Meet the IQ Test Tube Babies

The right is pouring money into companies that purport to optimize embryos. Privately, the pro-natalist movement is more explicit about its eugenicist project.

In conversations with an undercover reporter from the British organization Hope Not Hate, a leader of the so-called “pro-natalist” movement gave away the game.

“I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” said a former head of the non-profit group Pronatalist.org. She went on three times to refer to her work as eugenics. 

The pro-natalist movement, particularly the outlandish couple behind Pronatalist.org, sometimes launders its birth-rate panics through gentler language about improving outcomes for all families, regardless of demographics. Behind closed doors, that language changes. At last year’s NatalCon, for instance, the mostly-male speakers described themselves as engaged in a battle to out-breed their ideological and demographic rivals. 

An ascendant wing of the movement takes the idea of selective breeding to its obvious—if pseudoscientific—ends. Hope Not Hate revealed a dense network of racists and pro-natalists behind an up-and-coming gene-testing company that purports to let wealthy couples screen and select embryos for their potential intelligence. That company joins others, many with links to conservative megadonor Peter Thiel, in suggesting that their technologies can be used to create ultra-optimized babies. And while the science of selecting embryos for intelligence is dubious at best, these companies are helping the pro-natalist movement give eugenics a 21st century rebrand.

“When we talk to reporters we’re very, ‘Oh this isn’t just for the elites,’” Malcolm Collins, one of founders of Pronatalist.org told an undercover Hope Not Hate investigator, “but, in truth, we do target the elites unfortunately.”

Malcolm and his wife Simone, with whom he runs his pro-natalist organization, said they selected their own embryos for potential intelligence through screening from the secretive biotech company PolygenX, which currently only offers services to vetted customers, at a quoted price of $50,000. A second Hope Not Hate investigation found PolygenX to have worked closely with avowed advocates for eugenics, including one who was revealed in a data leak to have purchased Nazi propaganda posters and an anti-immigrant novel by a neo-Nazi singer.

The pro-natalist movement seldom voices these views so explicitly, and many of the people featured in Hope Not Hate’s investigations denied affiliation with the racist right. Nevertheless, a new field of fertility tech companies has attracted far-right funding with wink-wink suggestions of optimizing genetics for the ultra-rich.

Thiel is a frequent presence in these circles. Simone Collins is the former managing director of Dialog, an exclusive, Thiel-founded networking group. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of the embryo testing startup Orchid likewise found her start in Silicon Valley with a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. Though Siddiqui and Orchid publicly deny that the company has claimed to be able to test for intelligence, multiple sources told The Information this year that Siddiqui has privately claimed to be able to measure embryos’ potential IQ.

Thiel has likewise backed Nucleus Genomics, a startup that claims to be able to test genetics for IQ. This fall, Nucleus expressed interest in acquiring 23andMe, the financially embattled DNA testing giant. 

Elsewhere in more explicitly political circles, Thiel has bankrolled the rise of his former employee J.D. Vance, the pro-natalist politician who this year became the Republican vice presidential nominee. And Thiel has dumped money into “28,” a menstrual-tracking company by the anti-feminist magazine Evie, which devotes an inordinate percent of its output to denigrating hormonal or IUD birth control.

The relentless funding of upmarket baby-perfecting tech is by no means a promise that these products work. The menstrual-tracking methods endorsed by Evie, for instance, are far less effective than other forms of birth control.

Instead these funding rounds are investment in an ideology. They assert a eugenicist ideal: that genetics dictate one’s future, and that Some People (here, some but not all pro-natalists might hedge their language) are just destined for superiority.

For ideologues who believe in a society led by wealthy, white men, this pro-natalist program is a bargain deal: one that encourages the elevation of already-powerful men and pushes women of all strata back into the domestic sphere.