Orchid Health and Nucleus Embryo are facing backlash for helping IVF clients weed out unwanted babies based on their genetic traits, which commenters blasted as ‘evil’ and ‘eugenics.’
(LifeSiteNews) -- Priests, social activists, and others are criticizing companies that offer genome testing to weed out in-vitro fertilization (IVF) babies – highlighting just one of the problems with the procedure.
Noor Siddiqui created Orchid Health to help parents decide which of their human embryonic children to implant and which to discard or leave frozen potentially forever. She is also a former winner of Peter Thiel's "Thiel Fellowship."
A recently resurfaced story in the New York Times has drawn criticism online, with experts pointing out the problems with Orchid's model.
Though the story originally came out in April, it began circulating again in the past several days. Earlier this week, Nucleus Embryo released a similar "tool" to help weed out babies, drawing similar criticism.
"This baby was carefully selected as an embryo," reads a New York Times graphic, posted by Siddiqui along with her own comments.
Siddiqui said her mom went blind but that she "got lucky" and did not develop blindness. She said her company helps everyone "win the genetic lottery."
Yet children's rights advocate Katy Faust debunked the illogic of Siddiqui's argument.
"Except this isn't 'everybody gets to win the genetic lottery,'" the founder of Them Before Us wrote on X.
It's 'everybody gets tested and only those who meet our standards survive,'" Faust wrote. "This is eugenics."
"Just take a second look - a clean and sober second look - at the folks who think they are genetically superior," bioethics expert Chuck Donovan wrote on X. "Do we really want the future of human individuality in their hands rather than the Creator's?"Similarly, Nucleus Embryo says it "helps parents pursuing IVF see and understand the complete genetic profile of each of their embryos."
"This is evil," a priest named Fr. Paul wrote in response.
However, the support for the procedure follows from the disordered morality of its creators. "Sex is for fun. Embryo screening is for babies," Siddiqui perversely said, misunderstanding the purpose of sexuality.
IVF inherently requires the deliberate destruction of human embryonic children, as noted by both pro-life advocates and IVF promoters.
However, even pro-life advocates, such as Senator Ted Cruz, ignore the darker, pro-abortion side of IVF, which almost always leads to healthy human beings being discarded in what amounts to a direct abortion.
Though Cruz generally has a record opposing abortion, he wants the federal government to mandate all 50 states allow for embryo-destroying IVF or lose their Medicaid funds to provide health insurance. He teamed up with Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt in 2024 to push for a failed bill to coerce states into supporting the deliberate destruction of millions of embryo following an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that affirmed embryos are human beings inside and outside of the womb.
“People didn’t want anything to threaten IVF. I agree with that, Katie agrees with that. So, we said, let’s draft a simple, straightforward federal bill that … says you have a federal right to have access to IVF,” Cruz said in May 2024.
Similarly, President Donald Trump has called himself the “father of IVF” and ordered his aides to find a way to expand "access" to the practice.
IVF, if expanded nationwide, would lead to the direct and deliberate destruction of 2.4 million babies, according to a LifeSiteNews analysis.
However, Trump, Siddiqui, and Nucleus all miss the important point – IVF is, in fact, eugenic by nature, since it has parents pick and choose embryos based on desired characteristics. The "unwanted" embryos are then often left to die in favor of the select few embryos chosen for implantation.
IVF is not pro-life.
