Newly expanded genetic testing expands concerns about eugenics in assisted reproductive technology by allowing parents to choose which of their unborn children live and die based on their alleged predisposition to physical and mental conditions.
Orchid Health, whose motto is “Have healthy babies,” is the startup responsible for developing and marketing the first commercially available whole-genome-sequencing embryo test in nearly three dozen fertility facilities in the United States.
For $12,500, anyone who already paid the hefty price to undergo in vitro fertilization and create embryos can have five of them biopsied — the process of removing five cells out of the 120-cell embryo — by genetic screeners. The San Francisco-based company. Orchid claims its whole-genome analysis will help IVF customers “mitigate more risks” when choosing which of their unborn children to implant and carry to term.
The technology allegedly sequences more than 99 percent of an embryo’s DNA for potential diseases like Alzheimer’s, disorders like schizophrenia, cancers, defects, chromosomal abnormalities, forms of autism, and more.
Orchid achieves this by combining the results of preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) with PGT for monogenic or single-gene diseases (PGT-M), and PGT for polygenic risk, or conditions that can manifest into adulthood. The screening then produces a report card with a long list of hypotheticals about an embryonic child’s “quality of life.”
Orchid claims to “adhere to the highest clinical and scientific standards.” But shortly after its December 2023 debut, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, an international coalition of more than 800 scientists,
