Faith & Bioethics
The Laboratory Has Replaced the Delivery Room — and We Are Only Beginning to Understand What That Means
Section I
When the Laboratory Became a Delivery Room
In November 2018, a researcher named He Jiankui stood before an audience of geneticists in Hong Kong and announced that two baby girls had already been born — girls whose genomes he had edited before implantation, targeting a gene called CCR5 in an attempt to confer resistance to HIV. He called them Lulu and Nana. He smiled as he said it.
The room did not applaud. It went very quiet, in the way that rooms go quiet when something has been done that cannot be undone.
He Jiankui was subsequently sentenced to three years in a Chinese prison. The international scientific community condemned the experiment as premature, reckless, and ethically indefensible. The editing was imprecise; off-target mutations could not be ruled out. The children were, in a phrase that appeared repeatedly in the coverage, “human guinea pigs.” He was wrong to have done it, and he did it anyway, and the scientific consensus was nearly unanimous in saying so (Cyranoski & Ledford, 2018).
What the consensus did not say — because it had no shared vocabulary for saying it — was why.
Not the procedural why. The deeper one. Not what rule did he break but what has he done to these children by bringing them into the world as objects of design rather than subjects of love? That question echoed in the corridors of the conference center and largely went unanswered, because the secular academy, for all its procedural sophistication, does not possess a sufficiently common account of the human person to answer it coherently.
In the previous installment, The Image of the Image examined what separates human consciousness from the most sophisticated artificial intelligence — and argued that the gap is not technological but ontological. This installment turns to a different frontier, no less urgent: what happens when that same technological confidence, no longer content to imitate human life, reaches into the earliest moments of human becoming and begins to write its own specifications.
To be fair, He Jiankui did not claim to be designing intelligence, beauty, or athletic ability. He presented his intervention as a medical one — an attempt, however misguided, to reduce vulnerability to disease. Yet the ethical significance of the event lies precisely in that ambiguity. The first step toward treating children as customizable products rarely announces itself as customization. It arrives as prevention, protection, and care. The question is not whether He Jiankui created designer babies. The question is whether he crossed a threshold beyond which the distinction between treatment and design becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
The question, in other words, is not whether CRISPR is dangerous. The question is whether we know, any longer, what it is that we are editing — and what we are editing it for.
Section II
The Tower Has Been Built Before
The desire to design the human being is not a twenty-first-century innovation. It is one of the oldest temptations in the archive of civilizations, and it has always arrived wearing the face of progress.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the United States led the Western world in the institutionalization of eugenics — not as fringe pseudoscience, but as mainstream policy, funded by the Carnegie Institution, endorsed by leading figures at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and enshrined in law. By 1927, thirty states had compulsory sterilization statutes on the books. In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law with a decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who summarized the court’s reasoning in a sentence that should not be allowed to fade: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Lombardo, 2008).
The targets were the poor, the mentally ill, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and Black Americans — populations whose perceived genetic “deficiency” was, in fact, largely an artifact of poverty, discrimination, and the biases of those doing the measuring. Sixty thousand Americans were sterilized under these laws before the practices were gradually discredited — not primarily by moral awakening, but by the inconvenient association of American eugenics with the programs the Third Reich had openly admired and amplified.
Germany’s own eugenics program — Rassenhygiene, racial hygiene — proceeded from the same theoretical premises, equipped with greater state power and fewer restraints. Between 1933 and 1945, roughly four hundred thousand people were forcibly sterilized under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The category of the “unworthy of life” expanded steadily until it encompassed the Holocaust.
The lesson that the twentieth century offers is not simply that eugenics was cruel. It is that eugenics was internally coherent — that, given its foundational premise (that human value is a function of genetic quality), its conclusions followed with brutal logic. The horror was not an aberration. It was the premise, pursued to its end.
What has changed in 2026 is the delivery mechanism, not the premise. The state no longer sterilizes. The market customizes. The coercion is no longer imposed from above; it is whispered through parental anxiety, reproductive choice, and the seductive language of giving your child “every possible advantage.” Leon Kass, who chaired the President’s Council on Bioethics under George W. Bush, named this dynamic with characteristic precision: the new eugenics wears not the uniform of the fascist state but the face of consumer preference — and it is, for that reason, far more difficult to resist (Kass, 2002).
A civilization that could not name what was wrong in 1927 — that lacked a doctrine of the human person capable of holding the line — will find itself no better equipped in 2026, unless it recovers the vocabulary that it has spent a century quietly setting aside.
Section III
The Creature Who Was Breathed Into
The Scriptures do not speak to CRISPR by name. They speak to something deeper: the question of who a human being is, where that being comes from, and what kind of knowing belongs to the Creator alone.
