Orchid, Eugenics, and the “Acorn and Oak” Fallacy

There is a common argument that I’m sure pro-lifers other than myself have encountered more than once. I call it the “acorn and oak” fallacy, and it goes something like this: “People who compare fetuses with human beings confuse the acorn with the oak.”

If there’s any confusion, it’s in the strange belief that the acorn is a different species from the oak when in fact it’s merely an earlier version of the same plant. The argument displaces the essence of the oak with mere accidents. At its basest, it can only say, “Well, it doesn’t look like a tree, so how can it be a tree?” The “acorn and oak” fallacy isn’t an argument that can even pretend to be scientific, no matter how many scientists blindly repeat it, because there is no scientific or logical basis for it.

Put differently, the “acorn and oak” fallacy denies continuity between two developmental stages, inserting an unwarranted, inexplicable ontological change. By its logic, we could as easily deny humanity (or its functional equivalent, personhood) to the year-old infant as to the unborn child, or the third-grader at her desk, or even the adolescent struggling with hormones and other life changes. All you need is one or more traits, the presence or absence of which distinguish a person from an unperson, the human from the subhuman. The criteria, being arbitrary and extrinsic, can be set anywhere between fertilization and physical death to exclude whomever you wish.

The Acorn and Orchid

This has been one of the pro-life movement’s ongoing criticisms of in vitro fertilization (IVF): The process deliberately creates more than one embryo, destroying those that aren’t necessary. Over time, as genetic screening has developed, the laboratories have also begun destroying embryos with undesirable genetic traits such as trisomy-21 (Down syndrome). Orchid Health, a lab recently mentioned in a three-part New York Times series, claims to test over 99% of the genome for over 900 traits in pursuit of the genetically optimized child. Noor Siddiqui, Orchid’s founder and CEO, asked in a recent tweet:

If you could prevent your child from going blind—would you? From getting pediatric cancer at 5? From heart defects? Schizophrenia at 22? From living a life radically altered by pure genetic bad luck?

Put this way, you would think that Orchid somehow fixes the embryo’s genome sequence. That’s not what happens. Orchid does not prevent a child from going blind, but rather prevents a child who’s genetically likely to go blind from being born. It’s not that “every child wins the genetic lottery” but rather that those who lose don’t get to gestate, let alone see daylight. In the minds of those who do the testing, however, embryos are not the same as children. They haven’t passed that mystical, magical barrier that separates the acorn from the oak. They’re “clumps of cells.”

IVR and Eugenics

Eugenics begins with the postulate that we have a duty to our species to improve our overall health by eliminating genetic defects and undesirable traits. This notional duty implies that people who manifest such defects and traits don’t have a right to exist: they are lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” Referring to New York’s proposed medically-assisted suicide law, Leah Libresco Sargeant quotes the late advocate Diane Coleman: “The disability community is the canary in the coal mine. … If we as disabled, chronically ill, or terminally ill people are declared better off dead, who will be next?”

Orchid and other labs that perform such selective testing are necessarily practicing eugenics, and their critics haven’t hesitated to say so. Such criticism puzzles Nucleus Genomics founder Kian Sadeghi: “Since when is preventative medicine eugenics? And if a couple exercises their right to choose their own embryo based on what matters most to them ... that’s eugenics? We have lost the plot.” But what Orchid practices is not preventive medicine because medicine doesn’t prevent disease by killing the patient. And when parents impose genetic criteria that their children must meet to be allowed birth—yes, Mr. Sadeghi, that’s eugenics. Get an encyclopedia.

More insidious is the idea that parents have a right to choose an embryo, which implies a right to condemn other embryos to death. The notion that adults have a right not just to have children but to have children that carry their genes is IVF’s founding moral premise. But children are not toys, property, or consumer products. Such rights as parents have over their children stem from their responsibilities and obligations, not from ownership or possession. Little Johnny Unborn, moral sanity declares, is his own person, not a luxury automobile to be customized according to Mom and Dad’s priorities.

“You shall not kill” (Ex 20:13; Dt 5:17). Because the right to live is the first and most fundamental human right, the Catholic Church teaches that the taking of human life requires the gravest of crimes and causes to justify it. “The gravest of causes” does not include the real-world construction of Gattaca, or a medical Utopia relatively free of disease. It most certainly doesn’t include the factory production of genetically optimized “designer babies,” whether or not it meets a consumer demand and can be rationalized by a business case.

In the Genomic Arena

However, once you’ve disconnected the acorn from the oak, deciding that the embryo is a clump of cells, mere hyle to be manipulated or discarded according to your wishes, anything becomes possible. The word “eugenics” carries a lot of historical baggage. But the clean, cold sterility of the laboratory is so much less dramatic than the sadistic horror of the German death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, or the streets of Bosnia, the destruction of life on a microscopic scale where Joe Schmuckatelli can’t see (and therefore needs not struggle to ignore).

Perhaps, if instead of 16 embryos in a lab we had 16 almost identical preschool-aged children standing in an arena surrounded by soldiers with knives, the problem would be easier to understand. We can imagine the chosen child being led out of the arena by her smiling, cooing parents while the soldiers efficiently, ruthlessly slaughter the 15 unfortunates. Once you make the recognition of humanity dependent upon arbitrary, extrinsic metrics, the arena is more visible than the lab, but no less defensible as a solution to undesirable traits.

Does the “arena” image bother you? Do you consider it manipulative? How is the invocation of children going blind and developing pediatric cancer any less an ad misericordiam? It’s inconsistent to find pity for children slaughtered in an arena in service to eugenics but not for embryos destroyed in a lab toward the same end. Moreover, it’s deceptive to wail about children “living a life radically altered by genetic bad luck” when your solution is to eliminate the unlucky before they’re born. Failing to see the oak in the acorn is logically, scientifically, and morally indefensible.

Conclusion

I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment [i.e., Germany and Italy]. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 34)

Eugenics didn’t start or end with the Nazis. It arose with the progressive movement earlier in the 20th century. Even now, despite the evidence mounting against it, the postmodern movement can’t shake its initial conviction that Man possesses the tools and wisdom to master Nature. I can’t even grant Siddiqui the benefit of presuming that she means well. “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” she states in dead earnest, meaning that the whole business of reproduction ought to be taken out of the hands of Nature and placed in the omniscient hands of the Conditioners.

More to the point, I can’t believe that anyone means well who thinks that people with congenital defects and diseases don’t deserve to exist, or that they have lives that aren’t worth living. Ableism is a pernicious form of elitism, the kind of mentality that leads to master races and ruling classes. I’m quite sure Siddiqui would never advocate putting to death adult victims of retinitis pigmentosa, like her mother. But when you’ve convinced yourself that the acorn is not an oak, that the unborn aren’t human, you can convince yourself that some of them don’t deserve to be born.