End inherited suffering forever, or open the door to designer humans and a new kind of inequality? Healing, or playing God with the next generation?
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Add your commentMy daughter has Down syndrome. She is 11. She loves Taylor Swift, hates broccoli, has more genuine kindness in her than most adults I know, and will outlive the idea that her life isn't worth living. I am not opposed to editing. I am opposed to the assumption baked into these conversations that a life like hers is self-evidently a tragedy to be prevented. She wasn't consulted on that framing.
No one is saying your daughter's life has no value. But Down syndrome has a broad spectrum. Some individuals live independently and thrive. Others require total lifelong care. Pretending the question of whether to prevent the condition is purely about 'erasing people like her' is emotionally powerful but intellectually unfair.
my daughter has sickle cell. she's 7 and has already spent more nights in hospital than out of one. anyone who thinks editing that out of future kids is 'playing god' can come sit with her during a pain crisis and explain their position to her face.
my daughter has sickle cell. she's 9. she's been in the hospital 14 times. FOURTEEN. anyone who thinks editing that out of existence is somehow morally complicated has never sat with a child screaming in a pain crisis at 2am. i'm sorry but no. this isn't complicated for me.
I'm a geneticist. Let me offer some precision here because the debate is collapsing genuinely distinct things. Monogenic diseases — single-gene disorders like Tay-Sachs or Huntington's — are categorically different from polygenic traits like intelligence or height. The former are realistic edit targets TODAY. The latter involve thousands of variants with minuscule individual effects and enormous environmental interaction. 'It starts with cystic fibrosis and ends with designer geniuses' overstates current and near-future capability by about 50 years, conservatively.
Thank you for this. The scientific illiteracy in these conversations drives me up the wall. People think gene editing is like a dropdown menu. It is not.
Sure, it's not a dropdown menu today. Technologies have a funny habit of advancing. The 'that's science fiction' argument against concern has a terrible historical track record.
If you could spare your child a lifetime of a brutal genetic disease and you chose NOT to out of 'playing God' squeamishness, that's not virtue, that's letting them suffer for your comfort.
I'm autistic and I want to say this clearly: the question of whether my existence is a 'disease to be edited out' is not abstract to me. I'm not broken. I think differently. Some of that is hard. A lot of it is also genuinely valuable, to me and to others. Please stop having this conversation without us in it.
Thank you for saying this. The voices most affected by this debate are the most consistently talked over.
I respect this deeply and I'm not dismissing it, but there's a spectrum here. Being autistic is different from having a condition that causes unrelenting physical pain and early death. Both deserve to be in the conversation. Neither should crowd out the other.
My wife and I are both carriers for a condition that gives any child of ours a 1-in-4 chance of a brutal short life. We've been through IVF twice. The casual way people in this comment section throw around 'but what about slippery slopes' while we've been living the actual slope — I don't have words.
I hear you and I'm sorry. For what it's worth, most people arguing the slippery slope aren't dismissing your situation — they're scared of where the technology ends up in a society with no guardrails. The two concerns can coexist even if it doesn't feel that way when you're in the middle of it.
I'm a geneticist. Not a famous one. Just a lab rat. The off-target effects problem is still real and understated in popular coverage. We're getting better at precision but 'better' is not 'solved.' I'd want another decade of somatic-cell work before anyone edits a germline routinely. The caution isn't theological, it's technical.
Finally someone with actual credentials. The public debate leaps straight to ethics before the science is even settled. Thank you.
Credentials aren't arguments. A geneticist can be wrong. Evaluate the reasoning not the badge.
I've been disabled my whole life — spinal muscular atrophy — and I have a profoundly ambivalent reaction to this. I'm not my disease, but my disease shaped who I am completely. Would I edit it out if I could go back? Honestly I don't know. I genuinely don't know. That uncertainty deserves space in this conversation.
This is so important. The disability community is not monolithic on this and anyone acting like they represent 'what disabled people think' should sit down and listen for a while.
Thank you for sharing this. Genuinely. Though I'd push back gently — the question isn't really 'would you undo your own life' (no one would, because then you wouldn't exist). The question is whether a parent should be able to prevent that path for a future child. Those are different moral questions.
