Coming off the jeans vs. genes non-scandal, the push for comprehensive embryo screening should make alarm bells go off.
T he internet took a dystopian turn recently when Ross Douthat of the New York Times sat down for a podcast episode with Noor Siddiqui, the head of Orchid, the world’s first whole-genome embryo screener.
With a creepy nonchalance, Siddiqui claimed that it is “stewardship” and “responsible” parenting to edit out the possibility of serious health risk in offspring. This would be done via technology that would identify the embryos that could be potentially problematic, as well as those that are of “prime” quality. Siddiqui’s pitch uses euphemistic language to make the technology sound life-affirming, obfuscating what’s actually happening.
The counterargument, of course, is not that a baby unable to walk would miraculously gain the ability to walk (though anything is possible). It’s that the baby with the predisposition for a disability would never be born because the parents would not “select” it. Fewer babies with health problems would be born, and this is supposed to sound merciful. We could snap our fingers, and families would never again be burdened with a child with “defects,” as Marvel’s Thanos might say.
These ideas need to be deconstructed to reveal the evil within, since it’s not readily apparent to everyone in this modern age.
As the sister of a boy with autism, I can attest that the lives of those with special needs are difficult. In the most extreme cases, they may self-harm, remain mute, or lash out at others. Even in more minor cases, they may never develop social skills or be able to live on their own. Still, never in a million years would I erase the life of my brother, whose strong moral compass and whimsical outlook on life have blessed me and my family in immeasurable ways. People who can never live independently, or who might require a wheelchair forever, are worthy of life and love.
People with special needs, disabilities, and diseases test a health care system, sure. But more important, they test our capacity for compassion and selflessness, and that’s a good thing. It’s not about how we create a more “perfect” world without those people in it; it’s about how we subjugate our desires for convenience and wealth to make the world accommodating to those people.
Comedian Shane Gillis said it best in his iconic bit about having a relative with Down syndrome — that many people misunderstand the quality of life that people with special needs have. Of course, it’s a diverse group and autism itself is on a wide spectrum, but in the case of people with Down syndrome, they are now living to almost 60 years old on average. My brother’s life is limited by his autism, but he finds immense childlike joy in small things — whether it’s a steam locomotive pulling into a station or a SpongeBob episode — that most people don’t even notice. But most important, no one who is currently living has the right to deny a chance at life to anyone.
If we took RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement seriously, worked to have better diets, and stopped lacing our food supply with inflammatory chemicals, we could start to eliminate some root environmental causes of chronic childhood disease. That should be a major priority before we mainstream throwing away lab-made embryos that have the projected likelihood of disease.
“If you have enormous genetic privilege, and for you to roll the dice and get an outcome that isn’t going to lead to disease is in the cards for you, then of course, go ahead and roll the dice,” Siddiqui said to Douthat. “The vast majority of parents in the future are not going to want to roll the dice with their child’s health. They’re going to see it as taking the maximum amount of care, the maximum amount of love, plan their nursery, plan their home, plan their preschool.”
Coming off the Sydney Sweeney jeans vs. genes non-scandal, this is a statement that should make alarm bells go off for the left. The insinuation, as pro-life activist Lila Rose points out, is that only the “genetically privileged” deserve to have their children naturally while the rest of the population should be using in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo screening to make sure only the best crop sees the light of day. This sounds pretty close to the utopia in The Giver, in which pain and suffering have been edited out of the human experience, and the supposed deviants of the society are euthanized in a process called “the release.” Blinded by the pursuit of perfection, the advocates of embryo screening are killing not only children who are deemed rejects but our collective humanity.
Like many utilitarian movie villains, the proponents of embryo screening have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. They argue that the technology is more humane because it means that more parents will avoid aborting their children at ten weeks of gestation, the point at which limited genetic testing in utero is now offered. Rather than spare more children, however, their prescription is likely to sacrifice more. They forgot to mention, there is a steep moral price to pay in the IVF industry.
The CDC estimates that more than 238,000 patients attempted IVF in 2021. If clinics created between seven and eight embryos for every patient, 1.6 million to 1.9 million embryos in total would be created in a year. In 2021, fewer than 100,000 embryos were brought to term, which suggests that between 1.5 million and 1.8 million embryos created through IVF either failed to implant in the womb or were “extras” that were discarded. That’s an enormous number of souls destroyed; it makes the 985,000 lives the abortion industry claimed from July 2022 through June 2023 pale in comparison.
Once we open this can of worms, we normalize not just deleting human lives with potential but intervening further in an insidious way with gene editing — the scientific community has already started experimenting with this technology. With this, the advantage will go to affluent Silicon Valley couples who, out of vanity and a desire to produce prodigies, will edit embryos for IQ. Likewise, celebrities and other elites may wish to edit for eye color, sex, or other physical traits. Besides treating children like accessories used to inflate parental egos, gene editing for intelligence will also arguably exacerbate socioeconomic inequality, given that poor Americans won’t be able to afford to maximize their chances of having genius progeny.
In his interview with Siddiqui, Douthat also gently demonstrated the detrimental effect that embryo screening will have on love. Choking up as he reads a poem by Galway Kinnell titled, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” Douthat asks Siddiqui, “Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife in a relationship with a child?”
Staring back with an empty, befuddled smile, Siddiqui responds, “What do you mean?”
Unlike what Orchid is working on, this is not rocket science. Sex has an obvious purpose — creating children — that sweetens and deepens the bond between a husband and wife. IVF made mainstream, so that mass embryo screening can be conducted, will erode or erase the special connection between sex and procreation.
We know from mainstream culture that sex has already become increasingly transactional and less sacred because contraception and abortion are available on demand. Just survey a sample of college students and ask them if they think that sex is still special. Sex has lost a great deal of its profundity, and as a result, Gen Z is increasingly less interested in partaking in it. Young people are having less sex than previous generations did.
In the existing paradigm of progress, which includes significant family planning, there is always the possibility that nature will overrule our plans and a woman will still get pregnant. Orchid’s ideal world, however, is that embryo screening via IVF will become widespread, meaning that the sexual act will be strictly for pleasure, not procreation.
“Most kids are born by accident,” Siddiqui wrote in a post on X.
And yet we stigmatize parents who plan ahead? Who screen embryos to prevent deadly, (now) preventable diseases? If you wouldn’t screen, fine. Just be honest: you’re okay with your kid potentially suffering for life so you can feel morally superior . . . or because you can’t be inconvenienced for 2 weeks to extract eggs and check for genetic issues before they develop.
Siddiqui is unfortunately starting with the jarring, wrong premise that life, when it is created in the way it’s supposed to be, is not miraculous but a mistake. We don’t need designer babies; babies are already made by design. We need to nip this transhumanist sickness in the bud.