It is illegal in several states to abort unborn babies who receive a prenatal chromosomal abnormality diagnosis. Babies conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) who receive the same or similar verdict while they are still a frozen embryo, however, can be wiped out without second thought and without the threat of punishment under the law.
Bad actors have used these unregulated assisted reproductive technology (ART) loopholes to their advantage. Noor Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of the IVF eugenics company Orchid, is just one of many ART players who advertise anyone’s ability to toss unwanted embryos as a good thing.
In an X post this month, Siddiqui claimed embryo filtering technology like hers helps parents “prevent deadly, (now) preventable diseases.”
“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 @OrchidInc’s embryo screening forces,” she wrote. “You optimize everything… career, diet, skincare… but you’re going to chance it on your child’s genome, one of the most significant determinants of their health?”
Yet nothing about Orchid’s genome screening process is healing for the embryos that, for $2,500 a pop, undergo it.
According to Siddiqui, “every baby deserves a fair shot at health” and “no children are being killed.” Her version of that, however, requires culling embryos that are deemed unworthy of implantation after Orchid (or one of the many other IVF biotech startups popping up) sequences them for potential diseases, disorders, cancers, defects, and chromosomal abnormalities. In her recent sitdown with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Siddiqui even implied that she would have chosen to kill off her mom’s embryo due to the debilitating blindness the woman who birthed her developed.
The lab-created lives that don’t pass Orchid’s muster are guaranteed to become some of the millions of embryos that were created only to be discarded or sentenced to indefinite cryopreservation. That, however, didn’t stop Siddiqui from declaring that people who don’t indulge her twisted logic, which by default involves discarding tiny humans deemed “less than” by her tech, are “okay with your kid potentially suffering for life so you can feel morally superior… or because you can’t be inconvenienced for 2 weeks to extract eggs and check for genetic issues before they develop.”
You read that right. Siddiqui wants people to keep their babies from dying by killing them off before they ever have a chance to snuggle into the womb or take a breath.
In a moral, just, and ethical world, practices that indulge that thinking would be shamed and even criminalized. Instead, it is elevated, celebrated, and monetized.
For far too long, the people and politicians who claim to care about women and babies have been asleep at the wheel. As a result, IVF and other reproductive technologies that pit frozen siblings against each other and rip babies from their mothers’ wombs have exploded from mere experiments into an increasingly popular reality.
Societal justification of abortion based on an unborn baby’s sex, race, a down syndrome diagnosis, or assumed “quality of life,” while not uncommon, is unsurprising given the barbaric practice’s Planned Parenthood roots. It’s thanks to eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, whose decision to found and operate the abortion giant was rooted in her apparent desire to “exterminate the Negro population,” that women can end their child’s life — many times with a mail-order pill.
Similarly, justification of the mass manufacture and then discard of embryos based on a little life’s physical attributes, predicted IQ, or potential for emotional, mental, and physical suffering is promoted by techies like Siddiqui who pretend that life is only worth living if one is perfectly healthy from the get-go.
This outsourced and jaded approach to reproduction, which is a sacred and necessary act for societal flourishing, is far from ethical. Yet it won’t stop here. Already, reproductive technology innovators like Siddiqui are looking forward to an ART-fueled future laden with artificial wombs and other dystopian horrors that not only include eugenics-y technology like Orchid but are predicated on it.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
