American Eagle came under fire recently for an ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. In one ad, Sweeney fiddles with her jeans, saying, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue.” A male narrator finishes with, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
It’s a play on homophones, but the wordplay reveals a more sinister element: Sweeney does not just have great American Eagle jeans, she has great American genes. Picking a blonde, blue-eyed, able-bodied all-American girl was not an accident. It was about showcasing what are “good genes,” and thus what are “bad genes.” It’s a modern eugenics movement proudly re-emerging amid a welcoming political climate.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The American eugenics movement has historically promoted the superiority of Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied, wealthy people, leading to harmful policies from the Immigration Act of 1924 barring immigrants from Asia to a practice of unnecessary and undisclosed hysterectomies performed on Black women in the South so widespread it was coined the “Mississippi appendectomy.” Eugenicists promoted anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilization of those in prison and in poverty and of those with disabilities or mental illness.
These practices have not died. In 2020, low-income immigrant women detained by ICE in Georgia were forcibly sterilized. As we hear rhetoric from the current administration about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of our country, it invites horrifying thoughts of what may be happening to immigrants currently being detained by ICE.
Even more sinister, however, is a modern eugenics movement camouflaged by in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF is increasingly popular, and rightfully so. Couples with fertility issues can conceive. Women can freeze eggs. Queer couples can have genetically related kids. IVF can also ostensibly prevent harm. IVF clinics might screen embryos for sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, BRCA1, and Down syndrome. Things get confusing and uncomfortable, however, when we try to define what harms are worth preventing. In a world where whiteness and conventional beauty are tightly coupled with success, couldn’t selecting for these features be a way to minimize a child’s future suffering?
Most sperm donor companies have a height minimum of 5’9″. Harvard graduate egg and sperm donors are highly sought after. While it’s hard to fault parents for wanting the best for their children, as a geneticist, it is concerning to me how much stock people put into the inheritance of such complex and environmentally influenced traits.
With biotech companies explicitly offering genetic testing, I am even more concerned. Last October, Helios Genomics offered to boost a couple’s future child’s IQ via genetic screening. Nucleus Genomics recently took this a shocking step further by announcing it is offering genetic testing for traits like eye color, hair color, height, BMI, and IQ. Companies perform these screens with polygenic risk scoring, which makes use of genetic mutations identified from large scale population studies to be associated with a complex trait like intelligence.
But these findings are just that: associations. We barely understand the true, context-dependent function of all the genes and mutations associated with complex traits. The idea that a company could confidently boast a six-point increase in a trait as socially and environmentally modified as intelligence is naïve at best and deceptive at worst. It also plays directly into the ideals of eugenics: that all social disparities and ailments are genetically determined, and that there is one correct way to be.
Amid devastating cuts to everything from Medicaid to education, it is curious that one of the few spaces the Trump administration has pledged to increase federal funding is in vitro fertilization. Is this a random act of kindness amid an onslaught of cruelties? Or is it one of several strategies for breeding a homogenous generation of nationalistic Americans—ones with “good genes” and predetermined allegiances to the regime (thanks to $1,000 savings accounts established in their name from birth)?
In this modern era of eugenics, as immigrants are expelled while neo-Nazis spew hateful theories of “great replacement,” it is no wonder American Eagle felt bold enough to declare that Sydney Sweeney has great genes.
America must reject this renewed, government-endorsed eugenics. Scientists must think deeply about ramifications: Just because we can, or think we can, does not mean we should. IVF companies should be barred from making false promises about the heritability of traits like intelligence, BMI, and hair color. While fatal diseases like breast cancer are fair to select against, prospective parents should think twice about what is lost when selecting for subjective social norms.
We all have great genes and we all deserve a society that embraces us, that makes us feel whole, and bold, and beautiful—like a pair of great jeans.
Tania Fabo, MSc is an MD-PhD candidate in genetics at Stanford University, a Rhodes scholar, a Knight-Hennessy scholar, a Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, and a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project. Her PhD research focuses on the interaction between genetics and diet in colorectal cancer risk.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
