Meet the elites trying to make Gattaca a reality: avowed pronatalists dedicated to producing perfect heirs. Julia Black dives deep into the latest trend among wealthy, tech-minded types to bolster their legacies via science (see also: cryogenics). The subjects of this article are trying to turn their bloodlines into fire hoses and claiming it’s for the good of humankind:
Elites have used lineage to consolidate money and power for most of human history. But as couples in the developed world are increasingly putting off parenthood until later in life — or abandoning it altogether — people like the Collinses are looking for hacks to make large families feasible in a modern, secular society.
They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there’s the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The Collinses, who call themselves “ruthless pragmatists,” consider the inevitable backlash a small price to pay.
“We’re frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that people are super private within it,” Simone said. They not only hope that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around the high-birth-rate lifestyle.
The payoff won’t be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will “become the new dominant leading classes in the world.”
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