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 certain 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.
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.
Throughout the interview, Douthat asked a handful of ethical and moral questions that many have ignored about assisted reproductive technology (ART). Siddiqui not only remained unpahsed 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,” but 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.
Siddiqui claims the embryos that go through Orchid’s testing are “extremely precious” and “miraculous,” but she stops short of calling them humans. To her, they are “magical cells” that can be tossed without guilt. According to Siddiqui, throwing away unused embryos conceived via IVF is the same thing as an embryo’s failure to implant after natural reproduction.
As Douthat noted, “The term ‘discard’ implies agency.”
“I don’t think it implies agency,” Siddiqui quipped.
“The obvious difference between embryos that fail to implant when a husband and a wife have sex and embryos that are discarded in a laboratory is that in the first case, the embryo dies with no human being deciding that it’s going to die. And in the second case, the embryo dies because the laboratory decided it should die,” he explained.
Yet, Siddiqui did not budge. Later in the interview, Douthat pushed back even further.
“In order for your argument to work, you just have to say: The embryo doesn’t have any moral status that we are obliged to respect, and therefore it’s OK to discard it,” he noted.
Siddiqui instead suggested that embryos with conditions, like the gradual blindness that afflicted her mother, shouldn’t be implanted or born.
“I think that the question of an embryo that is going to get adult-onset blindness, what do I think about that embryo? My mom doesn’t want to be blind. She doesn’t want me to be blind. She doesn’t want her grandkids to be blind,” Siddiqui said.
She even went so far as to pretend that effectively culling embryos deemed problematic based on the results of Orchid’s sequencing would be a “positive moral choice.”
“It is the responsible decision as a parent, to detect that risk at the earliest possible stage and to transfer the embryo that has the best probability of a healthy life,” Siddiqui claimed.
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 every other eugenics-y startup posing as whole-genome sequencing companies). They believe the future lies in their handpicked breeding technology, 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.