What do we owe our children before they are born? That question hasn’t even really be coherent for most of human history. Then we got enough medical technology to understand that how a mother behaves during pregnancy has a profound effect on the baby’s development, and and new norms developed around that—namely, no drinking or smoking.
Large-scale, pre-natal, full-genomic sequencing—and eventually, pre-natal gene therapies and gene-editing—is going to blow that entire paradigm out of the water. Everything we thought we knew about the conception and gestation of children is going to change, radically and rapidly.
This is a story about that.
On Shoulders of Giants
“About two hundred,” his mother admitted, in a tone that indicated she knew he’d be upset but didn’t think he ought to be. “We did the two hundred-fifty six plan but there are always some that don’t fertilize. The recombination technology was—“
“Two hundred?!” He had guessed the number might be that high, but hearing it from her lips still hit him hard. And it had been at the high end of his range. He should have known, nothing but the best for the child of Salvatore and Espinita Carpacci.
“The Carpacci’s have the best, you know that.” Those words were cold. His mother felt guilty, her most dangerous emotion. “And you have the genes to show for our efforts, so be grateful for that, every time Meghan swoons over your height or ruffles that perfect hair on your head.”
“Do my hundred ninety nine dead brothers and sisters have the best?” She was trying to brush past the moment, but he would not be moved. He was twenty-two years old and he’d heard the rumors for years of his own genetic history, and it just finally hit him what that really meant.
“Don’t be dramatic, Anthony,” said his mother, “they never had names, never took a breath, never—“
“They could have,” he retorted. “The church—“
His mother giggled, high and shrill, then cut herself off and regained composure with such force that if he hadn’t known better, Anthony would have thought the laugh was fake.
“Eunuchs and pederasts,” she sniffed, haughty. “They don’t want those zygotes destroyed because they want to fuck them in a few years.”
Anthony stewed. She wasn’t wrong, exactly. He liked looking as he looked, and he liked being the biggest and strongest of his friends. He liked how Meghan looked at him. But he couldn’t let it go, and his mother could sense it.
“If you’re worried about what the church thinks, you should stop living with your girlfriend before marriage.”
“Don’t you ever think about them?” he asked her. “Don’t you wonder… who they would have been?”
“I wanted a son, and I got a son,” she said, and it really did seem it was that simple to her. “I got the most perfect son I could, the best possible combination of me and your father. I have never regretted that choice and I still don’t, despite your tendency to ask annoying questions.”
She seemed so sure, and yet he could almost see their faces. They had been coming to him in dreams, whispering in voices that sounded like his, accusing him of stealing their souls.
“Why are you asking me this now? she asked. “You saw how you developed, you heard the rumors. I expected this question years ago, and when it did not come, I expected it never would. I thought you’d had the wisdom to not look a gift horse in the mouth. Now it troubles you. Why?”
“Meghan is pregnant,” he admitted.
His mother sucked air in through gritted teeth, sucked hard enough to cause a sort of reverse whistling noise through the slight gap between her two top front incisors, and he knew it was going to be a long day.
*
“Not happy!”
“What does that mean, ‘not happy’? Did she do the sucking air through her teeth thing?”
“She did.”
“Gross.”
“So it didn’t go great.”
“Does she know how gross that is?”
“What do I know from what she knows?”
“Because it’s, like, distractingly—“
“Meghan!” He turned on her as he said it. She’d had a certain jauntiness in her voice, like she was inviting him to join her in starting to make fun of his mother but didn’t want to take responsibility for actually saying it. It was a ‘testing the waters’ sort of tone, and when he barked her name it disappeared, along with the slight conspiracy-inviting smile that he hadn’t even realized she was wearing until it was gone.
Now she was all business.
“What does she want?”
“She says if we want a kid fine, she’ll support us getting married and having one, but she wants it to have a gene tournament, like we did.”
“You mean she wants me to have a fucking abortion.”
“That’s what that would require, yes, although it’s incidental to what she wants.”
“Oh it’s fucking incidental, is it? If it’s so fucking incidental how about she has it instead?”
“Okay that was the wrong word to use, she didn’t say that, I did, that’s on me.”
“God would you just blame her and let me hate her for once?”
“I didn’t say any of this is what I wanted I’m just telling you what we talked about!”
“Then what do you want?!”
He had thought about it for a long time and he didn’t know. He tried to delay coming back to have this conversation until he could think it through, but Meghan had known where he was going and expected him back before too long, and three hours of driving around hadn’t made his desires any clearer.
