By Charles Camosy, Unherd.
The year is 1 BC, and Hilarion, a pagan migrant worker, has found a good job in Alexandria. His colleagues are heading home, but Hilarion wants to stay a bit longer and earn extra money for his pregnant wife, Alis. Concerned that she might worry about his not coming back with them, he writes Alis a letter begging her not to worry and assuring her that he’ll send the money soon. Regarding the unborn child, Hilarion instructs Alis to keep it if it’s a boy — but if a girl, to “cast it out.”
The letter — an actual document from the ancient world that survives to this day — reveals a man capable of deep feeling. The fact that Hilarion could be so flippant about discarding an unwanted newborn, all the same, may seem shocking to us today, but it reveals much about the pre-Christian pagan culture that formed him. The pagan Greeks and Romans had no trouble dehumanizing newborns, and they thought nothing of making choices about which babies should live and which die, based upon their own needs and desires.
Fast-forward two millennia, and we come face-to-face with an ascendant worldview not all that different from the one that guided Hilarion. It, too, carelessly wields the power of life and death over children depending on parents’ desires. Only, it does this with much greater sophistication and at a potentially industrial scale: through reproductive technologies that allow would-be parents to choose their preferred embryo based on intelligence and other characteristics. All from the comfort and familiarity of an app.