Tom Shakespeare, born in 1981 with spinal muscular atrophy, opens with a disarming confession: he once dreamed of being cured. He imagined a shadow-self, genetically identical but for one corrected error. That fantasy, he argues, is now being industrialised. Nucleus Genomics ran ads across the New York subway system in 2025 promising parents they could have their "best baby" — screening up to 20 embryos not just for genetic disorders but for eye colour, height, intelligence proxies, longevity, insomnia, and male-pattern baldness. The intellectual architecture behind this is what philosophers Nicholas Agar and Julian Savulescu termed "liberal eugenics" — a framework that separates individual parental choice from the state-directed eugenics of the early twentieth century. The argument: if parents freely choose to screen embryos, it's just another consumer decision, unrelated to the forced sterilisation programmes of the US or Nazi Germany's extermination of disabled people. Historian Nathaniel Comfort traces this pivot to mid-century, when medical genetics began replacing the pseudo-scientific eugenic records offices with tools that had real predictive power. The science, however, remains contested in ways the marketing elides. Nucleus's claims that "height is 80% genetic" and "intelligence is 50% genetic" refer to population-level heritability estimates — statistical artefacts that describe variance within groups, not reliable predictors for any individual embryo. Selling population statistics as individual guarantees is not a minor marketing exaggeration; it is a category error dressed up in a lab coat. Shakespeare notes that the majority of disabilities do not stem from genetics at all, but from "the wear and tear of the world." The deeper structural problem is what this does to the concept of disability. Denmark now terminates over 95% of pregnancies where Down syndrome is detected. Prenatal screening has been standard medical practice for decades, but extending it to polygenic traits like intelligence and height crosses a line from preventing suffering to engineering competitive advantage. The article draws on Foucault's analysis of biopolitics: the state once managed populations paternalistically; now that management has been outsourced to individual consumers operating within market logic. Shakespeare's personal stakes make the argument harder to dismiss. He is not an abstract ethicist — he is someone who lived inside the fantasy of genetic correction and eventually rejected it. His point is not that genetic screening is always wrong, but that the framing of "best baby" smuggles in assumptions about human value that should be argued openly, not buried in subway ads. The neoliberal packaging — "generational health" as a companion to "generational wealth" — reveals the real logic: eugenics as insurance policy against deteriorating public services. The piece identifies a genuine ratchet mechanism. Once embryo screening for competitive traits becomes commercially available and socially normalised, opting out becomes a form of disadvantage. Parents who refuse to screen may be seen as negligent. The logic of individual choice, aggregated across millions of decisions, produces population-level eugenic effects without any state directive — precisely the outcome liberal eugenics claimed to avoid. What makes this moment different from the 1990s bioethics debates is the commercial infrastructure. Nucleus is not a thought experiment; it is a company with a website, a pricing model, and a subway ad campaign. The shift from state eugenics to consumer eugenics tracks perfectly with the broader privatisation of social functions — healthcare, education, retirement security — now joined by genetic optimisation. The question is no longer whether eugenics will return, but who gets to buy it.
