By Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things. (Photo: Trust “Tru” Katsande/Unsplash)
With every bite you take, ask yourself, is this the best choice I could make for my baby?” That was the last sentence a friend of mine read in her guide to pregnancy book before she threw it in the bin. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of fertility startup Orchid, wants to make the pressure on mothers to create perfect children even more totalizing. Her company screens embryos for parents using IVF, and allows parents to rank order siblings based on projected health, eye color, and IQ.
Orchid could only exist in an age where IVF is common (one in fifty American births) and used far beyond its original purpose as a remedy for infertility. American IVF has already offered parents around the globe the chance to choose the gender of their child (broadly illegal elsewhere). It enables commercial surrogacy, and it opens the door to mix-and-match gametes for three-parent families. But more than anything, it is the extreme extension of the idea that parents are their children’s authors, rather than the stewards of children received as a gift.
Siddiqui has been clear that she hopes to see insurance cover embryo screening, and her analogies for her services suggest that she hopes it will become near universal, if not mandatory. When Siddiqui got criticism from parents grateful that they’d received children they wouldn’t have “chosen,” she shot back: “Trusting God doesn’t mean skipping the car seat. You still buckle your child in because protecting them is part of your job. The same is true for their genome. Hoping for the best is not the same as guarding them from preventable harm.”