By 5 amevery 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 byDeep 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 PresidentTrump.

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 theBarbiemoviewas the patriarchy.

Emma Waters, her husband Jackson, and their two daughters.

Photograph: Adrienne Grunwald

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 toldThe Wall Street Journal, their first gene-hacked baby has probably already been born.