Babies, Made to Order: The New York Times Sounds the Reproductive Technology Alarm
By: Glenn T. Stanton, originally published November 9, 2025, Public Discourse
If Siddiqui’s new moral imperative for artificial, disembodied procreation to ensure perfectly healthy babies becomes the norm, have we not lost something truly beautiful and human, the link between physical sexual communion and procreation?
Editors’ Note: This essay is the third and final in a three-part series on the challenges of Western parenting. This essay poses the question: what will family formation look like in a world where optimizing our children’s genetic makeup becomes a moral imperative?
In his “Interesting Times” podcast earlier this year, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat gave his audience a profound opportunity to see where in vitro reproductive technology is leading us, and wondered aloud whether it might replace natural, marital procreation. His guest was Silicon Valley entrepreneur Noor Siddiqui, who was a Thiel Fellow at age seventeen. She articulated a moral imperative for that displacement.
Shortly after the interview, social media erupted into heated debates about the ethics of IVF. Though that has mostly died down, Douthat’s interview with Siddiqui is worth revisiting, as it sheds light on a darker side of America’s fertility crisis: our desire to optimize, shape, mold, and control how we bring life into the world and what kind of life we create, … and to discard those who don’t fit our vision of what kind of life is worthy.
Noor Siddiqui is the founder of Orchid, a genetic testing company that “gives parents the power to protect their children before pregnancy begins,” by isolating potential monogenic diseases (from mutations of a single gene) and polygenic diseases (combined results from multiple genes) that in effect promise a perfectly healthy child for life, which is neither realistic nor human. In fact, the opening banner on the firm’s website touts its mission, which reads as a mandate: “Have healthy babies.”
The moral imperative is clear: create your children in a laboratory’s petri dish, and have each screened by Orchid, which can sequence over 99 percent of the child’s DNA. You then receive a complete genome report on each embryo of any illness, birth defect, disease, neurodevelopmental disorder, adult- or pediatric-onset cancer marker, etc., that is likely to develop at any stage of your chosen child’s life, all delivered to your smart phone. The price tag: $2,500 per embryo.
But of course, you must create enough embryos to give you a sporting chance of obtaining a perfect option. Siddiqui and her husband harvested twenty of her own eggs, creating sixteen embryos in order to have the four children (two boys and two girls, she says!) she and her husband desire over the coming years. As far as they know, they have no fertility issues. Siddiqui expresses a firm moral obligation to protect her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in this way because her mother developed a rare degenerative eye condition that ultimately rendered her blind.
In her interview with Douthat, Siddiqui praises the American virtue of choice, saying each woman who desires to become pregnant can do so through the “old-fashioned” way or via technology. “I think this should be about parental choice, parental freedom, and parental autonomy.” She adds, in classic progressive parlance, “I think the bottom line is that we shouldn’t be shoving our moral beliefs on other people.”
However, that is precisely what she does as she continues her interview with Douthat. He challenges her point that gene selection has become a moral imperative. Douthat says:
Just to go back to the example you talked about, with your mother and her illness: In the world you’re describing, your mother would exist as an embryo. Not your mother as an adult human being, your mother as an embryo. And someone running an Orchid-style program would look at that embryo and say: “We’re not going to implant that embryo.”
He adds, “You are running a business and you are saying it would be good to live in a society where the embryo that became my mother was assessed and ruled out of bounds.”
Siddiqui confesses, in response:
Sure. I think that the question of an embryo that is going to get adult-onset blindness, what do I think about that embryo? My mom doesn’t want to be blind. She doesn’t want me to be blind. She doesn’t want her grandkids to be blind. So I think that it is a positive moral choice, it is the responsible decision as a parent, to detect that risk at the earliest possible stage and to transfer the embryo that has the best probability of a healthy life.
Siddiqui has no qualms about telling us what her grandmother and mother’s proper moral choice would have been.
