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<div style="line-break:after-white-space">Hello philosophers and friends of philosophy!
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<div>Next Friday we’ll have our first speaker series event of 2026: </div>
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<div style="text-align:center"><font size="4">Pronatalism, the Private Sector, and Genetically Optimized Babies</font></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><font size="3">Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko (Stanford)</font></div>
<div style="text-align:center">Friday, February 6, 3:30-5pm</div>
<div style="text-align:center">COB 282</div>
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<div style="text-align:left">A resurgence of concern about declining birthrates has fueled pronatalist policies and cultural narratives that valorize reproduction as a social good. At the same time, advances in reproductive genetics are expanding the possibilities
for selecting embryos based on genetic profiles, including polygenic risk scores for complex traits. Once limited to rare disease prevention, embryo selection is increasingly marketed as a means of optimizing future offspring. This emerging landscape is shaped
in part by pronatalist private-sector innovation and consumer demand, raising new ethical, legal, and social questions about the aims and limits of reproductive choice. Together, these forces situate embryo selection at the intersection of biomedical entrepreneurship,
demographic anxiety, and moral reasoning about responsibility, health, and the future. This talk explores the connections between pronatalism, techno-optimism, and embryo selection and argues that while the technologies that are being financed and used by
tech-elite pronatalists are new, the push to have as many babies as possible and the best babies possible is not. </div>
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<div style="text-align:left">Daphne O. Martschenko, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is co-author of the book What We Inherit, which unpacks contentious social, ethical, and policy issues related to the DNA revolution
and currently working on her second book TechnoBaby: The Troubling Race to Make and Raise ‘Better’ Babies.</div>
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<div>Dan Hicks</div>
<div>Associate Professor and Chair</div>
<div>Department of Philosophy</div>
<div>University of California, Merced</div>
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<div>Pronouns: they/them/their</div>
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