Silicon Valley’s Plan to Make “Perfect" Babies is... Disturbing

With the rise of IVF and new reproductive technologies, it is now possible for prospective parents to create multiple embryos, test them for a multitude of genetic disorders, and even IQ, and select their optimal child before they're even pregnant. Silicon Valley Tech CEOs are pushing this technology, claiming to give parents the power to protect their future children and give them the best lives possible. One such CEO was recently asked some hard questions about her company's product, and the vision she laid out for the future of childbearing is shocking.

We already live in a world where sex and making babies have been, if I can borrow a marital metaphor, divorced. She says it very clearly. Sex is for fun, orchid and embryo screening is for babies. Yes, I didn't want to quote that to you because I thought it was so ridiculous, but go on. Oh, I actually don't. I think it's already true. I mean, already people are having sex much more often than they're having babies. Sex is already for fun and not for babies, you know, 99% of the time.

The hookup, that's for pleasure and intimacy. The lab, that's for procreation. Sex is messy, and baby-making has, until now, also been messy. Largely a game of chance. Not anymore. With IVF, knowing what to expect when you're expecting became more routine. But the usual old system of prenatal diagnosis has also been a mess. Scandal after scandal. Remember this? The New York Times in 2022. They found that 85%, yes, 85% of non-invasive prenatal tests came back with false positives. Mothers were literally being advised to terminate pregnancies.

A nice euphemism for abortion, based on that kind of accuracy. But now? Enter Noor Sidiqui, Silicon Valley rising star and founder of Orchid, and she's promising it's all been fixed. We can manufacture our babies now to specification. Listen to her pitch. We're the first company in the world that allows parents to actually sequence the entire genome of an embryo, so sequence 99% of the bases in an embryo's genome, which allows parents to detect for some of the most serious conditions, so heart defects, birth defects, pediatric cancers, developmental disorders, things that are, you know, massively change the trajectory of a child's life.

Sounds good, right? Sounds compassionate. Noor paints a picture of the child of your dreams, a child that you can protect, whose life you get to design and make as perfect as possible, a designer baby for a designer. But here's where the story turns, because that is not what's really going on.

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What actually happens when prospective parents use ORCID? During the interview, Noor shares her own story of using her own technology and how that went. So, for me, I got 20 eggs, and I got 16 embryos, and I was, I think, 28. Yeah, so let's say we have 16 embryos. Okay. So, what happens is that of those 16 embryos, you take five cells at day five, they get sent to ORCID's lab. And then we come back to you in, you know, three to four weeks with reports on each of your embryos.

So, then a genetic counselor, someone who's an expert on genetics, will meet with you and your partner. And then you guys will kind of go through the risks of each embryo and then make a decision, you know, between you and your doctor about which one you actually want to go forward with an implant. And then that implantation will hopefully be successful and lead to a pregnancy. How many conditions are you doing scores for?

Yes. For each embryo. Yeah, so it is kind of helpful to kind of go through all the different analysis that happens. So, the first layer of testing is chromosomal analysis, right? So, chromosomes, you can kind of think of them as like chapters in a book, right? So, that is usually where, you know, that is where genetic testing that is kind of widespread today during IVF stops, right? So, that is kind of akin to, you know, if you had a proofreader for your book, and the only thing that they are able to tell you is, hey, your book has an extra missing chapter, right?

Like, that is not very good. You would obviously want to... Be able to, you know, check for typos, check for, you know, are all the sentences capitalized, and do they have a period, right? So, that is kind of the level of resolution that ORCID is able to go. It is able to actually read every single gene, look for typos that could lead to diseases, and, you know. So, that's just the first step. There are already 16 embryos, 16 children, already alive, already unique.

She didn't design them. No one pulled out the Mr. Potato Head parts. There was no Chipotle-style order form for extra guac and blue eyes, please. What happened? Doctors in a lab did what couples usually do in bed. Sperm, egg, embryo. And then they analyze the embryos. They report to the parents, and the parents, in her case, at some future date when she feels ready, will decide which ones get implanted and which don't. That's the reality. And Noor calls this the future.

She is convinced people will, quote, vote with their feet. She points out that in Europe, you can already run the whole IVF process, meds and all, for five grand. And she's certain that America could afford to do the same thing right now for every couple if only we had the will to do it. Orchid. Cheap, accessible, and a moral responsibility.