“You want to start over!”
“Do YOU want to start over?” he asked.
“I didn’t even think about starting over til you brought it up on your mother’s say-so!”
“I’m not saying I agree with her, but she’s not crazy. Don’t you like your genes? You only had a sixteen-tourney and they still look pretty damn good from where I’m sitting. Imagine—”
“That’s the point though, how good does it need to get? Like a random draw from the two of us is already way better genes than like anybody in history ever got. Isn’t that enough that we shouldn’t kill this baby just ‘cause we decided it’s not a good enough hand? Like I feel like the baby would say it’s good enough, if it could answer surveys.”
“But it can’t say shit. And if it could, and we asked ‘hey, do you want to be a random product of a sixteen-tourney and a two-fifty-six tourney, or do you want to be the two-fifty-six tourney result of those two pools?’, it’s pretty clear the answer would be ‘hook me up with that extra tourney and make me a god’. That’s what I’d say anyway. Especially because he’s going to be fourth gen, and most of the high performers in his cohort are going to have that much gene selection in their bloodline. I’d take all I could get. Wouldn’t you?”
“You want to do this.” Meghan got very quiet when she was angry, and she spoke now barely above a whisper. “You want to kill this baby, and two hundred more, and you got this idea from your Catholic mother who fucking judges me for being Baptist and ALSO judges me for never going to church for the last ten years.” She stared daggers at him, absolute sword points piercing him, blue lances thrusting from her perfect, highly selected, fertile face.
“But do you really want to do this?” she said in a tone of wonder that seemed genuine even as it dripped with rage. “Or do you know you need to do this to avoid getting cut off? I assume she threatened that.”
She had threatened that, as she often did, and she’d done it to one of his sisters and enough secondary relatives to know she wasn’t kidding around. And she had her hooks in deep—he worked for a friend of hers, three promotions into what was supposed to be a five-year stint learning the business before he moved over and worked for his mother’s company as the heir apparent.
“It makes sense to me,” he said, feeling the weight of the truth finally leaving him as he spoke it aloud. “I don’t really think she’s wrong. And also, if anyone tries to hurt that baby in your belly, I might literally murder them on the spot with my bare hands. So I don’t know.”
*
“Maybe she’ll miscarry.” His father was bent over the billiards table, not even facing him.
“Yeah, something to hope for, Dad. Nice.” He rolled his eyes behind his father’s back.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Boy, I ain’t your mother. Say what you feel or don’t.” With a slow, deliberate stroke he sent the four-ball down the table and cleanly into the corner pocket.
“I don’t think she’s gonna miscarry. The women in her family are very fertile.”
“Speaking of your mother…” His father rarely brought her up; he must have really been curious.
“She was on the phone trying to hire a hitman before I got out the door.”
“Some people mellow as they age, and some don’t.”
“What do you think I should do, Dad?”
Salvatore shot again, but this time the three-ball banged off the lip of the pocket-guard and ricocheted back onto the table. He straightened and looked at his son.
“Do you think Meghan would kill it and start over if you told her to?”
“I think she might.” It made him sick to think about.
His father looked at him, one man to another, and a grimace passed across his face, an acknowledgement of that terrible power, of his son facing a situation that Salvatore never had. Then a flush of shame replaced it.
“I got tired of doing what your mother told me to do, and I stopped. Now I live in a two-bedroom on the edge of town with an upstairs neighbor who seems like he’s taping an audition for ‘America’s Next Top Jump Roper” on a nightly goddamn basis.”
Anthony opened his mouth to ask again. The words were on his tongue—but what should I DO—and then he realized that he had reached that terrifying adult truth: His father had nothing to tell him.
*
”And it was like in a dream, where you’re trying to run, and your legs are pumping, but you’re not getting anywhere, except it was my mouth. I knew it didn’t matter what I said, it wasn’t going to affect me, but it was like I’d made so many decisions that I just couldn’t make one more, whether it mattered or not. So I just stood there and stared at him for a long time, like too long, and then he left and I shut the door.”
He could feel the wine in him. It was making him maudlin. Meghan was sitting across the table, looking at him but clearly not paying attention, but it didn’t bother him that she wasn’t. It just felt so good to have words flowing out of his mouth, such a relief of something he couldn’t name.
“It’s just so strange to live when we do,” he continued. “Everything’s a choice. My great-great-grandfather made like five choices in his whole life. Everything else he just did what he was supposed to do. Now I wake up and make five choices before my eyes are all the way open. Sometimes—”
“I think we should start over,” said Meghan. There was a glass of wine in front of her that she’d insisted he pour, but the moment he had she’d started ignoring it, and hadn’t taken a single sip.
