‘Beautiful’ Babies and ‘Super’ Babies: An Ethnography of Reproductive Techno-Eugenics in Silicon Valley

Dr. R. Sánchez-Rivera, Project Lead

Funded by the LSE Seed Research Fund.

In January 2025, during the “March for Life”, Vice President of the United States, JD Vance stated: “So let me say it simply, I want more babies in the United States of America”. This responds to moral panics around declining birth rates in the Global North and a resurgence of pronatalist ideology mixed with ideas around “the great replacement theory” which is a eugenicists and white-supremacist ideology that implies that white people in the Global North will be replaced by Black and Brown people in the near future. Pronatalist today argue that to stop declining birthrates among whites, the use of assisted reproductive technologies is an imperative solution to existential risk. Pronatalist groups and the recent Republican government of the United States have joined forces with tech-capitalists as a way of putting forward genetic testing technologies and assisted reproductive services to make sure that this seemingly existential risk does not come to fruition. Whilst other works have explored the new rise of pronatalism in the US have researched this from a presentist approach, we argue that the pronatalist movement responds to historical tropes and moral panics around “racial suicide” and actively propose eugenic measures as the only “common sense” solution to existential risk.

Using a mixture of semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography, this work will answer the following question: How Silicon Valley’s biotech industry and pronatalism are reshaping reproductive practices and experiences of assisted reproduction.

Keywords:

Pronatalism, Technology, Science, Reproduction, Eugenics, Genetics, Racism, Health