Snuffing out the weak

Imagine being able to prevent your future children from ever having a birth defect or disease. This is the world Noor Siddiqui envisions. Her company, Orchid, offers to help couples “have healthy babies” by sequencing their genome on day five of their existence.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times asked Siddiqui about it on his podcast, Interesting Times. “We’re the first company in the world that allows parents to actually sequence the entire genome of an embryo,” Siddiqui said. This way parents can “detect risks for some of the most serious conditions … things that massively change the trajectory of a child’s life.” Orchid tells parents which embryos in an IVF cycle are at risk for developing over 1,200 conditions so that parents can “protect their children before a pregnancy begins.”

Protect them from what? From life, it turns out. Parents armed with Orchid’s report can select the embryos with the best shot at avoiding disease. What about the other ones? Siddiqui washes her hands of them.

“Parents make their own decisions about which embryo they want to implant and whether they want to discard it,” she says. “Orchid has absolutely zero to do with discard.” Except that they have everything to do with discard—destroying an embryo. They are showing parents the horrible diseases their child may develop if they decide to “begin the pregnancy.” Siddiqui boasts, “Orchid actually advises against discarding any embryo for any reason.” If they want parents to keep every embryo, why provide such a powerful decision influencing tool?

Siddiqui twists meaning. She says screening for defects and deciding which embryos best qualify for implanting is “stewardship.” Orchid can make the difference, she says, “between whether your child is going to live with pediatric cancer, with a heart defect that we can’t surgically fix, or born without a skull and never going to be able to make it to their first birthday.” How? By not letting that child live at all.

In her view, this equals love. “I think that 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.”

This is horror disguised as helping.

Siddiqui is not just the founder of Orchid, she’s a customer. She and her husband now have 16 embryos that have been screened by Orchid. Douthat asks how many will survive. “We want four children,” she says, “two boys and two girls.” What about the other 12? “That’s a personal decision,” she says.

When Douthat asks about her mother, who suffered adult-onset blindness, Siddiqui doubles down. “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. So I think that it is 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.” Translation: In an Orchid world, her mother’s embryo would have been passed over for a healthy one. “I don’t think that there’s any moral question there,” she says.

People who think this way believe everything comes down to what’s right for the couple, or the woman who wants a child. “I do think every single embryo is precious,” she says. “I think it’s an absolutely amazing thing that we’re able to make this process work outside of the body.” Notice the sleight of hand. She does not say every embryo is precious, or every life is sacred. She just says she thinks every embryo is precious.

We may try, but we can’t control our children’s trajectories. Babies born healthy are no guarantee of perfection. They will still sin, still endure hardship, still disappoint. Then what? What will parents think when their expensive, lab-certified investment yields a fallen child who is bumped and bruised by the fallen world? There is no way around suffering—for children or their parents. It will come, by God’s design, for our good (Genesis 50:20, Romans 8:28).

We’re not called to seek out suffering, but we must not use sinful means to avoid it. Some will feel the effects of the fall more acutely and more personally in their own flawed bodies than others. But this is not random or pointless. Babies, whether healthy or deformed, disabled or diseased, are good gifts from His fatherly hand (Psalm 139:13-16, James 1:17).

When the disciples met a blind man they asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:2-3). Sometimes God does this through physical healing, but always, in the lives of His children, by granting perseverance and the hope of eternal life.

Orchid would see lives ended rather than suffer. But suffering is often the means God uses to save His own for eternity (Romans 8:18-24). Calling embryo screening “protecting children”—will never make it so. Until every life conceived is protected, none are safe.