Will you make babies the right way, or the old-fashioned way?
Orchid, a reproductive technology startup, knows which option it would like you to pick. The company, which screens embryos for an extensive list of genetic diseases before clients select some for in vitro fertilization, frames the decision in language that appeals to parents’ deepest desires for their children.
“Now parents have this ability to protect their children from an entire category of disease,” said Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui in an interview this month.
According to Siddiqui, the embryo screening technology Orchid offers isn’t just for couples who worry they carry hereditary genetic disease. It’s intended for ordinary parents. After all, what future mother or father would wish a life-altering or -ending condition on their child, when the technology to prevent it exists? Siddiqui says she and her husband intend to use Orchid-informed IVF, despite not suffering any infertility problems like most heterosexual couples who pursue IVF.
The compassionate, ethical pathway to parenthood, Siddiqui claims, is to protect children from preventable disease through Orchid technology.
Siddiqui’s logic would be valid if her technology stood by the fundamental principle of good medicine — to do no harm — and cured existing embryos or babies of serious conditions. But Orchid does not cure. It kills. More specifically, the company aids and abets parents in freezing and disposing of living embryos.
Orchid is complicit in violating the sacred precondition of parenthood, unconditional love. Genetic screening allows parents to set conditions for their children to be born: a certain standard of physical and intellectual perfection that will soon expand to aesthetic perfection as well.
Had my own parents accepted the logic Orchid proposes, they would have aborted my sister. A 20-week ultrasound revealed that my sister suffered from anencephaly, a neural tube defect that almost guarantees an infant will die shortly after birth. In other words, my sister was exactly the type of embryo Orchid users would choose to discard.
Doctors offered to terminate the pregnancy. My parents said no: Their love for my sister had no conditions. They accepted her as a gift, not a commodity. The three days she lived outside the womb were ones of comfort, meaning, and the unconditional love of my parents, grandparents, and family.
Orchid heightens the objectification and commodification of human beings already sadly inherent in the IVF process, so much so that doctors and prospective parents fail to recognize the personhood and thus infinite dignity of every created embryo. Suffering does not deprive a life of meaning and worth; if anything it can heighten it. The creators of Orchid see people with illnesses or disabilities as flawed products they now can optimize out of existence. We must recognize them as people with dignity, whose health does not diminish their value.
Gen Z must take notice. Our generation, more than Millenials, will enter our twenties and thirties as Orchid and similar technologies grow in popularity and widespread acceptance. Assisted reproduction may very well become the norm: the 21st-century eugenics of compassion. Only weirdos will make babies the old-fashioned way.
Orchid offers a paradise that is actually a hell: a world of perfect children, made possible by killing any deemed unfit. The U.S. aborts three-quarters of babies diagnosed with Down Syndrome. Orchid aspires to aid it in aborting even more.
Those wise enough to see through Siddiqui’s illusions realize the necessity to cure and care for children with any kind of illness, and most importantly, to see them born in the first place. In doing so, we have the opportunity to make a paradise out of hell: a world of imperfect children, loved wildly for who they are.
Caroline Kurt is a senior studying English.
