The smiling couple pictured above are featured in a story that appeared in the August 14, 2025, edition of The Wall Street Journal. The title of that story is not, "Let's Make A Baby!" That's my title. In The Journal, the story is titled this way: "Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies."
Feel free to click the link that I have just provided, and you may, paywalls permitting, be able to read what Zusha Elinson has to say about that topic. No link clicking will be necessary, though, to read what I have to say about it!
To get you oriented, it turns out that the family pictured is expecting another young child, soon. The couple's children were not, at least in most cases, "surprises." They were, in fact, "engineered," if I may use that expression. The couple apparently represents, according to Elinson, a growing preoccupation among the Silicon Valley elite with the idea that they need to make sure that any children they have are "high-performing."
As Elinson and The Journal report, "Tech execs are paying tens of thousands to find brilliant dates or select high-IQ embryos." Apparently, Silicon Valley parents are typically paying up to $50,000 for such genetic-testing services, which include promises to screen embryos for IQ. Tech futurists such as Elon Musk are urging the intellectually gifted to multiply, while professional matchmakers are setting up tech execs with brilliant partners partly to get brilliant offspring. $50,000 per test, though, may be a bargain. According to Jennifer Donnelly, whose website bills her as "the ultimate matchmaker," Donnelly charges up to $500,000 to give you advice. “Right now," says Donnelly, "I have one, two, three tech CEOs and all of them prefer Ivy League.”
The invitation to "Let's Make A Baby!" comes from a song by Billy Paul, an American soul singer. Click the link to the title to listen to Paul's song. I think you will agree, if you do, that the song harkens back to an earlier time, and is an effort to initiate some "romantic" love-making, not an invitation to start a foray into genetic engineering.
It's a Sunday, and so it's not unusul that my blog posting today is focusing on what I think of as a profound "theological" question. From the "Golden Calf" on down, the big mistake humans make, according to the Bible and other religious texts, is to worship the products of their own hands, instead of accepting life as a "gift" from the Creator.
If you are not jarred by what that "pronatalist" family featured in The Journal has chosen to do, I am inviting you to think about it. For what it's worth (and I do have some very satisfactory personal experience with what happens when you focus on feelings of love, not IQ predictions, where sexual relationships are involved) my advice is to stick with Billy Paul.
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