The orchid was once an expensive, highly cultivated symbol of refinement; now, cheaper cultivars can be found in almost any grocery store. Perhaps that makes it a fitting image for a new fertility company, Orchid Health, that seeks to encourage parents to breed better children.
Orchid Health is one of several Silicon Valley start-ups that want to revolutionize genetic testing and the fertility industry. “Have Healthy Babies,” its website commands. The drop-down menu under the word “Products” includes “Embryo”—a perfect representation of the company’s view of human life.
Orchid and other start-ups like it take embryos produced by IVF and subject those embryos to polygenic screening. This process produces a “risk score”—an estimation of the probabilities that an individual person, once born, will suffer from conditions such as obesity or depression that may be caused by variants in multiple genes. As a matter of fact, the interaction of these genes in many cases, such as in obesity and depression, is not well understood. For this reason, among others, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics has not approved polygenic screening for clinical use.
The marketing materials of these companies are masterpieces of disingenuousness. They are thick with sentiment and vague appeals to “health.” Orchid Health founder Noor Siddiqui produced a long X thread about the inspiration for her life’s work: She is really doing all this because of her own mother. “When I was in elementary school, my mom started going blind. Retinitis pigmentosa. No family history. No treatments. No cure,” she wrote. “I got lucky. She didn’t. It led me to build OrchidInc so my baby—and everyone else’s—gets to win the genetic lottery—avoid blindness—and hundreds of severe genetic diseases.”
Sounds heartwarming, but it’s quite the opposite once you realize that what Siddiqui is building is not a company that can cure retinitis pigmentosa or other genetic diseases, but one dedicated to eliminating embryos that carry the genes associated with them. Her baby won’t have retinitis pigmentosa because that baby will not be allowed to exist. Indeed, in the world Siddiqui is seeking to create, her mother would never have been born.
And despite Siddiqui’s efforts to cast herself as a modern-day Jonas Salk, hers is not a service available to “everyone’s” babies—since the testing alone costs thousands of dollars in addition to the price of IVF and is thus out of reach for most Americans.
This is why, in selling Orchid and other such companies, the clear purpose of the sales pitch is to make parents feel that screening is not a choice but an obligation. Under pictures of adorable babies produced by Orchid, Siddiqui asks, “If you could prevent your child from going blind—would you? From getting pediatric cancer at 5? From heart defects? Schizophrenia at 22? From living a life radically altered by pure genetic bad luck?”
Only a monster would answer no to any of these propositions, as Siddiqui well knows; but what word would you use to describe a person who would offer the temptation to parents to deny a child life because said child might have heart defects that might be cured a decade after her birth?
Siddiqui and her ilk are proposing a future in which sex is effectively decoupled from procreation, in the name of health and safety. “Sex is for fun. Embryo screening is for babies,” Siddiqui says, “We’ve always sought to protect our children—embryo screening simply moves that protection earlier. The true moral question isn’t whether we should use this technology, but whether we can justify withholding it when it could prevent needless suffering.” She adds, “In 10 years, not screening your embryos will feel like not buckling your seatbelt.”
The most Orchid Health can muster regarding the “moral question” of screening embryos for imperfections is a fact sheet on “How to respond to your family skeptics.” It enlists the advice of a man named Jonathan Anomaly, who has written defenses of what he calls “liberal” eugenics—that is, eugenics free from state intervention. Anomaly is hardly a disinterested ethicist; he is an employee of another genetic-testing start-up, Heliospect Genomics. According to the Guardian, Heliospect promises prospective couples that it can rank embryos based on what one employee described as “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants,” including “sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.”
Siddiqui herself waves away the implications of her work. “Let the debates rage,” she says. “We’ll keep building.”
But Orchid and its fellow companies are not “building” anything. Instead, they are proposing to destroy nascent human life that fails to meet the “acceptable” health outcomes listed on spreadsheets. All while they wink at what they are really selling: bespoke child-making.
They are also enthusiastically destroying an ethical consensus in this country that has tenuously held for some time: the idea that playing God with the human genome is a dangerous thing to do, with likely serious unintended consequences. And they are lying to their customers, to whom they are promising they have powers of prediction that they do not yet possess.
The public does have serious concerns. A survey conducted in 2024 by Harvard Medical School found that, although “nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults support using emerging technology to screen embryos during IVF for likelihood of developing certain health conditions or traits that arise from more than one gene,” only a third “approved of using the technology to predict traits unrelated to disease.” Unlike Orchid Health and its competitors, “nearly all expressed concerns about potential negative outcomes for individuals or society.”
Reproduction as quality control has a long and dark history, but the enthusiasm around new repro-tech companies suggests younger generations have never learned it. Younger Americans have spent their lives saturated in technologically mediated worlds that promise seemingly limitless on-demand options. This may have habituated them to expect the same from their childbearing experience. As one of the couples who offered a testimonial to Orchid Health said, “We deeply believe in leveraging technology to better our lives.” A recent poll conducted by the Theos think tank in the UK found that people in Gen Z are more supportive than older generations of technologies such as artificial wombs; 42 percent of people ages 18 to 24 said they were in favor of them.
To them, repro-tech seems more hip than dystopian. As the mother of the first Orchid baby told the New York Times, “I actually didn’t think very much about being a parent when I was younger. I was very focused on career and I ended up getting married pretty late…. I had already frozen some eggs, just because I thought the process was cool. So we decided to do IVF so we could have extra genetic testing…honestly I just think the science of it is very cool.”
Powerful people in Silicon Valley also think it is very cool. Investors such as Peter Thiel have funded genomic-testing start-ups, and OpenAI founder Sam Altman is an investor in Genomic Prediction. Colossal, a company developing reproductive high tech such as artificial wombs, has also received backing from Silicon Valley investors. Silicon Valley is also home to a thriving subculture of tech pro-natalists whose concerns about declining birthrates often veer into discussions of questionable race and eugenic theories. In the unregulated world of repro-tech, however, anything goes.
Orchid Health and its like are flourishing in this environment. But it’s worth noting that orchids are well known among plants for being masters of deception that use sophisticated evolutionary tricks to attract pollinators. The deception promulgated by the new eugenicists is that they care only for the health and safety of all children, when in fact they are trying to design “better children” for those who can afford them. And they deem irresponsible those who cannot—and those who react appropriately and viscerally with nauseated horror to a new world that is the very opposite of brave.