“Have it your way” isn’t just for fast-food burgers anymore.
It’s also for babies.
Orchid, which labels itself as “the world’s most advanced whole genome screening for embryos during IVF,” was highlighted in a recent New York Times article headlined “This baby was carefully selected as an embryo.”
Orchid, writes journalist Anna Louie Sussman, “screens embryos’ DNA for hundreds of conditions” and also “offer[s] what is known as polygenic screening, which gives parents what is essentially a risk profile on each embryo’s propensity for conditions, such as heart disease.”
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?
This is a choice parents are now able to make.