“Like, start over this conversation?”
“No, not this fucking conversation, Anthony.” She rolled her eyes and giggled a little, a release of tension.
“You think my mother’s right?”
“Ugh, Jesus, no. Are you trying to change my mind?!” She rolled her eyes again, this time right at him, and he couldn’t tell if she thought it was funny or what. “The fact your know-it-all mother will think I do think she’s right is like the number one reason not to start over.”
“That’s the number one reason?”
“Shut up, Anthony, you know what I’m saying.”
“I really, seriously don’t.”
“I’m saying I wouldn’t have wanted less tourney than I have. That’s what I keep thinking about, you know? Like if my parents had some weird thing about it, they were Fundie Christians or whatever, and I was uglier and dumber, and I found out they could have made me prettier and smarter but they didn’t because they had some dumb belief they wanted to uphold, I’d be cheesed at them. Wouldn’t you?”
“Even though if they’d made you prettier and smarter, then ‘you’, as in the person you actually are, would never have existed?”
He wasn’t sure why he said that. He didn’t even disagree with her; he’d been first to suggest that starting over might be warranted. But the way she said it seemed accusatory somehow, like she was accusing him of forcing her to carry this particular baby to term, and it made him feel instantly defensive, so he argued.
She didn’t answer with words, just reached out for her wineglass and lifted it for a sip that turned into a chug, as she poured the entire glass down her throat at a go. She set the glass down, staring at him with an arched eyebrow as if daring him to object.
“I’d still be me,” she said. “I’d be me because I’d have the same name and the same parents and brothers and I’d have lived in the same place in the same house. “I’d just have better or worse genes, and I’ll take better ones.”
“So we’re starting over,” he said. “Two-fifty-six tourney.” Just that easily, it felt real. He lifted his wineglass. “I’d suggest a toast to starting over, but, uh…” he gestured to her empty glass, then drank his own wine. “My mother will be pleased.”
“If she does that stupid little “Hmn!” thing she does like a nun about to rap somebody’s knuckles for daring to disagree with her, I swear to God I’m gonna cut a bitch.”
“I mean, she’s probably gonna.”
“I will cut a bitch, this is not an idle threat.”
“The fact that she does it enough that it’s a thing you have a name for means she’s probably going to do it this time too, I—
“I. Will. Cut. A. B—“
*
“Oh good,” his mother paused, and a smile slid onto her mouth that did not touch her eyes. It was the smile of a wolf, circling a carcass, ready to eat but suspicious of a trap.
“Hmn!” It was almost a grunt. Her face didn’t smirk but the sound did, the voice did, the soul behind them did.
Anthony put his hand on Meghan’s knee. Her entire leg was tense with the straining effort of not saying something sarcastic or cutting. He was proud of her in a strange way, even though another part of him really did think this level of self-control seemed like a bare minimum. He certainly never had to strain like this around her parents, and they were no prize either.
“Well then, I can make arrangements for both procedures. I have excellent contacts with the—“
“We’ve already got the abortion scheduled,” Meghan blurted. “We appreciate your help with the second one though, we couldn’t afford a two-fifty-six tourney on our own.”
“You have it scheduled?” His mother asked, incredulous, then lapsed into silence. She had an annoying habit, when she heard something she didn’t like, of just repeating the most important few words of it back to the person, then waiting for them to continue to explain. It was annoying because, even when you were ready for it, it worked pretty well; the old woman had the patience of Job and could wait anyone out.
“Down at the clinic on Fredrick’s Street,” Meghan continued, and Anthony could see the tension forcing words out of her that she knew weren’t helping. “They can get us in on Tuesday.”
“At the clinic?” Espinita mirrored again. The silence stretched into infinity.
“Yes, Mother. At the clinic, on Tuesday. I’m glad that your hearing is still good.”
She shot him a look that shriveled him, but Meghan looked at him at the same time, the small, victorious smile she always flashed when he took up for her against his mother.
“I see,” said Espinita, and he could see the wheels spinning, examining possible leverage to get them to go to her doctor, no doubt the best in town, where she was sure to receive reports and could eliminate the possibility of something going… well, ‘wrong’ didn’t seem like the right word, since all they needed to do was leave not-pregnant and that seemed like pretty much a guarantee.
“Well if you’re determined to clear away this pregnancy in company of whatever strangers wander in off the street on Tuesday, I suppose I can’t stop you.”