Noor herself certainly employs the language of moral responsibility when she's promoting orchid. She's pretty blunt about this, even though she says she wouldn't impose it on any other couples. But the message is there. If you don't use this technology, if you leave it up to your god or to chance, what kind of a parent are you? Irresponsible? Negligent? Even cruel?

Ross pushes back on this and raises the specter of coercion. One of your views, I think, is that this kind of testing and this kind of process isn't just for people who are older parents or who have super high risk factors or who are struggling to conceive, right? Your argument is this is potentially for everyone who wants to protect their kids from these kind of conditions. And so… That is right. So, you would say to me, as a healthy 30-year-old male with a healthy wife, we should consider doing this, right?

I think that, you know, no one should ever be pressured into any decision, especially a medical one. So, I would say it's the same as, you know, giving women the opportunity to choose an epidural or not, to choose a home birth versus a hospital birth. I think these are incredibly intimate and personal decisions, and I do think that it should be part of the menu of choice, and everyone should consider it, but obviously, you know, no one should be compelled or coerced to do it.

Well, that's comforting. But we all know you don't have to make something legally required or coerce people if you can actually shame them for not doing it. Kind of like her Twitter post here. What if your baby never walks? What if they are never able to live independently? What if you could have stopped it but chose not to? That's the question orchids embryo screening forces. You optimize everything, career, diet, skin care, but you're going to chance it on your child's genome?

One of the most significant determinants of their health? I mean, that's kind of the language of shame to me. The implication is, if you don't eliminate those babies who maybe will never walk or who might go blind as adults, if you do leave it up to God or chance, what kind of a parent are you? Ross points this out later on in the interview. People don't just vote with their feet in terms of how medical processes work, right? So, the United States has a very, very high rate of cesarean section.

For instance, which are not necessarily medically indicated, but have become sort of a source of convenience and pressure from doctors and so on, right? That has, I think, in certain ways, warped the experience of childbearing in the US, right? And I think it becomes easy to see a scenario where, you know, you get a certain kind of medical pressures and expectations that Push people towards, you know, doing the kind of interventions you're describing because of, you know, again, I agree, no one is going to be locked in a room and told they have to do this, right?

But you can end up with certain kind of medical systems creating pressures for things that aren't necessarily just people making free choices and voting for their feet, voting with their feet. Both things can happen. People make choices, but the system imposes certain. Expectations, right? And I think it's very likely in a future where The ORCID process becomes a kind of norm that you would then get a whole set of medical pressures. Like, what are you, a bad parent? You're not going to, you know, you're not going to test your kids and so on, right?

Like, you could imagine a kind of tipping point or a cascade where you go from this is sort of a choice that a certain number of parents do to this is the expectation that the medical system imposes on expectant parents. Ross is exactly right here. As someone who has gone through childbirth. Seven times now in hospitals, women are under all kinds of pressures when they are in there, and it's a moving target. The expectations for me as a new mother in 2005 were very different from what they expected in 2024, or what they pressured us to do as parents of a new baby.

Noor comes around to admitting this sort of. She just says it's the morally responsible thing to do, like choosing your nursery decor, but just more important on order of magnitude. I think that if you have enormous genetic privilege, and for you to roll the dice and to get an outcome that isn't going to lead to disease is in the cards for you, then of course, go ahead and roll the dice. It's just that 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, in the same way that they... Plan their nursery, plan their home, plan their preschool. All of these decisions are actually extremely insignificant in terms of the difference between is your child going to live with pediatric cancer, with a heart defect that we can't surgically fix, born without a skull and never going to be able to make it to their first birthday. I think when people think about it really concretely in terms of what are they giving up, what are the risks that could potentially affect this child, I think that then it becomes about stewardship.

You know, it becomes about how do I make a responsible choice for my family? How do I make sure that, you know, my child doesn't have to suffer in the same way that I do, in the same way that my sibling does, in the same way that, you know, my parent that I'm a caregiver for does? So, I mean, I think sex is obviously a very beautiful thing. It's a very profound part of the human experience, but I think that it's, yeah, I think it's, you know, denigrating and dismissive to IVF parents and to IVF babies to say that somehow...

You know, science babies are inferior to babies that are made the old-fashioned way. Of course, that's not at all what Ross was saying here, and she's definitely trying to distract from the question at hand. And now we come to it. What is the status of all of these children that, quote-unquote, she is protecting, but really, we're just eliminating those that have markers for potential suffering down the road? Well, Noor says, She really believes that every embryo is precious. She finds it the most miraculous cell that we have ever discovered.

