‘Screening’ for gender and health during IVF means discarding embryonic human beings who don’t match parental preferences.
‘Screening’ for gender and health during IVF means discarding embryonic human beings who don’t match parental preferences.
A moving image of a smiling, crawling little girl appears on the screen, while a pink bow precariously totters on her head. Above her, big black letters read: “This baby was carefully selected as an embryo.” The subheading states: “Her mother screened for gender and health during I.V.F.”
This is the opening to a controversial op-ed by Anna Louie Sussman recently published in the New York Times: “Should Human Life Be Optimized?”
As the reader scrolls down, wiggling infants at play appear on the screen. An arrow points to a little girl nudging a wooden push toy: “Her parent selected for health.” Another arrow points to a little one with two tiny pigtails drumming on a stool: “Hers wanted a girl.” The tumbling toddlers, with their rosy cheeks and marshmallow legs, set a charmingly cherubic scene for the article.
However, all the happy babies pictured are missing something critical — their siblings.
When parents “screen for health” during in vitro fertilization (IVF), it means they dispose of their embryonic children who have genetic anomalies. When parents “select for gender,” it means they discard either all their embryonic sons or daughters. The term “screening” sounds like a mammography or colonoscopy, a test performed on a patient so that — if any disease is detected — they might be cured. A better term would be a “winnowing.” The process is analogous to a group of patients lining up to receive a scan — the healthy ones are sent on their way, while the sick ones are melted down and disposed of as medical waste.
This kind of genetic “screening” is made possible, Sussman writes, through Orchid — a start-up company dedicated to advancing artificial reproductive technology (ART). Orchid offers first-of-its-kind preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). Unlike other providers, it can sequence an embryo’s entire genome. Orchid then runs the embryo’s genome through a massive genetic dataset to calculate the embryo’s disease risks — or even probable IQ — in a process known as “polygenic screening.” While former PGT models were able to scan for diseases connected to a specific gene, such as Down’s syndrome or sickle cell anemia, Orchid’s model allows for broader predictions, including the embryo’s risk of developing heart disease, breast cancer, or depression.
Orchid was founded by Noora Siddiqui, a young tech entrepreneur who cites her mother’s genetic disease as inspiration for the company. Siddiqui’s mother suffers from retinitis pigmentosa — a rare disease caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation that ultimately leads to blindness. The hope of “curing” such diseases led Siddiqui to found Orchid “as a way of helping parents anticipate just such genetic misfortunes.”
However, under Orchid’s current model, Siddiqui’s mother would not have been “cured” from retinitis pigmentosa as an embryo. Rather, her mother would have been discarded before she was born.
One of the major investors in Orchid — and in IVF technology generally — is Peter Thiel, a transhumanist techno-billionaire and close friend of Vice President JD Vance. Siddiqui is an alumna of the Thiel Fellowship — a two-year research grant funded by Thiel. Elon Musk is also a fan of her work and has written Siddiqui congratulatory notes on X for Orchid’s breakthrough.
Thiel’s investment in Orchid is financially prescient, as the IVF industry currently holds a $25 billion market share — a number expected to double by 2035.
Orchid has already met with success. Last year, the first Orchid baby was born — a little boy named Jaffe. His mother, a San Francisco resident, described her path to motherhood in a filmed interview. “I actually didn’t think very much about being a parent when I was younger. I was very focused on career and I ended up getting married pretty late . . . at 38. And we started talking about having a baby. At that time I had already frozen some eggs, just because I thought the process was cool. So we decided to do IVF so we could have extra genetic testing . . . honestly I just think the science of it is very cool.”
Siddiqui hopes more and more mothers and babies will share the same path as Jaffe and his mother. She proclaimed on X that baby Jaffe “represents the future of how all babies will be created, hopefully!” As Sussman wrote,
Siddiqui — and others in Silicon Valley, where investors in and users of this technology abound — envision such comprehensive screening eventually replacing the old-fashioned way of having children altogether. “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” she said in a video she shared on X. “It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things.”
Siddiqui’s radical statement on the purpose of sex has not gone unnoticed, for it rattles the very foundations of marriage and family life. The Catholic Church has remained fearlessly clear on this issue: Sex is meant for unity in marriage, and it is ordered toward procreation. The total separation of childbearing from sex that Siddiqui advocates would permanently rend the already-thin ties of marriage and the family.
While Sussman attempts to offer moral skepticism regarding Orchid’s radical PGT offerings, she is much more concerned with parents selecting for height or IQ than selecting against disease. For her, these are different ethical categories. Sussman writes: “It’s one thing to screen for conditions like Type 1 diabetes; it’s quite another to go looking for the embryo deemed most likely to clear six feet and test into the Ivy League.”
I would argue that these two hypotheticals are morally equivalent at the bottom. The problem is not what a parent selects for; the problem is that a parent selects at all. We categorically should not select which of our children get to live or die. IVF, as practiced in America today, almost always necessitates the rejection of several — or even dozens of — embryonic human beings.
Emma Waters at the Heritage Foundation recently published a report advocating long-overdue IVF regulations. On average, a dozen or so embryos are made per round of IVF in the U.S., but only a few are actually implanted. And, typically, more than one round of IVF is needed to achieve a live birth (or to confirm the unlikelihood of a future live birth).
This means that ten, 20, 30 (even 40!) embryos can be left over from just one couple’s IVF process. Parents may choose to discard the leftover embryos, donate them to research, offer them up for embryonic adoption, or freeze them to be implanted at a later date.
Crucially, IVF can be conducted without producing leftover embryos. Countries such as Germany and Italy generally require that only up to three embryos can be made at a time — and that all three must be implanted. However, in the U.S., couples can make dozens of embryos per round and pick their favorite — leaving the rest to freeze in perpetual limbo (or to simply be discarded). This unregulated norm has left millions of embryos sitting in freezers across the country.
Compared with most other Western countries, America is the Wild West of artificial reproductive technology. For one, most European countries have guardrails around the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), given its eugenicist tendencies. Germany is especially wary of the practice, as the country knows full well the horrors of enacted eugenics.
Siddiqui says in a video on X that, during the IVF process, “the most heartbreaking thing that could possibly happen is the child has a really severe condition, has a birth defect, has a skeletal defect, has a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
This just isn’t true. For couples who struggle with infertility, the most heartbreaking thing that could possibly happen would be the loss of their baby’s life, whether through a miscarriage or otherwise. Mothers who have welcomed children with severe genetic abnormalities into the world desperately hoped that their baby would live — not that a different one would have been born instead.
The embrace of polygenic screening flirts too closely with the eugenicist mindset. If the IVF industry remains unregulated, millions of embryonic human beings will be culled from the population because they possess “undesirable” traits.