Actually no, they're not entirely different. If the person who LIVES the condition isn't sure it needed preventing, that matters enormously for the ethics of the parent's choice. You can't just bracket that as irrelevant.
I asked my son — he's 19 now, has had spinal muscular atrophy his whole life — whether he wishes he'd been edited before birth if that had been possible. He said, genuinely, that he doesn't know. That the life he has is the one he knows how to live, and he's not sure a different version of him would be him. I don't know what to do with that answer. I don't think he does either. But I think it deserves to be in this conversation.
This is the personal identity problem and it's genuinely hard. Derek Parfit spent a lot of his career on this. The person who would have been born without the condition isn't 'your son minus the SMA' — it might be a fundamentally different person entirely. Whether preventing a condition harms the hypothetical person or simply changes which person exists is a question without a clean answer.
I work in a NICU. I have watched parents hold infants through conditions that are now theoretically editable. The abstraction of this debate from the inside of a hospital is staggering. Whatever the right answer is, it has to reckon with what these diseases actually look like.
The 'slippery slope' argument is the laziest thing in bioethics. By that logic we never should have done organ transplants, IVF, or chemotherapy. Every advance gets the same 'but where does it END' panic. Regulate it properly and move on.
Genuine question for the 'just regulate it' crowd: which government do you trust to draw and hold that line? Because I'm looking at the global landscape and I'm not overflowing with confidence.
We regulate nuclear technology. We regulate pharmaceuticals. Imperfectly, yes — but 'regulation is imperfect' is not the same as 'regulation is impossible.' The argument proves too much.
lol at comparing gene editing to drug approval. one is tweaking a molecule, the other is rewriting the blueprint of a human being and every human being that person will ever have. the scale of potential error is not remotely comparable
I'm a genetic counselor and I want to gently push back on the binary this debate keeps setting up. Patients I work with aren't debating philosophy — they're making heartbreaking decisions with incomplete information and genuine grief involved. The smug certainty on BOTH sides of this thread is exhausting from where I sit.
The 'playing God' argument loses me every time. We play God when we give insulin to diabetics. We play God with chemotherapy. We play God with C-sections that save mothers who would have died in childbirth for millennia. At what exact point did 'playing God' become okay and why is the genome the sacred line?
ok but theres a difference between treating a condition someone already has and rewriting a person before they exist. one is medicine. the other is something else. i dont have a clean word for it but it feels fundamentally different and I think that feeling is pointing at something real
The feeling is pointing at unfamiliarity, not at ethics. Novel things feel wrong. That's a cognitive bias, not a moral framework.
The He Jiankui case should be front and center in every one of these discussions. A scientist actually did germline editing on human babies, those children are now living with undisclosed off-target effects, and the scientific community found out via a YouTube video. That's what 'we'll regulate it' looks like in practice.
He Jiankui is exactly why we need robust international governance, not why we should abandon the research. Bad actors doing something badly is an argument for better oversight, not for freezing science in place.
where is this 'robust international governance' going to come from lmao. we can't agree on climate. we can't agree on nuclear. but we're going to build a binding global bioethics treaty that every country actually follows? come on.
The history of eugenics is not a slippery slope argument. It literally happened. States decided which traits were worthy. Disabled people were sterilized. This happened in living memory in multiple democratic countries. 'Trust the institutions to draw the line' is a statement that requires some serious engagement with that history before it deserves credibility.
Bringing up the history of eugenics every time gene editing comes up is weaponizing context. The science was fraudulent. It was used by states against individuals. What we're discussing now is parents making decisions for their own children with accurate science. The power dynamic is completely inverted. The comparison is designed to shut down thinking, not advance it.
The power dynamic is inverted until there's social pressure, insurance incentives, or cost considerations that make 'choosing not to edit' effectively penalized. Then it isn't really individual parental choice anymore is it. The state doesn't have to mandate it directly.
I carry the BRCA1 mutation. Had a preventive double mastectomy at 34. Would I have wanted my parents to edit that out? Yesterday I'd have said obviously yes. Today I'm not sure. My cancer scare made me who I am. I don't think that's sentimental — I think it's honest. I genuinely don't know what I'd want.
ok but you got to CHOOSE to have the surgery. the child doesn't get to choose whether they're edited. those are two completely different ethical situations and mixing them up muddies everything.