The foundation is laid in the first chapter of Genesis, before any individual life has been named:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
— Genesis 1:26–27 (NIV)
The declaration is categorical and prior to all specification. Before any particular person is formed, before any genome is sequenced, before any trait is expressed — the human being is designated as image-bearer. This is not a property acquired through development or achievement. It is a status conferred by the act of creation itself. The image is not in the genome. It precedes the genome. And because it precedes the genome, no intervention at the level of the genome can constitute it, improve it, or diminish it.
This is the foundational claim that every subsequent text in the biblical tradition assumes. And it is the claim that a civilization which has reduced personhood to biology can no longer hear.
The Psalmist inhabits this foundation when he turns from the cosmic to the intimate:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
— Psalm 139:13–14 (NIV)
The Psalmist does not describe the womb as a workshop where specifications are entered and outcomes produced. He describes it as a place of divine attention — of knowing from the inside out. The Hebrew imagery evokes weaving and careful craftsmanship — intricate, intimate handiwork. The creature is not assembled; it is authored. And the authorship belongs to One whose knowing is not inferential but constitutive: God does not learn the child’s identity by observation; God establishes it by act.
The book of Job presses this further, when God answers Job’s accusations from the whirlwind:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.”
— Job 38:4 (NIV)
The rhetorical force is not cruel. It is clarifying. There is a difference between the creature and the Creator — a difference not of degree but of kind — and that difference is the ground upon which a theology of human dignity stands. The creature did not design itself. The creature did not choose the conditions of its emergence. The creature receives its being as something given, not as something earned or engineered. This receptivity — this creatureliness — is not a limitation to be overcome. It is the very structure of creaturely dignity.
The apostle Paul renders the same insight in relational terms:
“But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?'”
— Romans 9:20 (NIV)
Paul is addressing the mystery of divine sovereignty, not the ethics of genetic engineering. But his image is arresting in this context: the clay that asks the potter why it was formed as it was is the clay that has forgotten what kind of thing it is. The temptation of the CRISPR moment is precisely this — not merely to heal the clay, but to take the potter’s seat.
The theological tradition has a word for what is at stake. Imago Dei — the image of God — is not a property that can be mapped onto a genome. It is a relational designation, a calling, a vocation. It is not located in the CCR5 gene or in any other sequence of base pairs. It is located in the constitutive act of a God who addresses the creature and, in the address, calls it into personhood. What He Jiankui edited was a genome. What he did not — because he could not — was touch the image.
But the society that normalizes the editing of genomes as the management of personal specifications has, in its imagination, reduced the image to the genome. And that reduction, sustained long enough, will reshape everything downstream: medical ethics, family law, educational philosophy, and the basic grammar of what it means to welcome a child into the world.
Section IV
The Seduction of the Adjacent Possible
It would be dishonest to proceed without acknowledging what makes CRISPR so genuinely difficult — morally and theologically — for any serious person to simply dismiss.
Huntington’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition caused by a single genetic mutation. It destroys the person over years, beginning in midlife, taking with it speech, movement, cognition, and eventually life itself. It is heritable. A parent who carries it has a fifty percent chance of passing it to each child. Sickle cell disease causes episodes of excruciating pain, organ damage, and shortened lifespan. Tay-Sachs destroys the nervous system of infants, most of whom do not survive their fourth birthday.
If germline editing could, with precision and safety, eliminate these mutations before they are ever expressed — is that stewardship, or hubris? The question is not rhetorical. It is the question that any honest engagement with this technology must sit with.
The tradition does not require that disease be embraced. It requires that the person receiving treatment never be reduced to the disease being treated — or to the genome that might, one day, carry it.
Michael Sandel’s contribution to this debate — in The Case Against Perfection (2007) — is to draw a line not between therapy and enhancement (which he finds philosophically unstable) but between two moral orientations toward the child. The first he calls hyperparenting: the drive to control every variable of a child’s future, to optimize the outcome, to eliminate all that is unwanted and amplify all that is desired. The second he calls openness to the unbidden — the disposition to receive the child as a gift, to love what arrives rather than to demand what was ordered (Sandel, 2007).
The data from the emerging biotech landscape suggest that Sandel’s distinction is under severe pressure. The global market for genetic testing in reproductive medicine exceeded $3.4 billion in 2023 and is projected to double within a decade (Grand View Research, 2024). Consumer genomics companies now offer preimplantation genetic testing packages that screen embryos for dozens of conditions simultaneously. The line between disease prevention and trait selection is not bright; it is a gradient, and the gradient runs in one direction.
Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and the scientist who led the Human Genome Project to completion in 2003, has spoken with particular authority at this intersection. A committed evangelical Christian, Collins has argued throughout his career that the wonder of the genome — its extraordinary complexity and its intimate particularity — does not diminish the theological claim of the Creator but deepens it. The genome is not a blueprint that replaces the Psalmist’s image of divine authorship; it is evidence of the intricacy of that authorship (Collins, 2006). What Collins resists is not science. What he resists is the idolatry of the sequence — the assumption that because we can read the text, we are entitled to rewrite it according to our own preferences.
The philosopher Jürgen Habermas raised a related concern from an entirely secular direction. In The Future of Human Nature (2003), Habermas argued that a child whose genetic traits have been intentionally selected by others enters the world under conditions fundamentally different from those of any previous generation. The issue, he insisted, is not merely biological. It concerns the structure of freedom itself — whether a person can fully regard himself as the undirected author of a life whose defining characteristics were chosen before he existed. What Habermas identified was a form of asymmetry: the designed child cannot renegotiate the terms of her own creation, cannot consent retroactively, and may find that the freedom she exercises in adulthood has already been quietly circumscribed by decisions made in a laboratory before she was born (Habermas, 2003). This is not a theological argument. But it arrives at the same threshold — the recognition that treating the human being as a design object involves a kind of prior claim on that person’s existence that no subsequent love can fully undo.
That resistance belongs to an older tradition than molecular biology. The rabbinic tradition has long distinguished between tikkun olam — repairing the world, which is commanded — and overreaching the limits of the creaturely, which is the recurring shape of the sin at Babel. What the rabbinic tradition preserves in the Babel narrative is not merely a story of arrogance but a story of category confusion: the builders were not wrong to build; they were wrong to build as though the boundary between the creature and the Creator did not exist.
The bridge from that ancient pattern to the present moment is shorter than it appears. A civilization that treats the genome as a design brief has not merely made a policy error. It has accepted, at the deepest level of its imagination, that the child is a product — and that the parents are its manufacturers.
And once that imaginative shift is complete, it does not remain contained to the laboratory. It migrates into the nursery, the classroom, the therapy office, and the sanctuary — reshaping, in each environment, what it means to love someone you did not design.
Section V
What the Gift Requires of Its Recipients
Scripture does not require that every catastrophe be interpreted as divine judgment; it does, however, insist that societies eventually reveal the moral conditions under which they have chosen to live.
The church did not invent the category of the gift. But it has, in the long tradition of its theology, done more than any other institution in the Western world to articulate what a gift is, what it demands of its recipient, and why it cannot be collapsed into a transaction.
A gift, properly understood, arrives from beyond the recipient’s control. It is given — not earned, not engineered, not negotiated in advance. And the proper response to a gift is not optimization but gratitude: not the question how do I improve this? but the recognition I have received something I could not have produced alone.
When He Jiankui’s girls were born, something fundamental had already been altered — not only in their genomes, but in the relationship into which they were received.
They entered the world through a process that had already begun to blur the line between reception and specification.
Whether their parents loved them — and there is no reason to assume they did not — is a separate question from whether the structure of that welcome preserved the full dignity of the child as an unrepeatable gift. The ethical concern extends beyond the risk of off-target mutations. It is the deeper harm of having been, before they drew their first breath, the objects of a design rather than the subjects of a love.
The Christian tradition — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox alike — has resources for this moment that have not yet been fully deployed. The doctrine of creation — that the world is not self-generating but received — carries within it a vision of human life as fundamentally dependent, contingent, and therefore sacred in its very fragility. The doctrine of providence — that the God who authors does not abandon — holds open the possibility that what arrives unbidden is not an error to be corrected but a calling to be received.
None of this forecloses the treatment of disease. Healing is one of the oldest imperatives of Christian practice; medicine, rightly understood, is a form of participation in the Creator’s care for the creature. The tradition has never required that suffering be accepted passively. What it has required is that the human being, even in the midst of intervention, be treated as a person — as a subject of love and not an object of design.
The professionals who read these pages — the physicians, researchers, bioethicists, lawyers, and investors who inhabit the spaces where these decisions are actually made — are not spectators to this debate. They are its participants. The question they carry into those rooms is not whether they believe in God. The question is whether they believe in the human being — in the full, irreducible, unoptimizable particularity of the person who is not yet born and cannot advocate for herself.
The hook that opened this post named a silence: the silence of a room that knew something had been done but could not fully say what. That silence is not ignorance. It is the residue of a conviction that has not yet found its language — the intuition, still alive even in a post-Christian academy, that the child is not a product.
The Christian tradition possesses that language. What remains is the willingness to speak it — in the laboratory, in the legislature, and in every room where the question is still open.
Footnotes
¹ David Cyranoski and Heidi Ledford, “Genome-Edited Baby Claim Provokes International Outcry,” Nature, November 2018.
² Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
³ Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).
⁴ Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
⁵ Grand View Research, “Genetic Testing Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report,” 2024.
⁶ Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).
⁷ Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).