Where Have All the Boundaries Gone?

By: Mark Bradford, originally published November 19, 2025, WordOnFire.org

Is there a more fundamental human aspiration than for a young man and a young woman to meet, fall in love, get married, and then, by expressing their love in marital intimacy, nine months later welcome a beautiful child into their family? It is the inspiration for romance written into stories and song, the making of history, and a pledge to the future. What an incredible gift of God’s love that in the sacred surrender of spousal love, we have the power to engender new life, into which he infuses another soul—a soul that will continue to write the story of humanity through time into eternity.

The order that God established to sustain his creation is beautiful. It is a source of wonder, but when one or more of those steps are skipped—like the marriage part—or when lust drives a person to commit a violent and horrific crime against another, disorder occurs; souls and bodies are crushed. Since the introduction of in vitro fertilization in the late 1970s, there has been another kind of violent rupture in the natural order. Technology has placed itself between spouses and provided options for engendering children who can now be created to our specifications.

I wrote recently about how science has triumphed over the poetic in married love, and I used as an example a FemTech startup called Orchid. The company states on its website that it was founded to provide “cutting-edge whole genome embryo screening that is done as part of the IVF process that combines Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Aneuploidy (PGT-A), Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Monogenic/Single Gene Defects (PGT-M), and screens for hundreds of genes linked to severe monogenic diseases.”

Orchid was founded so couples could avoid the risk of dealing directly with Mother Nature. In the old days, we had to trust that nature knew best—that it possessed a conventional wisdom rooted in the laws that governed it, a wisdom we didn’t always understand but one we humbly accepted as best for us, even when the consequences weren’t always what we had hoped for. There are some who are too willing to shift their trust from God (who many deny exists anyway) to science.

Venerable Jérôme Lejeune (1926–1994), the French geneticist who discovered that Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of the twenty-first chromosome, cautioned that “we are certainly more powerful today than ever before, but we are not wiser.” Why? Because “technology is cumulative, wisdom is not.”

Orchid is cutting edge in reproductive technologies, but it has already become old news. An even newer investigation into technological meddling in human procreation was presented in an article in Nature Communications on September 30, 2025: “Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy.” The article presents research that provides proof of concept that human embryos can be generated using skin cells and an egg that has had its nucleus—i.e., all its genetic material—stripped out of it. So much for the mystery of falling in love and having babies through marital intimacy. Science presumes it can do a much better job.

To briefly summarize this research, investigators used a process very similar to human cloning, except cloning creates an identical copy of a person. This research used a donor egg and removed the nucleus, which contained the woman’s genetic material. They then reprogrammed a somatic cell (in this case a skin cell) from a different person so that it could support embryonic development, and put that cell’s nucleus into the enucleated egg and injected sperm to fertilize it, creating an embryo with a unique genome. The challenge they faced was that somatic cells have twice the number of chromosomes as sperm and egg, so the unique contribution of this research is the process they developed to reduce the number of chromosomes in the somatic cell by half. After the somatic cell’s nucleus had been inserted into the enucleated egg, they induced a process to trigger the division of chromosomes in the somatic cell. Similar to what happens in natural reproduction, that process created a “polar body” that discarded the excess chromosomes, leaving twenty-three in the egg: the number necessary to create an embryo with the correct number of chromosomes. At least, that was the goal. The actual result wasn’t always a perfect forty-six, but their goal wasn’t perfection—just proof it could be done.  

That description may be confusing, but the details aren’t as important as knowing that this kind of research is ongoing.  

But we need to ask why, and to what end. Theoretically, this process could be used to avoid passing on genetic diseases, but same-sex couples, who are by definition infertile, could also use it to engender a child who is a true biological product of each of the “parents”—just like the result of old-fashioned natural procreation, but with a wholly unnatural and perverted twist. Of course, a same-sex male couple would still need the services of an egg donor and a surrogate to gestate and deliver their child. Same-sex female couples would probably need to wait a few years until researchers perfect creating synthetic sperm.