He had thought Meghan’s leg was at full flexion before, but now some other set of muscles that he’d never felt in a human leg before seemed to emerge and clamp down, and the leg bulged out between his fingers as Meghan kept whatever she wanted to say bottled up instead.
*
“Are you here today of your own free will?” The nurse had on the kind of professional boredom that allowed a person to do this sort of work all day, every day. She might have been asking about why their car needed repairs. It was reassuring.
“I am,” said Meghan. She seemed less tense now than she had when talking to his mother.
“Do you understand that today’s procedure will result in the termination of your pregnancy, and is not reversible?”
“I do,” she said, with a little less confidence in her voice.
Anthony looked around at the clinic walls. There was pregnancy-related material everywhere. A diagram of the stages of pregnancy hung on one wall. A 3-D uterus model sat on a table, and Anthony assumed one could pull it apart and examine it if one were a real sicko.
“Do you have any other current medical conditions, or are you taking any medication?”
“No, I don’t. I mean— I’m not.”
She reached for his hand, and he gave it to her. She squeezed. It started to hurt, but he would rather have died than told her to stop.
There were other expectant mothers in the room, most not here for abortions, most just getting normal pre-natal care, some lugging young children with them, trying with limited success to keep them from futzing with the model uterus. A two-year-old toddled over while his mother looked at her phone, and grabbed a piece off the model, the name of which Anthony didn’t know. The child cooed and thrust the uterine castoff into his mouth, chewing at the hard plastic while staring off into space.
“Do you have any questions about the procedure?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Meghan. She turned to Anthony. “Do you have any questions?”
The toddler saw Anthony looking, took the uterus-part out of his mouth, and thrust it aloft, above his head like the Olympic torch. He screamed a victorious scream, which caught his mother’s attention. She rushed over and grabbed the part from his mouth, then tried to figure out how it fit back into the model. The boy’s chewing had damaged it, though, so it wouldn’t fit cleanly back into the uterus.
“Are you paying attention, Anthony?” Meghan’s voice was sharp, but as he looked at her, the next sharp remark died on her tongue. She saw something in his eyes, not tears, but something close.
“Let’s not do this,” he said. “I don’t want to. This is our child, and I want this one, whether we planned it or not, whether it’s the best possible one we could have or not, whatever that even means. This one is ours, and that’s enough for me, for it, for anybody. Fuck anybody it’s not enough for.”
Meghan burst into tears, and threw herself into his arms. He realized that she had been going along. Not that she didn’t agree with the decision, but she was allowing herself to agree even more than she felt, evincing a certitude she did not feel in order to have people on her side.
*
“Well, shit, I guess you got what you wanted,” his father said while sorting the balls into solids and stripes inside the triangular rack, in preparation for another game of eight-ball. “How’d your mother take it?”
“She did that thing where she refused to acknowledge it, just like changed the subject, and then when I brought it up again to make sure she’d heard, she got all mad like I was treating her like she was stupid and didn’t listen. Then she started talking about the weather, literally.”
“I told her I wanted a divorce and she asked me to pass the bread,” his dad said, taking the triangular rack off the balls and opening the path for Anthony to break. “We never talked about it again, I only heard about it from her lawyer.”
“Jesus,” said Anthony, “Why is she like that?”
“If you figure it out, tell my past self,” said his father. “That poor bastard sure could’ve used the help.”
Anthony no longer felt a desire to ask his dad what to do. He knew there would be no great wisdom forthcoming, and although that stung a bit, he accepted it. Both his parents had limitations, a fact that had taken him several hundred hours of therapy to be able to think plainly.
He bent over the table, stick gliding between his hands, and prepared to break. The smoothness of the wood against the crease between his thumb and first finger felt pure, uncomplicated. He loved this game because it was all physics. One set of balls, one defined set of options. In a good game, all the balls had the same fate, with no surprises. Which to pocket first was determined by circumstance, not values.
Just before he drew the stick back for his actual strike, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He had a special vibration that indicated the call was from Meghan, and Anthony put his stick down and answered without taking his shot.
“Hey babe, what’s up?”
Before she even spoke, he could smell blood and tears. He could feel them through the phone.
“Something’s wrong—“ her voice cracked. He could see the blood in their toilet, and on the black-and-white tile of their bathroom floor, see it in his mind’s eye just based on that tone of voice. And somewhere in that blood, his child. The one he had chosen. It was gone.
