The Ethics of the Unconceived
What Embryo Choice Really Means
Recent advances in reproductive technology now allow parents to compare embryos based on genetic indicators—disease risks, predicted traits, even proxies for cognitive potential. For many, this feels like a leap into dangerous territory. Some have gone as far as to call it "murder." This is not just an overstatement—it’s a category mistake.
Selection is not annihilation
Choosing one embryo over another is not equivalent to killing a person. It is a decision made in the context of reproduction, where potential lives vastly outnumber actual ones. Every choice we make—when to have children, with whom, under what conditions—forecloses countless other possible people. Yet we do not mourn the unconceived. Nor should we. Possibility is not personhood.
To treat the failure to actualize one potential life as equivalent to destroying a real one is to confuse the virtual with the actual, the imagined with the instantiated. This kind of thinking leads to absurd implications: if not having a child is murder, then so is abstaining from sex, choosing a different partner, or waiting a week. The map of potentiality is not the territory of obligation.
Making the implicit explicit
What’s changed is not the nature of reproductive choice, but the clarity with which we now see it. Embryo screening brings the process into focus. Decisions that were once vague and passive become structured and informed. That clarity feels clinical, perhaps unsettling—but that is no argument against its utility.
The ethical discomfort stems not from what is being done, but from seeing how it’s done. The act of choosing among possible futures has always been with us. What changes is the precision with which we can now do so.
The moral weight of visibility
Some will say that comparison itself is the problem—that seeing differences among embryos invites judgment, and judgment feels like condemnation. But this, too, is misplaced. Judgment is intrinsic to all action. To choose is to discriminate—between futures, between possibilities. The only alternative is paralysis.
That we now possess tools to make those judgments more informed should be welcomed, not feared. We already judge in ignorance. The ethical advance is that now, we can judge with knowledge.
The illusion of neutrality
There is no morally neutral stance in reproduction. Not choosing is still a choice, and ignorance does not absolve us of its consequences. To decline to use available knowledge in shaping a child’s future is not an act of moral humility—it is a refusal of responsibility.
This is not eugenics. It is not coercion. It is not a slippery slope to totalitarian breeding programs. It is a matter of individual agency informed by scientific understanding. The dystopian imagery reveals more about the anxieties of its authors than about the ethics of the technology itself.
Agency and the architecture of the future
We are always selecting among possible futures. What embryo screening changes is that it offers parents the opportunity to do so with foresight. To reject this tool on the grounds that it feels unnatural is to cling to the comforting illusion that reproduction was ever morally uncomplicated.
The real ethical question is not whether we should make such choices. We already do. The question is whether we will make them well.
And that requires confronting the reality: the future is always built by pruning the tree of possibility. There is no way to avoid shaping it—abdicating is just another form of choice.
A note from the multiverse
Under the Quantum Branching Universe (QBU), all physically possible outcomes occur. Every viable embryo, every potential child, lives—somewhere—across the vast expanse of branching timelines. Choosing one path does not annihilate the others; it merely locates you within a particular branch.
From this vantage, embryo selection does not eliminate possible people—it simply determines which one you encounter. The others continue, but not from your perspective. The moral significance lies not in who you exclude from existence, but in which future you take responsibility for bringing about.
Agency in the QBU is not the power to erase. It is the responsibility to steer.