When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like something safely locked in the past, an embarrassment we’ve collectively outgrown.

But I’ve come to wonder whether eugenics is really gone, or whether it has simply learned to rebrand itself. Instead of state-mandated sterilizations, we now have fertility startups promising “freedom” through egg freezing and embryo selection. Instead of crude racial hierarchies drawn by hand, we have sleek apps offering to optimize the “best traits” for future children. Instead of white-coated doctors backed by governments, we have DIY biohackers in Silicon Valley garages wielding CRISPR kits like toys, a reality underscored by widely available home gene-editing kits like those once sold by The Odin – a biotech company that markets CRISPR tools to hobbyists for as little as $150.

The vocabulary has shifted from “fitness” to “choice,” from “purity” to “optimization,” but the underlying logic feels hauntingly familiar: some lives are deemed more worth living than others.

On the surface, these technologies are marketed as liberation. Egg freezing gives women “more time.” Genetic testing promises “healthy children.” Biohacking offers the dream of human enhancement. Who could be against choice, empowerment or progress?

But dig deeper and the cracks show. Egg freezing is empowerment only if you can afford the thousands of dollars per cycle, plus annual storage fees. Genetic “optimization” often slides into the language of better and worse, normal and abnormal – a moral weight that reduces human complexity to a handful of markers. The DIY CRISPR movement plays at democratization, yet risks turning the human body into an experiment without informed consent or meaningful safeguards.

These aren’t just technical questions; they’re moral ones. Whose “freedom” are we really talking about? Whose bodies are being improved, and who is left behind?

It’s tempting to treat these tools as neutral – as if science is just discovery, divorced from power. But science has never been neutral. It has always reflected the hierarchies, economies and prejudices of its time. Today is no different.

When access to reproductive technology depends on wealth, inequality gets written into biology. Imagine a future where the affluent can screen out “undesirable” traits, enhance cognitive or athletic potential, or delay reproduction indefinitely while the poor are left to navigate higher risks, fewer choices and deeper stigma. That isn’t freedom. That’s genetic class warfare.

And yet, this future is not speculative. Fertility companies already advertise packages that rank embryos by “viability” and “quality.” For example, Genomic Prediction has promoted “expanded preimplantation genetic testing,” which claims to score embryos not just for disease risk but also for predicted health outcomes.

Venture capitalists already describe biohacking as the next trillion-dollar industry. For example, Andreessen Horowitz has publicly promoted consumer biotech and longevity startups as areas of investment opportunities, framing biohacking and enhancement as the next frontier of tech investment.

The old eugenics was state-imposed. The new eugenics might be consumer-driven, marketed as choice, sold as lifestyle, powered by inequality.

For humanists, the question is not whether science is good or bad. We value discovery, curiosity and reason. The question is how we use it, and to what ends. Do we treat biology as a marketplace, where only those with resources can buy their way into healthier, longer, “better” lives? Or do we demand an ethic of solidarity, where science expands possibilities for everyone, not just the privileged few?

This is not just about genetics or fertility. It’s about dignity. What does it mean to safeguard human worth in a world where DNA itself can be branded, packaged and sold? What happens to our sense of equality when technology makes it possible to codify inequality into bodies, not just bank accounts?

We need to reject the binary: either we embrace every new technology uncritically, or we shun science altogether. Humanism calls us to something harder and more hopeful: to imagine technologies that serve human dignity rather than undermine it.

One of the most unsettling truths about eugenics is that it never entirely went away, it just adapted. After the horrors of Nazi Germany, overt talk of “racial purity” became taboo in much of the West. But in subtler forms, the same logic lived on. In the United States, sterilizations of women in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and Indigenous communities continued well into the late 20th century. In other countries, population control campaigns targeted the poor and marginalized under the guise of “development.” Eugenics was simply renamed family planning, public health or modernization.

This history matters, because it shows that the line between empowerment and coercion is razor thin. Who decides whether reproductive technology expands freedom or narrows it? Who defines what counts as a “defect” or a “desirable trait?” These are not just scientific questions. They are political, cultural and economic. And when they are left in the hands of the powerful, the results have rarely favored equality.

Today, when a fertility startup markets itself as “giving women more options,” I ask: which women? The executives and influencers who can spend $15,000 on an egg freezing cycle? Or the single mother juggling three jobs without health insurance? When a genetic company offers parents the ability to rank embryos by risk factors, I ask: who decides what risks are worth avoiding? Does a 10% increased chance of ADHD justify discarding a potential life? What about dyslexia? What about being short, or having a higher body mass index?

The categories may sound clinical, but they carry centuries of stigma and discrimination. Part of what makes the new eugenics so insidious is its vocabulary. It rarely uses the blunt, offensive language of the past. Instead, it cloaks itself in the language of self-improvement and consumer choice.

