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“How are babies made?” is an age-old question that has sent centuries of parents scrambling for an answer. The go-to explanation, of course, goes something like “Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much…” A new in vitro fertilization experiment that yielded eight “healthy” live births after injecting purchased eggs with the DNA of a man and another woman, however, threatens to invalidate that reliable response.
Researchers in the United Kingdom, which rearranged its laws in 2015 to accommodate the “pronuclear transfer” trials, pitched their “three-person IVF” experiment as a means to lessen the chances of mitochondrial mutations that lead to genetic disorders in infants conceived via IVF.
Corporate media outlets across the globe, such as The Guardian and Financial Times, echoed those talking points in their coverage of the venture.
In a largely unregulated landscape like that of the U.S., however, it’s easy to see how a procedure promoted as a way to reduce the risk of life-threatening diseases can easily become a cover for something far more sinister, such as eugenics.
In this particular case, the UK researchers’ success in producing live babies born of three people’s DNA no doubt opens the door for bringing more people into the sacred act of reproduction.
Scientists have already made headway in the campaign to cut women out of reproduction by reprogramming adult male mice stem cells to become usable eggs. The lead researcher on that particular project expressed to an eager press that it is “theoretically possible to produce babies from male-male [human] couples.”
Now, scientists are not only paving the way for homosexual couples who want both of their DNA included in the process of commissioning children via IVF, but also for people in sexual relationships with more than one person.
There is a growing push in pop culture and corporate media to normalize and even legally recognize so-called “polyamorous” relationships and their parenting. One such example is the recently released TLC show PolyFamily, which follows a glorified group of swingers who pretend they don’t care which of their babies share certain pairings’ DNA.
The children who result from or are subject to these arrangements are at a much higher risk of abuse and endangerment than kids who live with their married biological mother and father. Yet, the expansion of assisted reproductive technology (ART) experiments, such as manipulating mitochondria, does nothing but embolden these inherently dysfunctional arrangements.
In fact, there is a not-so-secret hoard of activists that welcome unconventional reproduction because it distorts the definition of marriage and family.
The ongoing destruction of marriage and family in the Western world not only devastates children, putting them at higher risk for financial, social, and emotional consequences, but also society. Fertility rates and family structures are heavily responsible for “shaping the economic and political fortunes of nations.”
The more that developed countries rely on ART like IVF and the ever-evolving in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), the more they are expected to regress into dystopia described only in fiction.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