The child also doesn't get to choose whether they're born with Tay-Sachs. The 'consent' argument cuts both ways and people only ever apply it in the direction that preserves the disease.
The 'playing God' argument has always been a placeholder for 'I haven't thought about this carefully yet.' Every vaccine, every surgery, every C-section is playing God by that logic. We've been intervening in nature since we figured out how fire works.
The inequality point is the one that should scare everybody and somehow gets the least attention. If this becomes a premium medical service — and in most countries it will — you end up with a literal biological aristocracy within two generations. That's not a slippery slope, that's the obvious commercial endpoint.
So your solution to 'rich people will get it first' is... nobody gets it? Tell that to the kids with the disease. The answer to healthcare inequality is to fix healthcare inequality, not to ban treatments.
That's a clean line in theory. In practice every 'basic treatment' eventually becomes an enhancement vector. LASIK started as correcting blindness and is now routine cosmetic surgery for people with mild prescriptions. Mission creep is not hypothetical.
The real question that nobody is asking: who decides what counts as a disease? Deafness is considered a disease by hearing people and a culture by many Deaf communities. Homosexuality was in the DSM until 1973. The power to define 'what needs fixing' is enormous and has been catastrophically abused before.
This is the argument I've been waiting for in this thread. The governance question is the whole game. Who holds the pen that writes the definition of 'disease' is who holds the power over what kinds of humans get to exist.
Strong agree on the governance point but I think it argues FOR heavy regulation and international oversight, not against the technology itself. Ban it and it just moves to jurisdictions that don't care.
Here's the question nobody is asking: who decides what counts as a 'disease'? Deafness? Many in the Deaf community consider it a culture, not a defect. Autism spectrum? Some autistic people are furious at the implication their existence is a problem to be solved. This is genuinely complicated.
Complicated how? Huntington's kills you. Full stop. There is no Huntington's pride movement because there is nothing to be proud of — it just destroys people. Conflating that with deafness is exactly the muddling being called out already.
Honestly? I've been following CRISPR developments for years and the thing no one in popular coverage talks about is off-target effects. We still don't fully understand what else gets changed when you edit a gene. Some conditions exist because the same alleles confer different advantages in different environments. Sickle cell persists partly because it offers some resistance to malaria. We have a documented history of thinking we understand systems better than we do.
The sickle cell / malaria point is real and important. Removes the 'strictly beneficial edit' framing from its comfort zone. Though I'd note this would be relevant primarily for populations in malaria-endemic regions, and presumably they'd factor that into decisions. It's not a case against editing, it's a case for humility.
what gets me is people treating 'natural' like it's inherently good. natural is cancer. natural is cholera. natural is a child dying at 4 from a genetic disease. i'll take unnatural thanks
I was conceived through IVF in 1988. People said the same things about test-tube babies. Unnatural. Playing God. Slippery slope. I'm sitting here, pretty ordinary, not a harbinger of dystopia. At some point the panic has to be weighed against the actual outcomes.
IVF doesn't alter the genome of every subsequent generation. Gene editing does. The comparison keeps getting made and it keeps being wrong. Germline changes are heritable. IVF babies are not genetically different from naturally conceived ones.
okay the heritable part is genuinely the crux isn't it. you're not just deciding for a child you're deciding for all their children and grandchildren forever. that's an insane amount of power to hand to individual parents.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: we already do this. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis during IVF has been selecting against disease embryos for decades. The outrage about CRISPR is weirdly selective given that we collectively shrugged at PGD.
^ this is actually a really important point and most people in this debate have no idea PGD exists
Honestly? Both things can be true simultaneously. Germline editing for lethal single-gene diseases: probably justified, needs oversight. Enhancement editing: genuinely dangerous and should be prohibited. The debate keeps treating this as binary when it's a spectrum of distinct decisions.
This is the most sensible thing in this whole thread and it has fewer likes than the hot takes. That's the internet for you.
who decides what counts as a disease though. like actually who. a committee? a government? the WHO? because that power is enormous and we just glossed right past it in this whole conversation
This is the question I've been waiting for someone to ask. Thank you. Huntington's, fine, easy call. But then what? Schizophrenia? High genetic risk for depression? Deafness — and yes, there are Deaf people who explicitly do not want their deafness 'cured' and would not edit it out? The line isn't obvious and whoever draws it holds enormous power.
