(LifeSiteNews) — A burgeoning West Coast genome testing company is promising prospective parents “healthy babies” by helping them to selectively discard embryos that show any sign of predisposition to unwanted physical or mental conditions.
San Francisco-based Orchid Health purports to have developed technology capable of sequencing more than 99 percent of an embryo’s DNA, allowing for the detection of an enormous array of potential disorders, predispositions to diseases, and birth defects.
Capitalizing on IVF-type artificial reproductive technology, Orchid Health then screens its customers’ multiple embryos for any type of imperfection via “preimplantation genetic testing” (PGT), with the goal of allowing only the most perfect to survive the weeding out process.
Observers in the world of science, medicine, and children’s rights see in Orchid Health’s mission a cruel dystopian future founded upon the erasure of unconditional love from procreation and child rearing.
Orchid Health’s stated mission may well represent the purest distillation of the evil ushered into the world by the sexual revolution of the last eight decades.
“I think basically sex is for fun and embryo screening is for babies,” said the company’s founder Noor Siddiqui, revealing her allegiance to the absolute worst, most selfish dimensions of the sexual revolution that have contributed to the undoing of Western Civilization.
Siddiqui, a former Thiel fellow, clearly believes that all children to be born should undergo the form of genetic screening her company now offers. She wants to give parents a “superpower they never had before,” she says, allowing them to avoid “rolling the dice … and getting unlucky.”
“For the first time ever, parents can make sure that the genetics of their child aren’t working against them,” said Siddiqui, overlooking the fact that the genetics of the embryos – children – who are not selected for implantation have already “worked against them,” condemning them to become nothing more than “medical waste” or to an eternity frozen in a cryogenics facility.
“I think this has the potential to totally redefine reproduction,” Siddiqui told CNBC.
“The unspoken consequence of that quixotic notion” that future suffering can be avoided “is that the embryos deemed too predisposed to physical or mental suffering — something every human experiences in life — are sidelined, abandoned, or even eradicated,” noted Jordan Boyd writing for The Federalist.
“Genomic tests like Orchid promote 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,” wrote Boyd. “The losers are frozen in time, delayed, or disqualified altogether from implantation based on a report card of what-ifs.”
“There’s no doubt that genomic screenings like Orchid will only contribute to the millions of embryos that are destroyed or forsaken to indefinite cryopreservation,” noted Boyd, adding:
If Siddiqui and Orchid’s long list of Ivy League and venture capitalist investors like Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church and 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki get their way, making human life expendable will become an even more normalized practice in the ART world instead of a reprehensible one.
Other investors include Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Prometheus Fund, and Refactor Capital.
One section of Orchid Health’s website encourages parents to “Find the embryo at lowest risk for a disease that runs in your family,” implying that all the others are unworthy to be loved, nurtured, and permitted to live.
Through the technology she’s peddling, Siddiqui can appear— to religious and secular individuals alike— to want to assume a god-like presence in the world.
Futurism.com headlined its article on Siddiqui and Orchid Health with a denial, “Startup that selects embryos with good genes says it’s not doing eugenics.”
“The ‘goal isn’t simply to ‘make sci-fi real’ by normalizing genetic embryo testing for IVF participants around the country,” noted Katy Faust, founder of the children’s right’s organization Them Before Us on X. “She wants her handpicked breeding technology to be the ‘future of how all babies will be created.’”
The “goal isn’t simply to “make sci-fi real” by normalizing genetic embryo testing for IVF participants around the country. She wants her handpicked breeding technology to be the “future of how all babies will be created.”@jordanboydtx @FDRLST https://t.co/s016ErSf78
— Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy) May 8, 2024
An interview with WIRED last month bore a striking headline alluding to just such god-like capabilities: “This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born.”
