Print 
PDF
Mere weeks after the corporate media lost their minds over a playful “great genes jeans” ad, in vitro fertilization (IVF) connoisseur and Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui used an interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat to argue that only humans with specific genes, those deemed acceptable, should get a chance at life outside of the womb.
Siddiqui concluded that using her technology to rank embryonic life based on their predisposition to roughly 1,200 diseases and conditions is good for potential parents and maybe even good for society. On the contrary, Orchid’s mission and Siddiqui’s description of it fall fatally short of moral muster.
Be informed, not misled.
Siddiqui kicked off the conversation by claiming that Orchid “gives parents the power to protect their children before pregnancy begins.” The reality of her genetic testing, which costs $2,500 per embryo, however, is that it pits frozen siblings against each other in a battle to be born.
The New York Times headline reads "Silicon Valley Wants to Optimize Your Children’s Genes: For as little as $2,500, you can choose your future baby."
Should you?
Throughout the interview, Douthat posed a handful of ethical and moral questions that many have overlooked regarding assisted reproductive technology (ART). Siddiqui not only remained unfazed in the face of concerns about “removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife, in a relationship, with a child,” but she also brushed off worries that IVF genetic testing is notoriously unreliable.
When Douthat accurately noted that most IVF clients, including Orchid’s “thousands,” likely don’t opt for the misnomered “compassion transfer” for unused embryos and instead choose to dump them, Siddiqui claimed he was being “overly simplistic.”
Yet, Douthat is right that “we know in practice what is likely to happen.” Siddiqui claims Orchid “advises against discarding any embryo for any reason.” Still, those little lives that are deemed unworthy of implantation after getting sequenced by Orchid for potential diseases, disorders, cancers, defects, and chromosomal abnormalities, become some of the millions of embryos that were created only to be discarded or sentenced to indefinite cryopreservation.
Takeaway
As if Siddiqui’s lack of regard for human life couldn’t get any worse, she struggled to fend off questions from Douthat about how many of her 16 embryos she planned to implant.
“Yeah, we honestly haven’t — we haven’t really made —,” Siddiqui began.
Suddenly, the woman who repeatedly insisted that “every single embryo is precious” didn’t know what she was doing with them? It’s no surprise Douthat did not “believe” her stammering. As it turns out, he was right not to.
After some prodding, Siddiqui confessed she and her husband not only wanted to implant a fraction of their embryos, enough to get four children, but also planned to sex-select them to ensure they fulfilled their dreams of having two boys and two girls.
No amount of doublespeak or dodging from Siddiqui can disguise the true intentions of Orchid (or pretty much every other eugenics-y startup posing as whole-genome sequencing companies). They believe the future lies in their handpicked breeding technology, just like Margaret Sanger did, which gives anyone willing to pay their steep price the chance to disqualify already-created life from a chance at birth over potential physical qualities and conditions.
What’s worse is that, after years of successfully avoiding scrutiny from corporate media and policymakers for the moral pitfalls that plague their methods, ART activists like Siddiqui are on a mission to convince future clients that engaging mass embryo creation and destruction based on certain traits is not only acceptable, but it’s also the morally correct thing to do.
Since abortion became "women's healthcare" on demand, life has been devalued. This is an example of how it works.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.