The Deaf community specifically has been vocal about this for years. Deafness in that community is not a deficiency — it's a culture, a language, a way of being in the world. The hearing world's instinct to 'fix' it without asking is paternalistic in a way that should make everyone uncomfortable.
Hard disagree. A child who is edited to have hearing and then discovers Deaf culture can still choose to engage with it. A child born deaf cannot choose to hear. The editing expands options, it doesn't foreclose identity.
You just casually assumed hearing is the neutral default and deafness is the deviation. That's exactly the framing the Deaf community is pushing back on. There's no neutral here.
I think people underestimate how fast 'remove disease' becomes 'optimize.' Not because companies are evil — because parents love their kids and will want every edge for them. That's human nature. The demand will be there the moment the technology allows it.
This is what I keep coming back to. Not corporate greed, not government malice — just ordinary parental love at scale, making a thousand individual rational choices that collectively produce a nightmare outcome. Tragedy of the commons in genetic form.
Nope. Hard disagree. Parental love has driven every medical advance in pediatrics. Demonizing that instinct to prevent a technology is paternalistic and cruel.
Consent. The child being edited cannot consent. Every other medical procedure we perform on a child — even life-saving ones — we treat as a temporary exception until they can consent for themselves. Germline editing is permanent and affects all their descendants. This isn't squeamishness, it's the most basic principle of medical ethics.
By this logic, no parent can make any irreversible decision for a child. Circumcision. Religion. Moving to another country. We accept that parents make permanent, consent-impossible decisions constantly. The consent argument isn't unique to genetics.
circumcision and religion are not heritable changes to every biological descendant your child will ever have. the scale is completely different. this comparison keeps getting made and it keeps not working.
The disability rights angle is real and it's being dismissed too fast in this thread. When you say 'we need to eliminate this condition,' you are implicitly saying people living with it shouldn't have existed. That message lands. It has consequences for how society funds support, accommodation, and respect for living disabled people.
i genuinely dont understand why people act like the alternative to gene editing is some pristine natural human experience. the alternative is a child suffering. thats the actual choice on the table. not editing vs some beautiful natural state, editing vs pain.
Ask yourself this: would YOU want to have been born with Huntington's if your parents could have prevented it? If your honest answer is 'I think I'd still prefer to exist as-is,' that tells you something real about identity and disease that the clinical language misses.
Scientifically speaking: most complex diseases aren't single-gene. Height, intelligence, personality traits — these involve thousands of variants. The 'designer baby' panic assumes a level of genetic determinism that current science doesn't support. We are nowhere near being able to 'order' a smarter child.
Yet. The word you're looking for is 'yet.' We were nowhere near being able to edit single-gene conditions twenty years ago either.
My concern isn't the technology. My concern is that this will be private, expensive, and unregulated in any country that smells money in it. So the rich get edited kids and the rest of us don't. We've already seen this with IVF access. The technology itself isn't the inequality — the economic system it lands in is the inequality.
This exact argument was made against vaccines, against antibiotics, against every medical advance. 'The rich will get it first so we shouldn't develop it.' No. The answer is to develop it AND fight for equitable access. Not to freeze progress because distribution is hard.
Vaccines and antibiotics don't make your children constitutionally different from other children in heritable ways. The stakes are qualitatively different. Please stop reaching for the nearest analogy.
The disability rights community has been raising this exact concern for decades and keeps getting bulldozed by the 'but suffering' argument. There is a whole philosophical tradition here — the expressivist objection — that says using prenatal selection to eliminate a condition sends a message to people already living with it that their existence is a mistake. That's not nothing.
I've heard the expressivist objection and I find it unpersuasive. A couple deciding not to pass on a gene is not making a statement about anyone currently alive. Intentions and social messaging are not the same as logical implication. We need to be careful about letting philosophical frameworks substitute for actual consequences.
If society systematically selects against your type of existence, you will feel the message regardless of the intention behind it. The lived experience of that isn't a philosophical abstraction.
