[PhilosophyEvents] Daphne Martschenko, "Pronatalism, the Private Sector, and Genetically Optimized Babies"

[Dan Hicks]

Hello philosophers and friends of philosophy!

Next Friday we’ll have our first speaker series event of 2026:

Pronatalism, the Private Sector, and Genetically Optimized Babies
Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko (Stanford)
Friday, February 6, 3:30-5pm
COB 282

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.

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.

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Dan Hicks
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Merced

Pronouns: they/them/their

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