Shared Futures or Financialized Futures: Polygenic Screening, Reproductive Justice, and the Radical Charge of Collective Care

Abstract

Polygenic screening is a new form of embryo testing that assesses the probability that an embryo will later develop a wide range of health conditions. This technology purports to help prospective parents choose which embryos to implant during in-vitro fertilization to ensure the “healthiest” baby. In this essay, we interrogate polygenic screening as part of the broader economy of finance capital–backed fertility technologies that are redefining notions of care to stress individual risk mitigation and neo-eugenic genetic selection as a way to promote the ableist mirage of “healthy” futures for generations to come. Contesting these false promises, our essay reveals the political-economic interests that lurk behind this problematic notion of care, juxtaposing it with an alternative vision of collective care by engaging radical Black, Indigenous, and socialist feminist calls for reproductive justice, mutual aid, and the revaluation and reorganization of reproductive labor. We argue that the embrace of polygenic screening obfuscates the political roots of our crisis of reproductive labor and care—an obfuscation that also silences the ecological precarity upon which the settler state is predicated. We thus bring neoliberal, eugenic, and ultimately settler colonial ideologies of privatized care into stark relief with an alternative that will more likely open up futures for all of our children and kin. Foregrounding radical collective approaches to care repoliticizes discussions of maternal/parental care; it also points to the necessary political movement building required if we are to cherish and protect the lives of current and future generations, the planet, and all its inhabitants.