Silicon Valley and the Gentrification of Eugenics
Silicon Valley loves solving “problems.” Whether it’s self-driving cars or lab-grown meat, there’s always a startup or a billionaire trying to optimize something. Lately, a handful of tech elites have turned their attention to what they see as the next crisis: not enough babies.
This movement, called pro-natalism, is picking up steam in VC circles. You’ve probably seen it floating around on X (formerly Twitter) with people like Elon Musk openly worrying about declining birthrates and some tech investors quietly funding fertility clinics and egg freezing startups. On the surface, it sounds harmless, maybe even noble. “We need more kids!” Who can argue with that, right?
But peel back the layers, and there’s something eerily familiar about this conversation…it sure sounds a lot like eugenics.
Pro-natalism, at least in the Silicon Valley flavor, isn’t about just any babies. It’s about “smart babies,” “elite babies,” or, to put it bluntly, babies from a very particular social class – wealthy, educated, and usually white or East Asian. A lot of this talk focuses on encouraging certain people to reproduce, while vaguely implying that the rest of society isn’t doing its fair share.
Some pro-natalists go even further, openly discussing ideas like embryo selection for intelligence, longevity, or other desirable traits. That’s where the line between fertility innovation and good old-fashioned eugenics starts to blur.
Let’s be real: this isn’t just about population decline. It’s about who gets to shape the next generation. The rhetoric sounds suspiciously like a remix of early 20th-century eugenics movements, which aimed to improve the “gene pool” by controlling who should and shouldn’t reproduce. Back then, it led to horrific policies: forced sterilizations, institutionalization, and discrimination, all in the name of “bettering society.”
While no one in Silicon Valley is openly advocating for those policies (yet), the logic has striking similarities. When you talk about solving demographic decline by helping “high-value” individuals have more kids, you’re implicitly saying that some people’s offspring are worth more than others’.
In true Silicon Valley fashion, this is all being wrapped in the language of innovation, freedom, and optimization, but the elitist undertones are hard to ignore. Instead of addressing real-world issues like the cost of childcare, housing, and healthcare (things that would actually help people have kids if they wanted to), the focus is on subsidizing reproduction for the elite and maybe even tweaking their embryos while they’re at it.
So while it’s dressed up in sleek venture decks and podcasts, Silicon Valley’s pro-natalism feels like a modern-day rebrand of a much older and much uglier ideology: eugenics. And it should make us pause before we celebrate this latest “solution” from the tech world.
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