Imagine going to the doctor’s office with your spouse to learn that your unborn child carries genetic traits likely to cause blindness. The doctor tells you about available gene therapies that can “edit” out the genes causing blindness. Would you take advantage of this technology to spare your child from what is now an unnecessary hardship?
This is no longer just a hypothetical (even if the technology is not yet commercially available). Last week, the New York Timespublished a blockbuster bioethics story that should prompt all would-be parents to consider what the future of gene editing holds for childbearing.
According to an article based on a just-released research paper, geneticists at Columbia University have used a technology called “base editing” to rewrite a genetic typo in the human genome that can result in hereditary pathologies. This differs from earlier CRISPR technology, which is considered less predictable and riskier: CRISPR allows scientists to “cut out” the defective gene, thereby increasing the risk of chromosomal abnormalities. If CRISPR is like using scissors to remove a defective gene, base editing is like using a pencil to rewrite the gene. This does not result in the chromosomal abnormalities seen in CRISPR, though questions remain—as the article concedes—about the long-term viability, success, and safety of base editing. Even if base editing offers greater technical precision, the moral problems remain. A more effective technology wielded wrongly is still wrong.
The point of this column is not to drop the hammer on the technology entirely. Rather than speaking in terms of clear right and wrong, we should recognize that this technology occupies a morally gray zone. It is in a state of contestation. Stating the differences matters in the moral calculus. Therapeutic intervention differs from genetic enhancement. The former looks to repair or restore a natural function, while the latter looks to redesign the human germline beyond normal function. Base editing enables both. Somatic gene therapy for consenting individuals, for example, differs from interventions imposed on non-consenting embryos and future generations—interventions that will be driven by marketplace incentives.
Some Christians will look at this technology and see the possibility of repair and restoration as morally licit, while other Christians will see it as a Faustian bargain: There is too much that could go wrong for us to use it responsibly (availing ourselves of a technology with few principled limits, irreversible DNA damage, discarded embryos, designer babies, and eugenics). One can think of C.S. Lewis’s warnings in The Abolition of Man that humankind’s conquest of nature would be used against humankind.
Christian ethics recognizes a moral difference between repairing defective genes that cause hereditary diseases and genetic augmentation aimed at optimization. But the line between them is perilously thin because the technology that allows for one is likely the same technology that will enable the other.
But this new technology does open a Pandora’s box, forcing us to consider: How could an ostensibly good use of gene editing to eliminate pathologies not lead to a genetically optimized human population, as though human beings possess the power to override the realities of Genesis 3? Furthermore, what guarantees are there that such technologies will not be wielded for malevolent ends in the form of designer babies, creating, in effect, a genetic caste system where the economically well-off can secure their progeny’s genetic destiny while the lower classes are consigned to raising children more likely to have disabilities and disease? What are the far-flung consequences of trait selection that bear an eerie resemblance to the spirit of eugenics?
Given that human beings are not always apt to use technology for virtuous purposes, the concern for now is to raise the necessary questions and suggest guardrails to prevent this technology from spiraling out of control. Yet even the existence of this technology raises one of the most important questions: What happens to human nature when science can create it?
Even if we grant the potential of repairing defective genes that cause heritable diseases, the question for now is: Is this a technology that is good for humans to possess? What assurances do we have that this technology will remain limited to treating diseases and not be used to augment genes in pursuit of “designer babies”?
Another scientist quoted in the article, Fyodor Urnov, raised just these issues: “What they are really doing is providing the ‘baby improvers’ with a how-to manual for forays beyond the ethical pale.” The New York Times draws on the analysis of Urnov, whom it describes as speculating “that the new method, once perfected, would appeal to people who don’t merely want to address inherited diseases but to enhance traits by engineering embryos.”
Consider, too, this admission from a scientist quoted in the New York Times article: “The ability to fix disease-causing mutations in embryos could be a boon to those using I.V.F., allowing them to implant embryos that they otherwise would have discarded.” Here we see the technocratic and utilitarian impulse on full display: a “scoring” of embryos considered worthy of life versus those unworthy of life, a sentiment not far removed from the Nazi slogan “life unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben).
As bioethics journalist Katelyn Walls Shelton observes, the technology at stake here is not limited to its impact on one child but extends to the heritable traits those children themselves pass on, with “the potential for these edits (or mistakes) to be passed on generationally. They’re not just editing one embryo’s genes; they’re editing the future of the human race. That’s why scientists have long avoided this type of heritable gene editing.”
Another factor is the bioethical principle of consent. Individuals who are the subjects of experimentation have a right born of natural justice to be aware of what is being done to them and the far-reaching consequences of such technologies. No embryo can consent to such procedures.
There is also the question of long-term gain. The New York Timesreports that significant uncertainties remain about this technology and that base editing itself did not solve all the problems it set out to address. Concerns about structural damage to DNA raise the question of proportionality: Are the gains worth the potential harm?
And what of potential parents and scientists “playing God” in toggling the conditions for nascent life? We must consider whether human beings possess the wisdom, ability, moral standing, and foresight to re-engineer the human genome at the level of heritable transmission across multiple generations. And at civilizational scale. What Augustine called “libido dominandi,” the lust for domination, manifests in the drive for human self-mastery and control. Without a transcendent anchor point for humanity, rapacious technological utilitarianism can easily remake man in its own image, according to whatever tools it has at its disposal.
It is into this alchemy of scientific possibility and human finitude that Christian ethics speaks a better word: All humans, diseased and disabled alike, do not find their worth and dignity in the perfection of their genes, but in their status as beloved and created children of God, in whose image they are made (Genesis 1:27). The consistent teaching of Christian theology is that human worth is not a determination made by scientists or parents, nor a matter of human utility or capacity, but a gift conferred from conception.
We must end with the most important moral principle at stake: Jesus does not differentiate among the children He calls to come to Him (Matthew 19:14). Jesus offers no asterisks. It was not the blond-haired, blue-eyed children that Jesus called for. Just as Jesus welcomed the lepers and the sick who sought Him out, so the church must proclaim that His arms are open to all children, not just the genetically optimized. Regardless of where Christians fall in this debate, we must welcome children, not engineer them.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on June 8, 2026.
