CV NEWS FEED // The genetic testing startup Orchid Health is using eugenics to try to help people “have healthy babies,” a writer argued in an article this week.
Orchid, a company working with in vitro fertilization customers across the United States, recently launched a whole genome testing technology to screen its clients’ embryonic children for potential genetic and health complications.
The testing screens nearly 100% of an embryonic child’s DNA and can, allegedly, determine how at risk various embryonic children are for future health challenges and disabilities including cancers, autism, and Alzheimer’s, among others.
“The screening then produces a report card with a long list of hypotheticals about an embryonic child’s ‘quality of life,’” wrote Jordan Boyd, a staff writer for online conservative news outlet the Federalist, in her May 7 opinion article titled: “Orchid Health’s Genome Testing Promises ‘Healthy Babies’ But Delivers Morally Deplorable Eugenics.”
On April 22, the company’s founder, Noor Siddiqui, announced the first “Orchid baby” who was born after undergoing the organization’s extensive screening process.
“[The parents] used Orchid to screen for disorders like diabetes and bipolar, which run in their families, presumably opting to destroy or shelve any embryos that came back with high risk for those conditions,” Boyd wrote.
Boyd noted that Siddiqui has described the Orchid technology as “life-changing” because it enables couples to look at each embryonic child’s genetic report card and choose which child to implant based on whose report indicated the lowest risk.
“Siddiqui’s goal isn’t simply to ‘make sci-fi real’ by normalizing genetic embryo testing for IVF participants around the country,” Boyd wrote. “She wants her handpicked breeding technology to be the ‘future of how all babies will be created.’”
“The people buying into this technology, like Siddiqui, also seem to be under the impression that scientific knowledge bestows the power to eliminate human suffering,” Boyd later wrote:
The unspoken consequence of that quixotic notion is that the embryos deemed too predisposed to physical or mental suffering — something every human experiences in life— are sidelined, abandoned, or even eradicated.
Genetic screening like Orchid’s will normalize seeing human life as expendable, Boyd wrote, and “will only contribute to the millions of embryos that are destroyed or forsaken to indefinite cryopreservation.”
Boyd recalled a previous article she wrote for the Federalist, in which she criticized genome testing like Orchid’s because it promotes pitting “microscopic siblings against each other in a biological battle.”
“The winner snuggles into a uterus, hopefully her biological mother’s and not a surrogate’s, and has the privilege of being born and growing up. The losers are frozen in time, delayed, or disqualified altogether from implantation based on a report card of what-ifs,” Boyd wrote in the May 7 article.
She concluded, “Siddiqui and Orchid customers will inevitably deny that hand-selecting embryos based on genomic testing equates to eugenics. Yet they continue to promote and harness a technology that determines the value of a life based on a pseudo-scientific numbers game.”
