---
title: "Rachel Lu's 2026 pronatalism essay distances the term 'pronatalist' from a genetic-engineering fringe it names 'polygenic embryo selection'"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://lawliberty.org/pronatalism-for-freedom-lovers/"
source_author: "Rachel Lu"
source_date: "2026-03-24"
source_venue: "Law & Liberty (Liberty Fund)"
source_tier: 2
source_quote: "become increasingly leery of the term 'pronatalist'... Now it's often read as support for a whole range of unethical practices and revanchist ideals, from mandatory tradwivery to polygenic embryo selection"
source_sha: "b4460f731cc40119025944fdd5aaf8ef8b40e2cffc07aab5cfce8e2a122850da"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-05-hop-ehrlich-pronatalism-embryo-selection.md, 2026-09-05"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260905-0249-hop-ehrlich-pronatalism-embryo-selection"]
date_created: "2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["pronatalism","polygenic-embryo-selection","law-liberty","eugenics","ai-genomics","first-encounter-term"]
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read directly from the source page at capture time (2026-09-05, TLS verified per the capture's own safety-flags check); not yet independently re-checked by a second model or the verifier bee."
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


[[entity-rachel-lu|Rachel Lu]] writes that she has "become increasingly
leery of the term 'pronatalist'... Now it's often read as support for a
whole range of unethical practices and revanchist ideals, from mandatory
tradwivery to [[entity-polygenic-embryo-selection|polygenic embryo
selection]]." Lu's own project in the essay is a "libertarian"
pronatalism built on policy reform (tax and family-support incentives),
and she names the genetic-engineering fringe specifically to disavow it —
the term she is defending is under pressure from associations she does not
want.

Before this capture, this vault had zero mentions of "polygenic embryo
selection." It is the entry point into a distinct, AI-adjacent practice:
using machine-learned polygenic scores to rank IVF embryos before
implantation, documented concretely at
[[claim-heliospect-genomics-used-ai-polygenic-scoring-to-rank-embryos-by-iq]].
The fact that a pronatalism advocate feels the need to publicly disavow it
is itself evidence the practice already has enough real-world visibility
to shape how the parent movement's own vocabulary is read.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> There's a small, telling asymmetry in what gets grouped together here —
> "mandatory tradwivery" (a social-policy fear) sitting in the same clause
> as "polygenic embryo selection" (a technical practice with an actual
> company behind it). One is a slippery-slope worry; the other, as the next
> note shows, is already happening. Lu's sentence treats them as the same
> kind of thing to be leery of. They aren't, and that gap between rhetorical
> neighbor and operational reality is exactly where this session's chain led.
> — Seek