Think of how fitness apps encourage us to “optimize” our routines, or how wellness influencers promise to “hack” our diets for peak performance. The same mindset now creeps into reproduction: don’t just have a child, optimize them. Don’t just love the randomness of biology, curate it. In this worldview, children are no longer mysteries to embrace, but projects to manage, investments to perfect. What happens to parenting when your child is not just your child, but also the result of a series of choices, choices you paid for, choices you’re told will “maximize” their potential? If the child struggles, does that become a failure of your consumer decision-making? If they excel, is it really their achievement or the triumph of a carefully optimized embryo?

In chasing control, we risk cheapening the very thing that makes parenting profound: its unpredictability, its humbling reminder that love cannot be engineered. The truth is, none of this is accidental. It’s the inevitable result of letting market logic dictate human reproduction.

In the United States especially, health care is already stratified by class. Wealthier families can afford IVF, egg freezing, surrogacy and genetic screening. Poorer families struggle to afford basic prenatal care. Layer onto that a culture obsessed with productivity, performance and competition, and it’s no surprise that reproduction becomes just another arena where the market promises winners and punishes losers.

This is where the new eugenics reveals its sharpest edge. Not in some dystopian government decree, but in the quiet normalization of inequality. If only some parents can afford to select embryos with fewer health risks, or more “favorable” traits, the gap between classes widens not just in education or opportunity, but in biology itself. We create a feedback loop: wealth allows genetic advantages, which produce more wealth, which buys even greater biological edge.

That isn’t science fiction. It’s capitalism applied to the human genome.

No conversation about eugenics can avoid the question of disability. Genetic testing is often justified by the desire to reduce suffering by screening out conditions like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs. Few would deny the pain such illnesses can cause. But here’s the deeper dilemma: who gets to decide which conditions are “unbearable,” and which are simply part of human diversity?

Deaf communities, for example, have long resisted being treated as defective. Many see deafness not as a disease but as a culture, a way of life with its own language and richness. Yet prenatal testing routinely frames deafness as something to eliminate. Similarly, people with Down syndrome often live fulfilling, joyful lives surrounded by loving families. But in countries with widespread prenatal screening, pregnancies with Down syndrome diagnoses are terminated at high rates. In Iceland, for instance, CBS News reported that nearly 100% of such pregnancies end in termination following prenatal screening. These decisions are rarely framed as eugenics. They are presented as compassionate, rational, even responsible. Yet at their core, they echo the same judgment: some lives are less worth living than others. That should trouble anyone who believes in equal dignity.

On the other end of the spectrum are the biohackers, the enthusiasts who see CRISPR kits and genetic tinkering as the next frontier of self-expression. They speak in utopian terms: why not design bodies that are stronger, smarter or more beautiful? Why not rewrite evolution itself?

The danger here is not just technical (though the risks of unintended mutations are immense). It is philosophical. The biohacker worldview assumes the body is a blank slate to be rewritten at will, a mere platform for performance. But humanism teaches us something different: that dignity is not found in perfection, but in imperfection; not in control, but in the capacity to flourish even within limits.

If we reduce humanity to an endless quest for optimization, we risk hollowing out the very thing we claim to enhance. We risk creating not stronger humans, but more anxious ones forever measuring themselves against some imagined genetic ideal.

So what would a humanist vision of reproductive technology look like? First, it would begin with equity. If technologies like IVF, genetic screening or egg freezing are truly empowering, then access should not be limited to the affluent. Public funding and universal health coverage could ensure that reproductive choice is not a luxury, but a right.

Second, it would reject the language of optimization. Science can and should help prevent suffering where possible, but it must never slide into ranking lives by value. Instead, we should champion diversity as a strength, recognizing that human variation – including disability – is part of what makes our species resilient, creative and compassionate.

Third, it would center ethics over profit. Fertility clinics and biotech firms should not be left to market themselves unchecked, using fear and aspiration to drive sales. Transparent regulation, ethical oversight and democratic debate are essential if we are to steer these tools toward justice rather than inequality.

Finally, a humanist vision would ask not just what is possible, but what is wise. Just because we can rewrite DNA does not mean we always should. The challenge is not to halt science, but to anchor it in values that affirm dignity, equality and solidarity.

Perhaps the greatest danger is not the technology itself, but our capacity to forget. Forget how easily noble intentions slide into exclusion. Forget how quickly markets exploit our insecurities. Forget how history has shown, again and again, that the desire to perfect humanity often ends in cruelty.

The past warns us, but the present tempts us to look away. After all, what could be wrong with choice? What harm is optimization? But if we listen closely, we can hear the old eugenics whispering beneath the new branding. It tells us that some lives are better than others. It tells us that dignity can be purchased, engineered or discarded.

Humanism must answer differently. It must say: every life is equal in worth, regardless of ability, wealth or genetic profile. It must say: science belongs to all of us, not just to those who can pay. And it must say: the future of humanity is not perfection, but solidarity.

The true test of our values is not whether we can push the boundaries of biology, but whether we can do so without abandoning the principle that every life has equal worth. That’s the future humanists must fight for: not one of “perfected” bodies, but one of dignity and equality.