Published November 19, 2025
Key Takeaways
- Four in five voters have at least some concerns about the future of embryo screening
- Very few Americans want Silicon Valley to “hack” reproduction
- Commonsense regulations have potential for support across demographic groups
Background
Silicon Valley-funded startups purport to be able to give would-be parents the ability to screen their embryos for genetic traits, such as physical appearance, propensity for disease, even predicted intelligence. Yet while Americans support measures to help infertile couples have children, they express concerns about broader implications of these technologies. Four in five respondents to a new EPPC/YouGov survey about the future of family said they had at least some concerns about the way embryo screening technology could be used.
Additional Information
Backed by billions of dollars of funding from Big Tech, multiple startups in Silicon Valley purport to give parents the ability to screen the embryos they have created to ascertain their propensity for intelligence, appearance, health conditions, personality, and more. While the technology is still unproven, its backers promise an era of “responsible” parenthood, when parents will create and select embryos according to their preferences.
This would radically change the nature of parenthood, turning would-be parents from recipients of the gift of a new child to consumers looking for a product made to order. It would undermine social support and research funding into diseases that would have otherwise been screened out, casting parents who have children naturally as taking an unacceptable risk.
Policy Implications
An era of unfettered embryonic screening could usher in eugenic pressures and remake the relationship between parents and children. To address this challenge, lawmakers could consider:
- Amending the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to ban outright, or limit the commercial sale or advertising of tests that purport to offer the ability to identify an embryo’s predicted physical characteristics, intelligence, or other outcomes.
- Requiring any hospitals, clinics, or research facilities that receive federal funding to adopt best practices that include bioethical safeguards prohibiting the use of predictive algorithms for non-health related screening.
- Expanding federal monitoring of assisted reproduction through the Centers for Disease Control, to include broader reporting on the use of pre-implementation testing and the number of embryos discarded in those processes.
Ramifications
These high-profile fertility screening startups promise parents the ability to “hack” reproduction, offering the chance to bring home a perfectly healthy child, or one with maximum athletic, intellectual, or physical potential. But they are not curing disease or enhancing abilities in the womb—they are simply discarding embryos that don’t make the cut. Only a small minority of Americans say they desire to utilize the kind of genetic screening that is being introduced, but that share is likely to grow over time if these tools are culturally normalized and achieve economies of scale. A pro-family, pro-life Congress would seek to preserve parenthood by banning or regulating the kinds of reimplementation genetic testing that will turn embryos into commodities and make society less welcoming of those whose genetic tests don’t show up as “perfect.”
The 2025 EPPC/YouGov Future of the Family Survey is a nationally representative online survey, with an oversample of adults age 18-45. It had a sample of 1,100 and was weighted on gender, age, race, education, and 2024 presidential vote choice. The margin of error is +/- 4.5 percent. More crosstabs, polling questions, and other levels of analysis are available by contacting Patrick T. Brown: [email protected]
Patrick T. Brown is a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.