She then praises the prospect, thanks to a directive from President Trump, that “IVF itself is something that is going to hopefully be covered for everyone.” She adds, “In addition to that, hopefully we’ll be able to get access to screening technologies like Orchid.” She is not shy about saying she wants her product fully funded too. “I think it’s something that in the very near future hopefully we’ll be able to mobilize enough excitement around so that it’s something that’s going to be covered for everyone.”
Then, this is where nobody would ever expect a New York Times writer to go, exactly where any good Christian ethicist should go. Douthat: “You are excited about a world in which lots and lots more babies than is the case right now are born from laboratory fertilization.” Given that, he asks Siddiqui the profound question: If her new moral imperative for artificial, disembodied procreation to ensure perfectly healthy babies becomes the norm, have we not lost something truly beautiful and human, the link between physical sexual communion and procreation?
Douthat then claims “podcaster’s privilege” and introduces a section of a poem by Galway Kinnell entitled “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps:”
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body —
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
Douthat, a father himself, gets emotional as he reads these last words, realizing the power and beauty of what Kinnell is describing. He apologizes for the vulnerability, then asks Siddiqui, “Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife, in a relationship, with a child?”
It is indeed a profound humanistic question. Remarkably, the incredibly well-educated woman responds blankly, “What do you mean?”
How can she not know what he means? He is describing one of the most universal, beautiful truths of human experience. In the ideal, it is the mystery that brought each of us into the world. But her technological worldview has blinded her to the beauty the poet is describing. Sadly, those who listen to the false promise of technology’s siren song will also, in time, find themselves blind to the ineffable beauty. And we will all be much poorer for the loss.
But this blindness gives Douthat the opportunity to shine a light. He says directly:
I mean, in a future where Orchid technology becomes the norm, the feeling that poet is expressing, where a man and a woman make love, and by making love they bring a new life into the world that they haven’t sculpted or engineered in any way, that is given to them out of the self-giving from each other, that forms this profound connection between sex, the way you love your partner, and the family that you brought into being.
In the new moral imperative, created by technology’s bold promise of ever-healthy babies guaranteed free from all maladies, great and small, Douthat asks, “I’m wondering if you think anything would actually be lost if that goes away?”
He adds, “If 90 percent of babies are born through IVF, and having sex and having a baby out of that becomes this weird thing that the Amish do, aren’t you pushing some really intimate and important aspect of human experience out of human experience?”
Siddiqui flippantly answers with a quip she has clearly used in marketing pitches many times over: “Sex is for fun; Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.”
Douthat then admits, “Yes, I didn’t want to quote that to you because I thought it was so ridiculous.” He is exactly right, because it is so anti-human. We all know sex is so much more than just “fun.” But fertility technology turns this fruitful love into another commodity to be customized. In Siddiqui’s world, children are not a gift to be received with wonder and curiosity, but another product to be optimized in order to fulfill adult wishes. We have Amazon for that. We don’t need to subvert human reproduction in the same manner.
Siddiqui must know she has been challenged by a more honest and true view of human procreation, so she doubles down and becomes morally manipulative. The very thing she just warned us we should never do to one another.
It’s just that I think that the vast majority of parents in the future are not going to want to roll the dice with their child’s health. They’re going to see it as taking the maximum amount of care, the maximum amount of love, in the same way that they plan nursery, plan their home, plan their preschool. All these decisions are actually extremely insignificant in terms of the difference between whether your child is going to live with pediatric cancer, with a heart defect that we can’t surgically fix, or born without a skull and never going to be able to make it to their first birthday.
Feeling as if she must soften her landing, though, she offers more happy marketing talk. “I think it’s their personal choice, and I think freedom and choice is what makes America a great place to live and to be.”
Douthat, realizing his listeners had just gotten an all too chilling picture of where fee-based technologized disembodied procreation is taking us, thanked his guest for joining him.
Glenn T. Stanton is the director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family and a regular contributor to World Opinions and The Federalist.