Just discard human dignity

Silicon Valley and the technocrat-futurists want to redefine what it means to have a child, but their aims and technologies can be horrifying.

Consider what Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of tech company Orchid, said in a recent X post: “When I was in elementary school, my mom started going blind. Retinitis pigmentosa. No family history. No treatments. No cure. … If you could prevent your child from going blind—would you?”

Every parent and potential parent responds, Yes!. What kind of insane person wouldn’t want to mitigate preventable suffering? She goes on to say that it’s hard “to tell a parent, ‘Sorry, your baby was born with a disease we could’ve prevented … but chose not to.” In her moral universe, and mine as well, parents who would choose gratuitous suffering for their child are immoral and irresponsible.

So, what do we have to do to prevent the suffering of our children? What is this new technology that promises to prevent illness and difficulty? What is this new seed of hope that parents can leverage in order to create the best life possible for their future children?

It is an old thing, a Nazi thing, a satanic thing: eugenics.

What does Orchid want the future of reproduction to look like?

First, we separate having sex from having babies. “Sex is for fun. Embryo screening is for babies,” Siddiqui says. IVF is no longer a last-ditch effort for those who have battled with infertility in the minds of Orchid, no, its Plan A for how babies will get made (not begotten) going forward.

Second, after we’ve created little human embryos, we screen them for both actual and possible maladies. Orchid claims to sequence 99% of the baby’s DNA and give a report on genetic errors linked to severe disease and, using a proprietary algorithm, give a risk assessment for conditions ranging from bipolar to inflammatory bowel syndrome to diabetes.

Third, parents select which of their children they’d like to allow to survive. This one has a chance of developing bipolar? This one has Downs Syndrome? This one will need hearing aids? This one will need insulin injections? Pass. Discard. The language is “discard,” which is a euphemism for “murder.” The techno-futurists are technocratic-fascists; they just have traded the gas chambers for the dumpster next to the laboratory.

You disagree? You think a child who is in fact healthy, but just has a chance of being sick doesn’t deserve to die? “Just be honest,” Siddiqui says, “you’re okay with your kid potentially suffering for life so you can feel morally superior…” (emphasis added). Well, I respond, “Yes.” It is in fact morally superior to not kill the sick or potentially sick for the reason that they are sick.

Here’s the irony in this: Noor would not exist if the technology and plausibility structures she’s promoting existed before her mother was conceived. Her mother would have been discarded as an embryo. The technocratic-eugenicist-death-cult is just an ableist movement with a openly stated eugenic purpose.

Siddiqui makes things worse, even using a misapplied theological argument: “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.”

Here’s what Siddiqui and Orchid are actually recommending and making possible: Your child might be harmed in a car wreck, so, the best move you can make is to go ahead and destroy him as an embryo and throw him in the dumpster. That way, we can prevent suffering.

It turns out, that in the moral universe of Orchid, the way to have a healthy child is just to destroy most of your children when they are embryos.