The future of reproduction now fits in your hand, on your phone. Embryo-screening companies like Nucleus Genomics, Orchid, and Genomic Prediction promise to make one of life’s most intimate decisions as simple as scrolling on a phone, with interfaces mirroring dating apps and health dashboards. If the medium is the message, then these apps are teaching parents to approach their embryonic children through the logic of optimization, risk management, and control. In this scenario, the child becomes something to tap, swipe, or delete.

These companies now occupy a rapidly expanding corner of the fertility industry. Each offers polygenic risk scores for embryos and, in some cases, whole-genome sequencing. For these companies, it’s not just about helping parents have a child, but a certain kind of child.

Scrolling through all 2,196 potential diseases tested by Nucleus Genomics—2-methylbutyrylglycinuria, aceruloplasminemia, amelogenesis imperfecta type IA—most parents will encounter conditions they’ve likely never heard of nor know much about, aside from the brief description and risk score the company provides. It’s a smart business model: tap into a parents’ natural desire to have a healthy baby, advertise that your company can help them have “their best baby,” genetically test their human embryos for over 2,000 potential diseases and traits including IQ, then present a sleek interface that invites parents to compare, filter, and rank their own embryos.

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The illusion of mastery feels responsible, even obligatory. I didn’t go to business school, but it seems that a company that taps into a parents’ deepest fears and sells them a product of predicted health outcomes that can’t be validated for between one and 85 years is a rather lucrative gig.

Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan saw this coming long before smartphones or artificial intelligence existed. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), he argued that the medium is the message: every technology must be judged not only by what it does, but by its “psychic and social consequences.” As he warned, “the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.”

The interface offered by Nucleus Genomics illustrates this perfectly. Visit the website, and you are greeted by baby pictures (to which my toddler exclaimed, “awe, mama, babies!”) with numeric ratings on each picture: -4% breast cancer risk, +4 height, -1% Alzheimer’s risk.

The content is about having a healthy baby. But the character of the medium conveys something else: a friction-free vision of parenting in which children exist on our terms. If doomscrolling already correlates with anxiety, hypervigilance, and a need to control one’s environment, how much more does a dating-app-like embryo report card intensify our desire to control what kind of child we have? The medium shapes the user just as much as the user tries to shape the child—an orientation that stands in stark contrast to the unconditional love that should define parenthood.

This is, in effect, consumer eugenics. Those in favor of polygenic embryo screening recoil from the term “eugenics,” often offering two defenses. Some compare embryo screening to choosing a spouse: if we accept “selection” there, why not here? Others point to adult genetic screening for conditions like breast cancer. But these analogies confuse two fundamentally different categories.

Choosing a spouse is a decision about one’s own life; embryo selection is a decision imposed on another human being, determining their life, death, or indefinite freezing. And adult disease screening, likewise, is voluntary and oriented toward treatment, not destruction. As Ari Schulman, editor of the New Atlantis, noted on X, “Cancer screening prevents disease by helping the patient live. Embryo screening prevents disease by killing the patient.” Indeed, decisions about who one marries or what medical treatments they pursue are categorically different from decisions that eliminate another self.

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Meanwhile, the scientific certainty these companies rely on is far less robust than their marketing suggests. In 2019, for example, researchers tested whether genetic tests could correctly predict and correspond with which siblings were the tallest in multiple family units. (Height is a trait that geneticists understand best.) They were right only 25% of the time.

The public seems uneasy about all this. Polling from the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that four in five Americans have concerns about embryo screening. In particular, over half of Trump voters and 40% of Harris voters say IQ-based embryo selection should be illegal.

As Professor Benjamin Hurlbut told Axios, the real question reaches beyond health or science. “In his view, the right question isn't, ‘Is embryo genetic screening good technology?’ but, ‘Is it good for a parent-child relationship to begin this way?’” Instead of beginning with wonder, anticipation, and unconditional love, embryo screening trains us to greet our children—even as embryos—with suspicion, fear, and a calculated precision unbecoming of creatures made in the image of God.

If McLuhan is right, then the message of these technologies is not better health, but a remaking of children as products to be optimized rather than persons to be received with unconditional love.