*
“Welcome to Orpheum, the number one infant design studio on the planet. And congratulations, you’ve already made the right choice for your baby. Now you’re here today for a… two-fifty-six tourney. Wow, that’s really special. Anthony, I know we did your two-fifty-six when you were born, and looking at you today, I’m proud to say we gave your family their money’s worth. You are the specimen your mother wanted, no doubt about it. It’s exciting to think about the genetic excellence the two of you will produce.”
They were in a private office, a stark contrast to the crowdedness of the clinic. Soft, tonal music played throughout these offices to soften the silence. There were no diagrams, no models. The whole experience was sterility, cleverly concealed as tastefulness by people who had dedicated their lives to making sure rich people never felt the slightest discomfort.
“Now of course the ideal is a two-fifty-six tourney between two genomes that were themselves the product of two-fifty-six tourneys, but a two-fifty-six and a sixteen mixed together with a two-fifty six tournament will still produce truly spectacular results.”
“And all it will have taken is five-hundred-twenty-five dead siblings to get there.” That number kept rattling around in Anthony’s head.
His mother shot him a sideways look that told him to shut up. The Orpheum saleswoman noticed, and held out a placating hand to her, then addressed Anthony.
“I understand you have discomfort around this, Anthony,” she said with infinite patience, “and I want to tell you that I think it’s really brave of you to be here anyway. You’re doing a great thing for your child.”
“And two-hundred-fifty-five bad things to get there,” he muttered. “And he’ll be like me, so he’ll think about those things his whole life, just like I have.”
“For God’s sake, they’re fucking zygotes,” his mother said, on her last nerve. “All of them together don’t make the head of a pin. Just—“
She stopped as the Orpheum woman held up her hand again, and returned that infinite, patient smile to Anthony.
“What your mother says is true. A third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, and most of them the mother never even knows she was pregnant. Whatever we’re doing here, then god or nature or whatever you want to call it, it’s doing it all the time too. We’re just doing it in a more organized way.”
“What if ‘organized’ and ‘perfect’ aren’t the things I want my kid to be? What if ‘present’ and ‘at peace’ and ‘happy’ are what I want? Can you guarantee those things?”
“We do genetic fitness here. We’re the best at that. Beyond that…” She trailed off and spread her hands in a conciliatory gesture. Anthony was suddenly aware of how much she gestured with her hands when she spoke.
“For the love of Christ!” Espinita lost it and turned on them. “Don’t you see how stupid you are?! You’re sitting here with your genetic perfection and talking about how unimportant it is, how really it’s *other* things that matter when I made sure you had all of this you could ever need?! Do you know how many people would kill to have what you have, and now you’re acting like an ungrateful little—“
“Don’t talk to him like that!” Meghan rose from her chair and turned to Espinita. “There are so many damn things that matter, and you care about like three of them! How about a kind word! How about approval and emotional support and letting someone make their own decision once in their damn life?!”
“You talk like a sixteen,” said Espinita, with enough spite to start a fire on a rainy day. “You ought to be kissing the ground my son walks on every second of your life and instead all you do is piss and moan about what you don’t have. You won the lottery to be with a two-fifty-six and still you whine, you ungrateful bitch.”
The Orpheum employee tried holding up her hands to stop them, but Anthony rose at the same time. He offered his hand to Meghan and she took it, rising to stand beside him. No one spoke a word as they moved together towards the door, until they were almost through it.
“If you go out that door, you’re out forever,” said Espinita. Both of you. And when you do have a baby, it will grow up and curse you for what you took from it, and for what? For what?!”
Anthony and Meghan were halfway out the door, but then Anthony hesitated. He wanted to say this one more thing to his mother, and he knew he’d never see her again after this. Or at least, if he did see her, it would never be the same.
“Our child will know that it’s parents know that they are enough, and it is enough. Not perfect. Just enough. I know you don’t see the value in that, but it’s what really matters. Goodbye, Mom.”
Anthony and Meghan left the Orpheum clinic, and walked through a nearby park, not talking, not making plans, just both of them imagining what it would be like when they got pregnant again. It was uncertain, exciting, frightening. It was enough.
END
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing on your social media or with a friend via email. Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
I’ve thought about “designer babies” in the past, and I wonder if one day those children will be a sign of some measure of wealth? Like if you have cancer or some sort of handicap, that will one day be blamed on your parents being too poor to edit the bad genes out of you. And if you are wealthy but your parents still chose to have children the normal way, it will be seen as weird or even cruel.
This is a winner! And definitely opens a door for more chapters in Meghan and Anthony’s life.