Origin Genomics founder calls embryo editing moral imperative

The announcement concerns families carrying hereditary disease. What it does not concern, because the question was not asked, is the woman lying on the table with a needle in her side, eggs drawn out of her one careful puncture at a time, after weeks of injections that swelled her belly and kept her up at night. Before any embryo is edited, a body must be emptied of what it grew. That body belongs to a living woman, and in the speeches about the future she is scenery.

Cathy Tie, founder of Origin Genomics, calls the editing of embryos a moral imperative. I have heard that word before. Men used it about bringing religion to people who already had one, and about work that somebody else would do. When a person says imperative, I ask who is being commanded. Tie is not commanded. Origin Genomics is not commanded. The company offers a service, and the imperative falls on whoever might buy it. A product has been turned into a duty, and the duty has been handed to the customer.

That is my first charge, and I want it plain. Once a company tells a family that preventing a hereditary disease through embryo editing is a moral duty, a family that declines has not made a choice. It has failed a duty. The mother who carries the gene and says “not in my body, not this way” becomes the negligent one. The company’s language would be sitting in the room with her doctor, her mother-in-law, and her own conscience before she opened her mouth.

Now I will give the other side its full due, because it deserves it. I have seen children die. I have buried what I loved, and I know a parent watching a child fail, knowing the failure was written in the blood before birth, would cut off a hand to rewrite it. If the knife could be made safe, who am I to hold it back? This is the strongest thing Tie can say. It is strong because the grief is true.

But look at whose grief is being spent. The families living with these diseases did not write the word imperative. It was written for them by a company that needs them to feel it. Their suffering is being used as the argument, and they are not doing the arguing. Ask them and you will not hear one answer. You will hear a hundred. Some will say yes, do it. Some will say embryo screening already lets us choose among the embryos we have. Some who carry the condition themselves will tell you plainly that their lives were worth living, and they would like the people speaking about them to hear that before deciding their kind should not be born. An imperative has no room for a hundred answers. It has room for one, and a company chose it.

Then there is the risk, which the word imperative sweeps under the rug like crumbs before company arrives. This practice is controversial because nobody knows what an edit made in the first days of life will do in the fortieth year. The first people to find out will not be the founders. They will be children who never agreed to be the evidence, and mothers who carried them. I have lived long enough to see what doctors do when they want to learn something about a body. They go looking for a body that cannot refuse. An embryo cannot refuse. A frightened mother told she is failing her duty cannot refuse very well either.

So here is my inventory, set beside the claim. Families who carry these diseases have already done extraordinary things. They have nursed and tended and buried, and they have raised children the diagnosis said would not live as long as they did. They have made hard choices about whether to have children at all, and they made them without a company telling them what their duty was. That labor is the real moral work in this story. It was done long before Origin Genomics had a name.

If Tie wants to talk about imperatives, there is one ready to hand. Before you tell a woman what her body owes the future, sit down across from her. Let her talk, and do not bring a contract. Somewhere tonight a woman is pressing ice to the bruise on her belly where the fertility needle went in, and she is the one who will carry whatever comes of this. Nobody at the podium has asked her what she owes.