I recently read a Washington Post essay entitled “Inside the Silicon-Valley Push to Breed Super Babies.” It describes the latest technology to screen embryos for genetic differences, technology which claims to be able to use 5 embryonic cells to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of an embryonic genome. Apparently there are problems with the company’s scientific claims. But even more, the desire to “eradicate suffering” and champion parents who “choose their embryos by spreadsheet” and create “a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease”—all plays into a false narrative about who we are meant to be as humans.

First of all, eradicating human lives is not an effective way to eradicate suffering. Second, as I wrote recently, the way to address suffering is not to eradicate it but to enter into it with love. And third, we lose our humanity when we construct life according to our predictions rather than receiving it as it is given, in all its precarity and beauty.

I just spent a week with dozens of individuals who would have been named as genetic misfits. A young girl with Down syndrome looked me in the eye, anointed me with oil and said, “I am with you. I am for you. God is with you. God is for you. And I love you.” A young man who uses a wheelchair to navigate and adaptive technology to speak proclaimed to all of us that his life is good.

It is scary to receive life as it is given. And yet that posture of loving receptivity opens us up to the fullness of who we are, not as autonomous individuals but as diverse, confounding, interdependent creatures.

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