Gene editing of human embryos for non-therapeutic purposes should be legally permitted

The therapeutic/enhancement distinction is philosophically unstable. Editing to eliminate Huntington's disease is therapeutic. Editing to reduce risk of late-onset Alzheimer's — is that therapeutic? What about reducing the genetic component of depression? Editing for height in a child who would have been in the bottom fifth percentile? The categories bleed. A regulatory framework that permits therapeutic editing but prohibits enhancement needs a principled distinction it can actually enforce, which no one has provided.

The consent argument proves too much. Parents routinely make irreversible decisions that shape who their children will be — early education, diet, the country in which they're raised, their language, their religious exposure. We don't treat these as autonomy violations requiring consent. The distinction people draw between genetic and environmental shaping is either a naturalistic fallacy (genetic = special because natural) or requires an argument about what makes gene editing categorically different from these other parental decisions.

The edited embryo cannot consent. This is the decisive argument. We impose significant irreversible interventions on non-consenting future persons — circumcision is controversial for the same reason. Gene editing goes further: it determines their genome before they exist and before they can form preferences about what kind of person they want to be. This isn't a regulatory problem that oversight can solve. It's a foundational autonomy problem with non-consenting modification of persons.

Enhancement editing is not currently safe enough to permit under any regulatory framework. CRISPR editing in embryos has off-target effects that we can characterise but not fully predict. He Jiankui's edited twins have edits we know happened but off-targets we cannot be certain haven't caused harm. A regulatory framework that permitted enhancement editing now would be permitting harm to unconsenting persons at an unknown but non-negligible probability. The 'under regulatory oversight' clause is doing too much work — oversight cannot make an unsafe procedure safe.