Designer Babies
Would you like a carefully screened newborn to pair with your custom handbag?
In April 2025, the New York Times ran an opinion piece that posed the following question: “I.V.F., Gene Selection and Embryo Screening: Is This the Future of Making Babies?” In other words, has the initial stage of the dystopian sci-fi world of the 1997 film Gattaca already arrived? Watch this clip to refresh your memory if it’s been a while since you watched this movie…
In answer to this question, Noor Siddiqui, founder of the embryo screening company Orchid, recently explained in a video on X that, “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies. It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things.”
Later in the video, which introduces baby Japhy, the first person born using Orchid’s genetic screening technology, Siddiqui, makes a telling remark about her relationship as company CEO to the newborn baby: “I mean, I don’t know how to explain it—it’s Leah’s baby, but it feels like my baby too. Like it’s been the culmination of an incredible amount of work of not just mine, but an entire team.”
While Sidiqqui highlights her role in bringing this child into the world (for a $50,000 fee, of course), I could not help but notice that the baby’s father is nowhere featured or mentioned in the video. After all, providing the sperm seems almost incidental, compared to the massive technical resources deployed in the genetic screening and selection process. The video also fails to mention the fate of those embryos deemed “not good enough” to be brought to birth. The discarded ones simply disappear from view. At one point in the interview, Baby Japhy’s mom, Leah, holds a picture of Japhy as an embryo, and tells her bouncing baby boy: “this is you—this was you at five days old.” She neglected to mention, or show him pictures of, his embryonic siblings.
I’ll be exploring these, and even more astonishing projects in manufacturing human life which are quickly coming down the pike, having just signed a contract for a forthcoming book, Braver New World: Reproduction in a Posthuman Society. The book will explore the ethical and societal implications of artificial gametes, artificial wombs, gene editing, human-animal chimeras, bodyoids (human bodies designed to be without brains), and whatever else we dream up between now and the book’s publication. As I dig into the research, stay tuned here at Human Flourishing for more dispatches from the frontiers of our braver new world…
How disconnected from God does one have to be to think that designer babies is a good idea?
There was a professor at Chicago Kent School of Law (now IIT), which I attended, named Lori B. Andrews, who tried to explore the legal complexities and nuance of various reproductive technology issues in the 90's, but the technology kept leaping far beyond the development of the law.
This also coincided with the advent of Clintonian neoliberalism and its attempt to reconcile profit and rent-seeking with liberal ethics and pluralism.
There are reckonings to be had between technologies and the life-cycle, as recently demonstrated by Tucker Carlson and Michael Shellenberger's interviews with opponents of euthanasia which is increasing with alarm velocity. Canada's MAD 2.0. is now making euthanasia available to physically ok young people with mental disorders and no longer pretends to adhere to the End of Life, "mercy-killing" model most persons were sold.
Commodification of organ transplants and surrogacy are also areas of deep concern, as there is nothing of monetary value on earth that isn't subject to theft, embezzlement, fraud, extortion, blackmail etc.