacy.

 Further, I wish to signal the key role of Silicon Valley in fueling disturbing and dystopian aspirations for creating not just beautiful babies but what have recently become known as “super babies” - babies who are genetically selected for “super intelligence and superior health” - and the technologies to realize them. These start up companies such as the recently-publicized Orchid, utilized by tech industry elite and notables (including the mother of Elon Musk’s thirteenth child), promise to “optimize” babies through custom-based algorithms of “polygenic risk scores” that claim to measure future propensity for everything from obesity to intellectual disability to bipolar disorder to intelligence - and many more. Indeed, Orchid claims to be able to sequence an embryo’s full genome of 3 billion base pairs. 

While genetic testing is not new, nor in itself a problematic practice, these consumer-oriented start-up approaches to baby-selection present a particularly pernicious new era in reproductive technologies. And who is the market for these products? The tech-hub elite - those who are primarily white, well-educated and technologically oriented and/or driven who  “are comfortable with a brave new world of probabilistic, data-driven medical decision-making, and can afford the extra costs to give their children a genetic edge.” As a recent subheader to an article, The Next Parenting Trend Starts Before Conception, states, “For as little as $2500, you can choose your future baby. Should you?”

 Historically, medical and legal systems have been foundational to eugenic practices - and I would argue we are seeing biotech emerge rapidly as an indispensable enabler of eugenics in a long history of policies and practices that aim to promote the racial superiority of whites and the genetically “superior.” Throughout history, eugenicists have advocated for the forced sterilization of women of color, people with disabilities, the poor, and those deemed to be “immoral,” drawing on the authority of “scientific” beliefs that “everything from intellect to sexuality to poverty to crime was attributable to heredity.” (Ordover, 2003 xii) Eugenics has been described as a “scavenger ideology,” in which differences between people are not only understood as immutable but are ascribed the authority and redemptive power of science: “exploiting and reinforcing anxieties over race, gender, sexuality, and class and bringing them into the service of nationalism, white supremacy, and heterosexism.” (Ordover, 207)

The nuclear family is being weaponized as a means of political and economic oppression and its specific imperatives to assume a two-parent, heterosexual, white, cisgender structure - and Silicon Valley lies at the center of the engines of these emergent technologies of what has been dubiously dubbed “liberal eugenics.” This approach to eugenics is adopted by families as they utilize emerging biological tools to select for favorable genetic traits, as opposed to the more “explicit” forms of eugenics in the form of governmental interventions that aim to limit undesirable births. As if we should be reassured to meet this milder form of eugenics in liberal eugenics or, as the bioethicist Jonathan Anomaly now prefers, “genetic enhancement.” 

What is the relationship between these emergent reproductive industries driven by Silicon Valley’s biotechnology infrastructure and the national political landscape? I am deeply concerned that the local landscape in Silicon Valley is playing a key role as an engine of reproductive inequality in driving a contemporary national reproductive landscape that will perpetuate - and even enable - emergent policies of selective reproduction. 

This growing nexus of techno-repro fascination and its billion-dollar industry traces the fault lines of social and structural inequity through ever-growing forms of stratified reproduction that embody what Sarah Franklin and Marcia Inhorn (2025) have defined as “the new reproductive order.” In this, in-fertility becomes a “signifier - or code for other issues and topics… fertility and infertility have become mediating idioms through which a wide range of nationalist aspirations and anxieties are expressed” (Franklin & Inhorn: 17). 

Reproductive technologies reproduce far more than babies. As a university embedded within the promises, problematics and moral dilemmas of Silicon Valley - and driven to pursue social justice and health equity - I urge SCU to advance broad understandings and practices of reproductive justice. Reproductive Justice has been defined by Loretta Ross and the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective as “as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Most importantly, we must consider our role in understanding and building social and institutional change to address the systemic inequities reproduced by biotechnology’s broadening reach - even as these practices create futures that only a few may see.