Use of Artificial Intelligence by fertility clinics to efficiently sort through embryos and select the most suitable for implantation is a programme of ‘AI led eugenics’, a leading pro-life politician has claimed.

Lord David Alton, who sits in the British House of Lords, was commenting on a newspaper report that a fertility clinics are now using an AI tool to analyse embryos in minute detail and pick up tiny flaws that are undetectable to the human eye. The most flawless ones are implanted to increase a woman’s odds of becoming pregnant as a result of IVF.

Lord Alton said this technology is used to “detect and determine which human embryos will be destroyed and which ones be saved”.

“This is AI led eugenics”, he claimed. “We need instead Authentic Intelligence, Ethical Intelligence – not more eugenics”.

Lord Alton said since embryo experimentation was legalised in Britain in 1990 an estimated three and a half million human embryos have been destroyed or discarded.

“The ‘special status’ which the UK Parliament was told the human embryo would be given was rapidly jettisoned and grotesque demands acceded to . . . for procedures foretold in CS Lewis’ dystopian 1945 novel, That Hideous Strength – with the fiction now fact”.