The problem isn't the first generation of careful, medically supervised edits. The problem is what happens 30 years later when the technology has matured, costs have dropped, and 'medical necessity' has been quietly redefined seventeen times by people with financial interests in defining it broadly.
slippery slope isn't an argument it's an admission that you can't engage with the actual question so you invented a hypothetical future where you're right
Slippery slope is a logical fallacy in formal debate class. In policy and technology history, it is frequently just... accurate. Pharmaceutical companies did not start marketing opioids intending to create an addiction crisis either.
Here's what I want someone to explain: why is this a debate about individual parental choice but climate change is a debate about collective action? Both involve making decisions now that shape lives in decades. Both involve people arguing over whose freedom matters. The consistency is all over the place.
Interesting how 'designer babies' always gets framed as the hypothetical boogeyman when we already live in a world that selects for wealth, education, and access to nutrition before birth. The baby being born to poverty is already getting a worse genetic outcome via epigenetics. The outrage about editing is very selectively applied.
epigenetics isn't heritable in the same way, that's not how it works, please don't spread this
we're all gonna pretend this doesn't immediately become a rich people thing? the first decade this exists it costs $200k minimum and only hedge fund managers can access it. so we're just voting to give wealthy families healthier children than poor ones, great plan
Insulin costs $300 in the US and $30 in Canada. The answer to healthcare inequality is healthcare policy, not banning medical advances. Otherwise we'd have rejected every treatment ever developed because it was expensive at launch.
the confidence in that reply assuming healthcare policy will actually fix it is adorable, have you seen American healthcare policy
If your child had a tumor you'd remove it. If your child had a bacterial infection you'd treat it. This is the same instinct applied earlier in the process. The 'playing God' framing is just unfamiliarity dressed up as ethics.
A tumor is not part of the child's identity. A genetic variant might be woven into personality, cognition, experience in ways we don't fully understand. The analogy is too simple.
I'm religious and I actually don't think editing out genuine disease contradicts my faith. God gave us the intelligence to develop these tools. What I'm wary of is the enhancement side — that starts to feel like something different to me. Using gifts to heal vs. using gifts to grasp for more.
This is a more thoughtful religious perspective than I expected in this thread, genuinely. Thank you.
Lost a sibling to an inherited condition that's now editable. Don't you dare lecture me about 'natural' from a comfortable distance. We'd have given anything.
Yes to disease prevention. Hard no to anything else. I will die on this hill. The moment enhancement enters the conversation is the moment we've lost the plot entirely and I'm not interested in anyone's techno-optimist argument for why it'll all be fine.
Religious objection incoming and I know that's an eye-roll for some of you: there's a difference between treating disease in a living person and redesigning human nature before a person exists. One is mercy. The other is manufacturing. I believe that distinction matters morally regardless of your faith.
The 'manufacturing' framing smuggles in a lot of assumptions. Parents already shape their children enormously — diet, education, environment, even which embryo gets implanted via PGT. Why is genetic intervention uniquely manufacturing when all the other interventions aren't?
Because degree matters in ethics. Locking your kid in a room is parenting taken too far. The fact that all parenting involves some control doesn't mean all levels of control are equal.
I keep seeing 'draw the line at suffering' like that's obvious. Pain is not the only form of suffering. A child who grows up knowing their genes were edited — edited to match some standard someone else decided — might suffer from that knowledge in ways we aren't accounting for.
Nope. Hard disagree. If suffering is preventable and you prevent it, you haven't harmed anyone. The child who is never born with Tay-Sachs suffers zero loss from not having Tay-Sachs.
This gets into non-identity problem territory which is genuinely philosophically contentious. Derek Parfit spent a career on exactly this. It's not as simple as 'no harm, no foul.'
ok philosophy guy. while you're citing Parfit, actual children are dying from diseases that we might be able to prevent. there's a time for thought experiments and there's a time to act
Philosophy IS how we decide whether to act and how. 'Just do it because it feels right' is how you get He Jiankui editing embryos in a hotel room with no oversight. The 'just act' impulse is exactly what created the first real CRISPR baby scandal.
Curing a disease and 'designing' a person are not the same act, and the whole debate is people deliberately collapsing them to win the argument. Draw the line at suffering.
It never stops at disease. It starts with 'cure cystic fibrosis' and ends with the rich buying taller, smarter kids while everyone else gets the factory model. Inequality with a genome.
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