As the keynote speaker at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast this year, Monsignor James Shea spoke on the theme of hope. A central example of the speech was children present a particularly pure source of hope.

Yet, society consistently misdirects its hope. This point was the flip side of Shea’s example: We do so toward the end of creating a perfect earthly world, in a general sense, as well as toward self-interest, more locally.

So it is with the technology industry or those ill-intentioned players we name under Big Tech, and so it is with in vitro fertilization, a subsidiary. Hope is placed in the prospect of having a child and stops short of the moral considerations that make the value of the child intelligible. It proposes: If you want a child, you can make one. (Consider abortion the contrapositive: If you do not want a child, you can unmake one.)

Infertility is undoubtedly a painful experience. To want to alleviate it is a charitable desire, and so people are attracted to the great good of a child as a straightforward solution; ethics and nature go by the wayside in the process. No matter what it feels like, which is probably chaos, IVF is a categorical grasp for agency. All proximate hope for fulfillment is then placed in this child, who comes to be the justification for countless actions. The same framing goes for the children who are either frozen indefinitely or destroyed — they just do not end up the living proof since it is necessary to memory-hole them if we want to keep on with the procedure.

Except, most people do not want to discard the several other embryos generated per round of IVF. They probably identify with the embryos to some degree, whether in terms of explicit progeny or vague responsibility. To which one asks: What induces someone to be willing to get rid of something in which she sees herself distilled? What of self-image turns to condemn offspring?

These questions warrant multi-essay responses, something that will not be satisfied here. But they bring us to consider what hand technology has had in advancing that unfortunate relational reality. Unavoidable in it is the parallel reality Big Tech is busy constructing for us. A perfect world is, of course, not possible, but we inch closer to being convinced that it is, or at least convinced that the way to get there is boundless innovation. Right now, that perfect world consists of a life online.

This is a zoomed-out version of the principle from just earlier: IVF misplaces hope. Rather than a medical procedure — and thankfully with much less gravity — the concept is what software engineer Marc Andreessen termed “reality privilege.” For some, he said, the real world is beautiful and stimulating, and for others, the online world “will be immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them.”

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Again, it is the wrong posture to take in staking all hope for fulfillment in a brainchild, one that cuts out the human experience and has no real end. At best, it confuses what we are to make of creation. Further, you might even wonder whether it is a malicious entrapment of the user.

Either way, the idea partly explains the frame of mind that entertains IVF as an ethical option. The more our self-image is a reflection of internet-based modes of operating, such as with social media or most work we do nowadays, the more dispensable humanity is. Life is increasingly distant from physical action, divorced from consequences, and reduced to character-playing — something more self-centered and less self-interested. People have feared as much since technological innovation became a real possibility. Now, we are seeing one stark but preventable example in IVF.