Ross presses her on what is the moral status of these embryos exactly. Many of those embryos will not be used. They'll be kept on ice. They'll eventually be discarded. This is something Americans are comfortable with under the existing IVF system, but they're comfortable with it. In a context where most of the people who are doing this are struggling with infertility and are in a kind of crisis environment, what you're talking about is doing this at a much, much larger scale. So, I just have to ask, do you think the embryos that are created in the orchid process have any kind of moral status?

Whatsoever. I think that embryos are extremely precious. I mean, they're the most miraculous and magical cells that we've, I think, ever discovered, right? I mean, they somehow differentiate into the trillions of cells that make you and I. But I think that something that is, unfortunately, I think a lot of people don't understand biology. So, what happens the old fashioned way, right? A lot of embryos are discarded through that process. Nature is extremely brutal. Right. So, a lot of people don't know that, you know, even people in their 20s, they have about a 20% chance of getting pregnant every month, right?

So, yes, an egg can fertilize, right? Great, now you have an embryo, but that doesn't mean an embryo is going to implant. So, at the natural process at home, you know, there's been multiple, you know, really large-scale studies on this. You know, lots of embryos are discarded at home. It's just that IVF makes that process visible that is currently invisible. Okay. I have heard this before, and as a woman who has also experienced miscarriage, I can tell you that the experience of losing a child in the womb who you wanted and desired, even who you didn't expect but is there, the experience of losing that child because Mother Nature is cruel is completely different than deliberately creating an embryo, putting it on ice, and then discarding it.

So, she's using the word discard here in a very... In a facetious way. It doesn't even compare. And Ross points this out rightly to her, that to put an equivocation between the natural process of miscarriage and say, well, Mother Nature is cruel, so it's okay if we do it, too, on purpose, is not a moral argument. It's sort of just a moral obtuseness.

Just sort of skirts the question. She won't give him a straight answer, accuses him of moral dishonesty or dishonest framing of the question, and he keeps going. I think that your framing is dishonest, and I want to tell you why it's dishonest. You can take embryos that have been created through IVF, and you can transfer them back into the mom if you really want to make it not a human choice whether or not those embryos become babies or not. Yes. And then it is exactly equivalent, and many people choose.

To transfer those embryos into mom, it is called compassionate transfer, and they do not take the IVF meds, and there is a very low chance that that is going to become a pregnancy, just like when you and your partner at home do it the old-fashioned way, that there is plenty of times in the month that it is not going to lead to a pregnancy. I actually completely agree with you. I think it is quite different to transfer embryos into a woman's body.

When they have a really low chance of survival, then it is to discard or permanently freeze and then forget about existing embryos, right? Right, and he's correct there, but Ross can only say that because he actually believes in the moral dignity of those embryos, of those little tiny human babies. To allow them to go back into their mother, to naturally live or naturally die, is very different. from manufacturing them with the intent of discarding any number of them. So Noor has 16 children on ice right now.

Maybe one, maybe two will be born. She actually manufactured them with the intent that they will never be implanted in their mother and live, die, thrive, survive, any of those options. It is a very different sort of moral action on the part. Ross keeps going. If I. I took the trays of embryos that contain you and your husband's embryonic children, and I threw them in the river. What kind of crime have I committed? Have I committed a property crime? Like, should I pay a fine?

Like, what have I done? Fair question. So, are you saying that you want to criminalize IVF and that you should ban IVF? Is that your stance? I'm asking, I mean, look, I have... I have convictions on abortion and IVF that are generally out of step with the mainstream of America, and I completely own that. I would say, no, I don't want to ban IVF, but I think there should be limits on the number of embryos created. Absolutely. And I would favor, at least at a level of sort of moral suasion, encouraging the kind of, you know, compassionate, what's the term you use?

Compassionate? It's called compassionate transfer. Compassionate transfer. I would support that. So, I've answered your question. Now, I'd like you to tell me, does the embryo have any moral status? That's all I'm asking. Sure. I think that the question of, okay, 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. 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. I don't think that there's any Moral question there, I think. There is a moral question there, because again, she is sidestepping the question about those embryos that don't get chosen, that don't make it. Lots of embryos are discarded by nature, she says, casual shrug. Good for us for not letting it go, but she ends up dodging the most important moral question here, because to answer it would either be to say there is nothing special about any of these embryos, including the ones I choose to implant other than they're healthy enough for me and my husband's standards, or she ends up saying they do have a moral status and I'm okay with killing or discarding them anyway.

