“Sex is for fun. Embryo screening is for babies.”

That’s one motto of industrial eugenicist Noor Siddiqui, whose company makes babies in a lab, investigates their genes, eliminates the undesirable ones, and implants the desirable ones.

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If you make babies the old-fashioned way, Siddiqui warned, you could curse your child with mental illness, obesity, brown eyes, or average height. If, instead, you cut her a massive check, you could help your child “win the genetic lottery.”

Siddiqui paints her corporation as a humanitarian effort. She told the New York Times that she was inspired to start it because of her mother’s blindness, which was caused by a random gene mutation.

The world has always had mad scientists. The United States has always had ruthless capitalists who peddle fear to exploit desperate customers. The comic-book villain, with the brutal childhood origin story, has always been a classic character.

However, for the past 80 years or so, the Western world has generally rejected eugenics. The guy or gal who tries to play God to weed out the unfit with the goal of perfecting the human race is always the bad guy in the story.

However, in the year 2025, this may be changing.

President Donald Trump declared himself the president of in vitro fertilization, promising all sorts of subsidies for the industry. The U.S. was already an IVF destination. Here, everything is permitted: polygenic screening and sex selection are regular practices. You can make a hundred babies in vitro, pick the blue-eyed one, and put the rest of them in a freezer indefinitely. Surrogacy, egg donation, sperm donation — it’s all here on offer, and Trump’s plans would turbocharge it all.

Trump has not explicitly endorsed eugenics, but others have — or at least come pretty close.

The tech-libertarian world is enthusiastic about this brave new world and, in fact, pretty disdainful of those who, due to religion or worry about unforeseen consequences, resist this push.

As Canada and parts of Europe rush to embrace euthanasia, with a nod to the cost-saving it provides for their socialized medicine, it is inevitable that similar pressure campaigns will build in the U.S. to steer parents away from the old-fashioned, “riskier” way of making babies.

Of course, abortion has already taken us pretty far down this path. Recall the news report a few years back that “Iceland is on pace to virtually eliminate Down syndrome through abortion.” Likewise, author Malcolm Gladwell reported a couple of decades ago that abortion was removing criminals from our population.

WE ARE BOUND TO IVF BY INDIFFERENCE

Consider that Siddiqui uses similar terminology to the abortion lobby, proclaiming “our bodies, our choice.” She touts the company as a feminist enterprise and promises to empower women’s “reproductive decision-making.”

With allies in industry, the White House, capital, tech, and feminism, will eugenics, for the first time since before Hitler, shed its bad reputation in the U.S?