The most important question we should be asking with all these developing reproductive technologies is who sets the boundaries around science that hold researchers accountable to ethical standards and the common good. Lejeune tells us what we already know: It would be foolish to depend on the wisdom and moral conscience of researchers. History has proven he was right. Even when boundaries have been imposed to regulate how research involving human subjects is conducted, some have ignored them.

The Nazis conducted crude experiments on humans, and the revelation of the depth of their atrocities inspired international agreements after World War II. The first of these was the Nuremberg Code in 1947, which required voluntary informed consent for any medical intervention and set guidelines that prohibited the use of human subjects for medical research without that consent. The Declaration of Helsinki was then adopted in 1964 by the World Medical Association as a formal statement and further guidance on the use of human subjects in medical research. But the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was already underway when both agreements were adopted; it was later discovered that between 1932 and 1972, physicians had been misleading 600 African American men in Alabama in order to research the progression and treatment of the disease by not giving them proper care. Similar horrors occurred from 1956 to 1971 at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, where individuals with developmental disabilities were used like lab animals and infected with hepatitis—once again, to follow the progression and treatment of the disease. Apparently race and disability nullified human rights in these researchers’ immoral minds. Willowbrook finally closed, and the Belmont Report was the result of the moral outrage over what happened at Tuskegee.

The Belmont Report (1979) was drafted by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to ensure that research participants are treated with dignity, informed about the study, and protected from harm while ensuring fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of research.

Research on human fetal material is complicated by the ambiguity in law over whether the human fetus is, well, human, or at least protected by the same rights that human persons have—persons who have been born. Historically, though, cloning has had a different consideration. In 2005, the United Nations called on all states to prohibit all forms of human cloning “inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” But a UN declaration has no force of law, and the 2005 UN Declaration on Human Cloning was received with an ambivalent response by the member states and has been the subject of ongoing debate almost since it was drafted.

Not by statute but by general agreement, there is a rule that prohibits laboratory culture of human embryos from developing past fourteen days. But with regard to research, regulatory guidelines in the US for experimentation on human embryos and fetal tissue, especially when derived from voluntary abortion, have mostly been tied to funding and who controls Congress and the White House. Private and institutional research that doesn’t involve the use of federal funds is governed by individual states and institutional review boards that evaluate the ethical standards used in research according to their own adopted policies.

Of all the disciplines within science that might involve the use of human embryonic or fetal material, investigations into human procreation are the most pernicious—and they are also heavily driven by industry because they are some of the most lucrative. The global market for artificial reproductive technologies in 2018 was $21.32 billion and is projected to reach $45.06 billion in 2026.

Of course, for those concerned about the future of humanity, the financial consideration is secondary compared to concerns about the integral development of the family—what Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis called “human ecology.” They warned against the consequences of manipulating human life and treating persons as means instead of ends in themselves. Human persons are not machines, nor are we livestock that should be genetically manufactured according to our specifications to satisfy our fickle concept of perfection or avoid fear of genetic mistakes.

You might want to go back and reread the first paragraph of this essay. Technology is pushing the noble simplicity of romance, marriage, and the natural begetting of children to the margins. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of Orchid, expressed the new belief of many by saying in a New York Times feature that “sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.” We must wonder when the utopian dreams of these technocrats—dreams that are the dystopian nightmares of those who value the wisdom and beauty of God’s design—will become the norm. God forbid!

The wisdom of religion sings the sweet song of the natural order. It is sweet because its lyric expresses the accumulated wisdom of the ages, and its tune resonates within the human soul as true, good, and beautiful.

Who, ultimately, will establish boundaries to hold technocrats accountable to the ends of true human flourishing? As Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII, “Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge that no king can corrupt.” If we don’t heed the voice of wisdom and set boundaries that hold science and technology to account, nature will eventually impose its own consequences. The Bard’s words are indeed true: There is a judge, and heaven is above all yet.

Mark Bradford is an author and passionate advocate for those born with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.