Translation, bottom line, it's okay if some lives don't make it, if it helps someone else achieve their hopes and dreams in parenthood. And history rings a bell, doesn't it? I mean, deciding who is worthy of life isn't really about science or objectivity anymore. It's about an idea of what humans should be that those of us privileged to be living now, here, in the present, in a position of power and cultural influence construct.

Orchid isn't doing something new and brave. They're not protecting anyone. It's doing something old, tired, and new. And very dark. Control over who gets to be born and celebrate his first birthday isn't a modern problem, it's a human problem. Let's go back to Sparta. Two and a half thousand years ago, the elders would inspect every newborn. If you were weak, you were left to die at apothecary, eugenics as civic duty. Rome, from about 100 BC to 300 AD, the paterfamilias decided which infants to keep or expose.

Unwanted? Deformed? Too poor? Out you go. Eugenics as property management. Fast forward to the twilight of Christendom, Nazi Germany, 1933, the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring, over 400,000 forced sterilizations, and then Action T4, disabled children and adults systematically murdered, all in the name of a purified future. Imagine what the Nazis would have done with Orchid.

You see, this isn't about design. It's about deciding who counts and who doesn't. Who's worthy of life? It's not science. It's power. It's not medicine. It's ideology. And now we're doing it all over again. The fertility industrial complex and transhumanist Silicon Valley utopians have fully embraced the idea that the unfit must be identified and should be eliminated, in the name of compassion.

Instead of the Roman paterfamilias, we have the feminist materfamilias, who, in a perfect negative of Mary's let-it-be-done-unto-me, manufactures extra children with the intention of discarding those that don't conform to her sanitized, perfect vision of what she wants her children to be. And guys, it is not like we haven't thought about this moment as a culture. Remember Gattaca? The Orchid folks seem to think that the dad was actually the good guy. So, what does Gattaca, in real life, mean for culture?

Ross asks Noor about a caste system. What happens when some parents can afford this, and others can't? What happens when some parents embrace this, she thinks it will be most parents embrace this, and others won't? And you heard how she shifted from, you can protect your child, to you should. And then the real question, if you don't, what kind of a parent are you?

Those of you who grew up in the 90s might remember The Giver, Lois Lowry's dystopian novel, where the community's euphemism for lethal injection, a sanitized, ritualized killing, was released. Unfit infants were released for failure to grow or develop, according to that community's strict standards of health. Sounds familiar? Any infant deemed too difficult to integrate into the community's tightly controlled system essentially Anyone who might disrupt the sameness dies.

When identical twins are born, the smaller one is automatically released. The stated reason is to avoid confusion in a society that depends on perfect order and sameness, which sounds a lot like Cookie Cutter's Silicon Valley. In the movie version, I think they do this really well. They show how the protagonist, Jonas, witnesses this release happening in a harrowing scene where his father casually kills the weaker twin. And shows no awareness of the act's gravity. And that's where we are. For example, Down syndrome births are plummeting.

Countries like Iceland boast that they've eliminated Down syndrome, but they've done it by eliminating 98% of the babies who are diagnosed as having that beautiful extra chromosome. Parents are pressured and shamed to choose elimination. They're told it's the responsible thing to do. And look at our wonderful, controlled society that we now have as a result.

There's almost no awareness of the moral choice that we are making here to destroy instead of to heal. This is social sorting by genes, wrapped in the language of health, compassion, and responsibility. You wanted to heal the sick. You wanted to be like Christ, but instead, you turned into Thanos, snapping away the weak. So, don't be fooled. Orchid is not about building designer babies, because, as Noor says, the technology just isn't there. It's something older, something much darker. This is a eugenic impulse as ancient as Sparta, as bloody as Carthage, and now as sanitized as Silicon Valley.

Out of a fear of suffering, this is human beings raging against the fact that we are not God. We are not the designers. We are the stewards. But in our rage and pain against our own mortality and fragility, we choose to snap our fingers and eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferers. It's cloaked in compassion, and it's fueled by fear, hubris, and technology.

Normalized by shame and social pressures, and if we don't stop to ask, what is the worth of the embryo? Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Then we're not heading toward freedom and choice. We are heading into the abyss.