All the Customers Are Wrong

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) recently filmed herself injecting medication into her stomach, uploaded the video to the internet, and announced that she is preparing to freeze her eggs. The responses from the political right mostly fall into the following categories: 1) “She’ll be 37 soon, so what is she waiting for?,” 2) “Hasn’t she been with the same guy for years, what are they waiting for?,” 3) “There are significant health risks to the baby and to her, given her age, so she shouldn’t be trying to have a kid, let alone waiting to have a kid,” 4) “The odds that she’ll have a successful pregnancy later are not so great, so she’ll be disappointed,” 5) “If she does have a child who then becomes a parent, she’ll be rather old as a grandma, or possibly die before meeting any grandchildren,” 6) “She was just telling people to not have children because of climate change, what a hypocrite,” and 6) “She claims to be a Catholic, but this is against Catholic teachings, what a hypocrite.”

These are all legitimate points, but they err in focusing on AOC’s personal circumstances. The objections summarized above center on whether egg freezing is a sound choice (morally, ethically, practically, and medically) for her specifically. Rather than criticize AOC for seeking to artificially preserve eggs, we should instead discuss whether freezing eggs — and the IVF procedures that normally follow — should happen at all.

My answer — dare I say, the answer — is no, for a long list of reasons that can’t be explained in a single article, let alone a blog post. But here’s a basic summary of my position. Even if a series of perfectly designed scientific studies were to find that IVF results in exactly zero health consequences for all parties involved, we should not allow a technology that treats human beings as customizable products. (I’ve written here and here about eugenics in the IVF industry; it is a small leap from “do not implant the embryo with Down syndrome” to “implant only the embryos with blonde hair and blue eyes.”) And even if the law prevented eugenic practices such as genetic editing or selective implantation, IVF still subverts our understanding of parenthood by treating children as an entitlement justified by longing, yearning, and desire. Hopeful parents (technically customers) at IVF clinics think that they are owed the product (a human being) for which they paid heaps of money. Ultimately, these aspiring parents believe that they deserve a child because they want one, and that they have earned a particular type of child if they paid to create, test, and select it.