// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
She’s 28, Loves God and Her Family, and Might Be the Reason You Can’t Have Kids
By 5 am every morning, Emma Waters is on the sofa with a blanket, plotting America’s baby-making future. For two hours, she stays off her phone, inspired by Deep Work, the self-help bestseller. At 7:30, she does emails. Waters, 28 years old, is a monk of productivity who makes motherhood look like all-natural Adderall.
At 8 am, it’s time for breakfast and the Bible. Waters tries to live her life according to the mantra “Love God, get married, have babies.” She asks that I not use the real names of her two daughters for their safety, even though they’ve been printed elsewhere. I’ll call them Gertie and Ophelia, which are close enough.
All morning, they play. Ophelia, the baby, runs around in white tights, shirtless, clutching a pink purse; Gertie’s doll won’t stop crying. Jack, Waters’ husband, flits in and out. There isn’t much to say about Jack, other than that he’s hot, is studying to be a preacher, and has a big desk at home, much bigger than Waters’, featuring a bust of Nietzsche. In the same room, Waters has a pull-out secretary where she takes meetings, not far from a portrait of a glowering President Trump.
The only thing Waters doesn’t really do is exercise; she hasn’t found the time.
Not many people outside of DC have heard of Waters, who mostly works from home in a dreary Pennsylvania suburb named after a long-offshored manufacturer. Yet Waters is a factory for policy papers and op-eds extolling the harms of unregulated reproductive technology, probing the moral issues that liberals don’t want to touch with a 10-foot turkey baster. At least once a month, reporting on fertility, I ask for an academic source and am instead directed to Waters, author of a biblical women’s leadership book that basically says the best thing about the Barbie movie was the patriarchy.
Emma Waters, her husband Jackson, and their two daughters.
The craziest thing is that, in certain ways, she’s a voice of reason. America’s $10 billion fertility industry is suffering a massive PR crisis that makes the embryo mix-ups and baby-selling schemes of yore seem quaint. A few recent headlines: “The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of US-Born Babies Via Surrogate,” “The Family Law Loophole That Lets Sex Offenders Parent Kids,” “California Couple Busted for Running Suspected Baby Mill,” “Surrogate Mother Who Refused to Abort Baby Gives Birth Amid Ongoing Legal Dispute.” Polygenic testing companies promise today’s parents that they can pick the tallest, smartest, least-bald offspring, mainstreaming debates about the “Black-white IQ gap.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—a father via surrogacy—and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong are invested in an embryo-editing startup. If you believe what they told The Wall Street Journal, their first gene-hacked baby has probably already been born.
Many right-wing techies are jazzed about these developments, which might bump up birth rates or create “better” spawn. Many liberals don’t know how to talk about the ethical pitfalls. Emma Waters fills in the gaps. As a kind of backroom wheeler-dealer and political strategist, she is the mastermind behind Florida’s recent ban on international surrogacy, the Texas GOP’s souring on IVF, and the squashing of Trump’s “fertilization president” initiatives. This God-loving, JD Vance–stanning Gen Z-er might be standing between you and your ability to have a family, or she might be, somehow, the force that makes it possible. Waters has so much to teach us about optics and politics and why, in so many arenas, Democrats are losing so dramatically. Waters wants to dismantle fertility as we know it. And she wants to do it politely, during nap time, with her husband’s permission.
Waters wasn’t always political. She and her three younger siblings were homeschooled by their mother in a poor, rural part of southern Georgia, while their father worked 60-hour weeks as a facilities manager and HVAC repairman. (Waters describes her local high school as the kind of place where one-third of students