Maybe Emma Waters Is Right

By the time WIRED is finished introducing Emma Waters, you know an extraordinary amount about her.

She gets up at 5 a.m. She reads the Bible at breakfast. She has two young daughters, a husband studying to become a preacher and a small desk dwarfed by his much larger one. She cooks butternut squash soup with bacon and brie. She doesn't exercise enough. She owns an Oura ring. She believes husbands should lead their families.

You also know that WIRED thinks you should find some of this ridiculous.

The profile is terrific journalism: deeply reported, funny, colorful and almost novelistic. But there is a tension running through it that becomes harder to ignore the longer you read.

The prose keeps inviting you to laugh at Emma Waters. The reporting keeps giving you reasons to take her seriously.

Waters is 28. She works largely from home while raising two children. And somehow, between breakfast, diapers and nap time, she has managed to put herself near the center of one of the most consequential debates of the next generation: what happens when human reproduction becomes technology?

Not just IVF.

Surrogacy. Embryo selection. Sex selection. Polygenic screening. Gene editing. The buying and selling of eggs and sperm. The possibility of choosing children according to predicted characteristics.

This is no longer science fiction.

And that is where the WIRED profile gets interesting.

The Crazy Lady Keeps Being Right About Things

The article spends plenty of time on Waters' traditional views about marriage and motherhood. But buried beneath the jokes is an inconvenient record.

Years before international surrogacy involving Chinese clients became a national story, Waters was warning about it. She called the practice a new form of birth tourism: sperm could be shipped into the United States, an American surrogate could carry the child and an American citizen could effectively be shipped back.

That sounds considerably less eccentric after reports of wealthy foreign clients commissioning large numbers of American surrogates—and after the case WIRED itself recounts involving a Chinese couple accused of commissioning at least 25 surrogate pregnancies.

Then there is embryo selection.

Companies are already offering parents genetic screening intended to estimate disease risks and other traits among embryos. WIRED describes one company's CEO arguing that parents who decline such testing may someday be considered irresponsible. Waters looks at that trajectory and sees something darker: the transformation of having a child into choosing a child.

Again, you can disagree with her conclusion.

But what exactly is ridiculous about the question?

We Crossed the Line Before We Agreed Where the Line Was

That question becomes even harder after reading a Federalist essay published this week about whether an ethically constrained form of IVF is possible for Christians.

It constructs the strongest case it can.

Imagine a married couple suffering from infertility. They use only their own sperm and egg. They refuse genetic selection. They regard every embryo created as their child. They won't intentionally discard embryos. They ask the clinic to create only a small number and intend to implant every surviving embryo.

Surely that resolves the moral problem.

Except the questions keep coming.

What happens to embryos that don't survive the laboratory process? What about freezing the embryos that cannot immediately be implanted? What obligations do parents have toward embryonic human life once they have deliberately created it? Does using a clinic whose ordinary business includes practices they consider immoral matter?

And beneath all of it sits the question that modern fertility medicine has largely treated as already settled: Is creating a child technologically different in kind from helping a husband and wife conceive one?

The Federalist article reaches its own Christian natural-law argument about that question.

But you don't have to accept its theological conclusion to recognize the importance of asking it.

Because the technology isn't waiting for us.

The Future Is Arriving During Nap Time

Perhaps the most revealing scene in WIRED's profile happens around Waters' dining-room table.

Once a month, during her children's nap time, she convenes a private group of bioethicists, activists and policy people. On this particular day, the special guest is the founder of a polygenic-testing company—a man whose industry Waters has spent considerable time criticizing.

She invited him anyway.

They argue about whether the technology works. Someone brings up research suggesting the limitations of predicting height from embryos. The founder pushes back. They debate error bars. Waters asks about using genetic risk scores to determine which human beings should be born.

This is supposedly the dangerous extremist in the story.

Yet she's sitting across the table from the people building the technology, asking them questions.

There's another moment WIRED records that deserves more attention than it receives. After a Heritage event on gene editing, the reporter asks one participating academic why he showed up.

His answer, essentially, is that somebody needs to have this conversation. These questions don't divide neatly between left and right. Taking them seriously is a public service.

Then he's asked who is doing comparable work on the liberal side.

His answer: essentially no major players.

And there is the real Emma Waters problem.

It isn't that she's asking crazy questions.

It's that too few other people are asking them.

Maybe the Radical Position Isn't Hers

We have developed an extraordinary ability to intervene in human reproduction.

We can create embryos outside the body. Freeze them. Screen them. Rank them. Select among them. Hire another woman to carry one. Predict some of their genetic risks. Increasingly, researchers are contemplating editing their genes.

The technological argument is usually about what comes next.

Waters is asking the question that should come first: Just because we can, should we?

Maybe she'll draw some lines in the wrong places. Maybe Christians themselves will disagree about IVF, as they already do. Maybe some technologies she fears will ultimately alleviate enormous human suffering without producing the dystopian consequences she anticipates.

Those debates should happen.

But dismissing the person asking the questions because she reads the Bible at breakfast, believes husbands should lead their families, or thinks motherhood is more important than professional status isn't an answer to any of them.

WIRED set out to introduce readers to a 28-year-old Christian woman trying to change the way America thinks about fertility.

It succeeded.

Perhaps more than it intended.

Because after thousands of words of jokes, eyebrow raises, colorful details and genuinely excellent reporting, the strangest thing about Emma Waters isn't how radical her questions sound.

It's how normal those questions begin to sound once you see where the technology is going.