Closer to Perfect?

Advanced IVF & Embryo Screening

As of 2024, about two percent of U.S. births were the result of IVF. An estimated 13–17 million children have been born worldwide using the technology since it was first introduced in 1978. As part of the process, preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) is often used to identify the healthiest embryos for transfer in order to give the greatest chance for a successful birth. This has had the added effect of giving parents some additional control over their children—to choose, for example, a male or female embryo.

Until recently, most PGT was concerned only with serious diseases and conditions. But in 2025, some companies started advertising new, more advanced forms of IVF and genetic screening. With the tagline “Have your best baby,” Nucleus now offers a service called IVF+ that analyzes more than 2,000 “factors,” which it claims “can shape the health and well-being of your future child.”¹ Nucleus calls this “genetic optimization with a human touch,” and the website shows how parents can use the data to compare their embryos and select which ones to transfer. Similarly, Orchid advertises that its Whole Genome Embryo Screening helps clients “have healthy babies” and “mitigate more risks with the world’s most advanced whole genome screening for embryos.”²

Noor Siddiqui, the CEO of Orchid, says, “Sex is for fun; Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.” She believes IVF and intensive screening will become the norm for all pregnancies—they will be seen as parents taking maximum care and love for their child. “It becomes about stewardship … how do I make a responsible choice for my family?”³ Why would parents have a child that could have pediatric cancer if, through screening, that suffering could be prevented?

Commodifying Children

There are numerous causes for concern about the promises made by companies such as Nucleus and Orchid. Their stated intentions of helping families have healthy babies and giving prospective parents as much information as possible sound noble, but they are contributing to the commodification of children. Instead of treating each child as a gift to be freely received, they are turning children into consumer products while encouraging prospective parents to think first of themselves and their own desires, rather than to accept their children as they are and value them for their own sake. As the Nucleus website says, once the testing process is complete, you can then “choose the best embryo for you.”

Siddiqui’s comment that these technologies simply represent parents showing a “maximum amount of care and love” is insulting. Of course parents want the best for their children. However, the implication is that those parents who choose to conceive naturally, or who are unable or unwilling to shell out thousands of dollars to her company, love their children less. We should flatly reject the idea that the best way parents can show love for their children is to have them conceived in a lab and screened during their first days of life.

Furthermore, there is evidence that trying to determine a child’s future through genetics might actually be detrimental, both to the child’s mental health as well as to the parent-child relationship. As Emi Nietfeld wrote in Wired about so-called “designer babies,” “The kids feel like walking science experiments [and] the parents are disappointed in how their progeny turned out.”⁴ These negative effects were being seen even before the advent of the advanced PGT now being advertised.

A False Premise

Though companies like Nucleus and Orchid offer more comprehensive testing and claim that they help parents have healthier babies, it should be emphasized that they do not offer treatment for any diseases but merely provide parents with data and “choices.”

Parents who purchase their services are not making their child(ren) healthier. When they are looking through a group of embryos, they are ranking children who already exist in the earliest stage of life. They are merely choosing which ones will receive the opportunity to grow and develop and which ones will be frozen or discarded without ever being afforded that chance. It might be that parents who utilize these services will have healthier children than those who do not, but this is not the result of improving babies’ health. The unchosen embryos still exist; they are simply never being given an opportunity to develop. This is eugenics in its most basic form—ranking human life based on fitness (or mere preferences like sex or hair color) and then eliminating the ones deemed inferior or unwanted.

Each of the embryos created in the IVF process represents a distinct, nascent human life. The very wealth of information that advanced IVF offers only reinforces this point. If testing is about sex, eye color, and hair color, along with potential height, weight, and disease profiles, how can we not see these as individual human lives?

