Frankenstein
Frankenstein is one of those books that only gets more unsettling as technology advances. On the surface, it’s a gothic tale: Victor Frankenstein, a gifted young scientist, discovers how to assemble and animate a being from dead matter, only to be horrified by the creature he’s brought to life. Underneath, it’s a story about what happens when we reach for godlike power without accepting godlike responsibility—about “playing God” in ways that hit very close to modern questions around creating life in the lab.
Victor’s fatal failure isn’t just that he crosses some forbidden scientific line. The true horror begins after he succeeds. As soon as the creature opens its eyes, Victor panics, recoils from its ugliness, and abandons it. He wants the thrill and glory of creation, but he refuses the next step: acknowledging this being as “mine” and binding himself to its good. The creature begins as something innocent and needy—longing for companionship, meaning, and a place in the world—but it becomes monstrous largely through rejection, isolation, and rage at having been made and then despised. The novel’s most haunting question is not “How did you make it?” but “What have you done to what you made?”
That question is what made Frankenstein especially powerful for me when I wrote about it in the context of IVF. The parallel is not exact—Shelley wasn’t thinking about fertility clinics—but the underlying moral issue is similar: what happens when we treat the origins of human life as a technical project we control? In IVF, children can be conceived outside the marital act, embryos can be created in excess, frozen, selected, or discarded. Years ago, I wrote about using Frankenstein as a way to ask whether we risk wanting the power to “make” life without fully reckoning with the unconditional claim that each new human person has on us.
It is crucial, though, to be absolutely clear: this is not a criticism of children conceived through IVF. Every human life, however conceived, is precious, unrepeatable, and fully worthy of love. The moral questions I see in Frankenstein are directed at the choices and systems adults build around technology—not at the dignity of the babies who result. If anything, the novel underscores how deeply wrong it is to treat any human being as a product, a mistake, or an afterthought. The child is never the problem; our willingness (or unwillingness) to receive and protect that child is.
Shelley’s story doesn’t give us a bioethics manual, but it does sharpen the question I tried to explore: if we step into roles once left to God and the natural order, will we also accept the radical, non-negotiable responsibilities that come with that? Or will we, like Victor, be tempted to look away from the “creatures” who most disturb our plans—whether that’s an unwanted child, a disabled embryo, or a life conceived under circumstances we didn’t originally intend to embrace? Frankenstein endures partly because it refuses to let us separate power from responsibility. It forces us to ask not only what we can do, but what we owe to every human being who exists because we chose to act.