A Return to Barbarity

Siddiqui and those like her who push IVF and genetic testing see it as the future of human childbearing, believing it will usher in a new era of parental choice and reduce disease and illness. These lofty goals, while they sound progressive, in reality harken back to pagan Rome, where the paterfamilias, or father of the family, had the right to determine which children would be allowed to live. If he felt that a child was sickly, or was the wrong sex, or that the family could not afford another child, it was his prerogative to declare that the child should be exposed to the elements and left to die. In a famous Roman letter, Hilarion, writing to his pregnant wife, instructs her that if their baby is a boy to keep it, but if it is a girl to “cast it out.”⁵

Exposing a newborn to die seems barbaric to us today, but prenatal genetic testing effectively allows us to do the same thing; we simply do it before the child is born rather than after. Advanced IVF is a new, technological way to participate in the same practice by allowing parents an expanded range of characteristics to consider when selecting their next child. While testing was once limited to serious illnesses, parents are now being encouraged to make their determination based on calculated potentials for a wider variety of conditions, as well as many more nebulous “heightened risk factors.” They might not endorse the ancient practice of infant exposure, but they are nonetheless picking and choosing which children to welcome into their home and discarding those who do not measure up.

Two Ploys

To resist the eugenic mindset that lies behind much of advanced genetic testing, it is helpful to identify two of the marketing hooks that companies like Nucleus and Orchid use to draw parents into it. The first is fear. On Nucleus’s list of benefits for carrier screening (carrier screening looks at the parents’ genomes to identify genetic disorders they carry and could pass along), the number one reason put forth in favor of screening is to relieve anxiety; the fifth reason is for the peace of mind it can give. Prospective parents are frequently full of anxiety about how their children will turn out, and so genetic testing is marketed as a way to alleviate fear and anxiety.

There are certainly benefits to understanding one’s genetic risk factors, and there are good reasons why some parents might take advantage of the analyses, such as giving time to prepare for a child with a disability. Testing itself is not the problem, nor is gaining knowledge about one’s children. But fears about having a less-than-perfect child should not drive parental decision-making and should never result in the destruction of embryonic human life.

The second marketing hook is control. Given the fears and anxiety prospective parents experience, the service is put forward as a way parents can take greater control over their own reproduction: Do we want a boy with a higher chance of developing diabetes but also a higher IQ, or would we prefer a girl with a low risk of developing breast cancer but a heightened risk for autism? Or do we prefer her sister, who has a higher risk of both, but will be a few inches taller and have blue eyes like her mother? Advanced IVF purports to put parents in the driver’s seat. They get to pick which embryo is “best for them.”

However, prospective parents should wrestle with the fact that no matter how well they plan or how much technology they use, many aspects of their children’s lives will remain outside of their control. Our genetic code is only one part of who we are. The control promised by genetic screening is an illusion. Even the most advanced testing in the world cannot guarantee any given outcome for a child. Also worth noting is that the quest for control merely trades one set of anxieties for another, because with choice comes responsibility—and these choices about what kind of children to have were not ones that parents were ever meant to make.

Gifts, Not Products

The fears and anxieties of prospective parents are very real. And, it must be acknowledged, the diseases the testing is meant to screen out can be devastating to whole families. But the costs of turning human procreation into a technological process are also destructive. The eugenic mindset that says certain lives are not worthy of life has wreaked havoc throughout history and needs to be rejected. Likewise, the consumer-driven mindset that says parents should have maximum control over their reproduction, to the point of determining which children will be welcomed into the family, is, at base, pure selfishness. It is putting the parents’ desires ahead of the needs of their vulnerable children.

Early Christians were known for not only rejecting abortion and infanticide for themselves but also for saving and adopting children who had been abandoned. Their actions helped to change societal attitudes towards children. Like those early Christians, we too need to avoid seeing children as a reproductive project to be shaped according to our own desires. We need to recover a vision of children as gifts to be freely received. We do not need to plan our reproduction in a lab to show love for our children. We love them by fully accepting them as the gifts that they are.

Notes
1. MyNucleus.com/IVF (accessed Jan. 2, 2026).
2. OrchidHealth.com (accessed Jan. 5, 2026).
3. “Silicon Valley Wants to Optimize Your Children’s Genes,” Interesting Times with Ross Douthat (Aug. 7, 2025).
4. Emi Nietfeld, “Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It,” Wired (Dec. 11, 2024).
5. Charles Camosy, “We’ve Seen ‘Designer Babies’ Before,” UnHerd (Aug. 26, 2025).