If Sex Isn't For Babies...

The future Orchid's embryo-screening service wants

All through August, you’re invited to play Mutual Dependence Bingo. Get a bingo in any direction, and on September 1st, I’ll send you a pdf of the first chapter of The Dignity of Dependence. Two bingo-scorers will get the whole book as an advance reader copy. I’ll have a thread this weekend for you to share bingo-chasing stories from the first week.

Photo by wd toro 🇲🇨 on Unsplash

On his podcast Interesting Times, Ross Douthat had a heated conversation with Noor Siddiqui, the head of Orchid. Orchid does whole genome examinations of embryos, for $2,500 a pop, so that parents pursuing IVF can pick which child to keep and carry.

There are some obvious eugenic objections to raise (and Douthat raised them) but I really appreciated how their conversation ended. During the podcast, Douthat quotes from the poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” (which I recommend reading in full!). I am just pulling a little from the end:

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

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.

Because he wants to ask Siddiqui about her contention that “Sex is for fun, Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.”

Obviously contraception and pre-marital sex have weakened the connection between lovemaking and engendering a child (though, notably, contraception means paying some kind of tribute to sex’s power, if only to ward it off). But what Douthat wants to ask her is whether she forsees a cost to trying to de-link sex from children entirely.

What if lovemaking is not meant to ever create some small, new person to love. What if when it does create a child, that child is viewed as presumptively damaged goods compared to the child a medical technician can select for you from among its siblings?

Here’s how their exchange goes:

Douthat: But when you get a baby, most people get it from having sex. And yes, there’s plenty of people who have sex without having babies, but most people who get a baby — it is linked inextricably to having sex with your spouse.

Siddiqui: Yeah, today ——

Douthat: And you are saying it’s time to sever that for the sake, I concede, of potential medical benefits. I’m just saying, I think, pretty clearly, something that poets write about would go away.

Siddiqui: Yeah, I think that sex is a beautiful thing, and I think that if you have enormous genetic privilege and for you to roll the dice and to get an outcome that isn’t going to lead to diseases is in the cards for you, then of course, go ahead and roll the dice.

I find it so striking that Siddiqui retreats to the language of “privilege” to describe the most universal human experience. Whether you are partnered or not, childless or not, for almost all of human history (until just now) you are the product of a man and a woman who with their bodies engendered you.

She goes on to say that forgoing the generative parts of sex in favor of choosing the best baby is “the maximum amount of care, the maximum amount of love.” (As much as she says she just favors reproductive pluralism, such language doesn’t leave much room to describe parents having children the old fashioned way as anything other than negligent.)

I think it’s hard to make the case against IVF if you make it primarily in terms of IVF’s harms.

• Are the drugs hard on women’s bodies? (Sure)

• Would the high cost of IVF have better bang for the buck on other fertility research or child benefits (Probably)

• Are clinics very choosy about their statistics in a way that mislead customers (You bet!)

But if you’re mostly oriented toward risk mitigation, of course a service like Orchid will be compelling. It can’t be opposed by setting up larger risks in opposition to the ones it seeks to mitigate. It can only by beaten with an opposing positive good.

The story Douthat tells about sex linked to children linked to sex is one such positive vision. It’s not that it makes sex better every time, knowing that it carries the risk of uphending your current life for the sake of an as-of-yet-unknown-to-you son or daughter, but it means you are genuinely losing something in exchange for your control.

Long after your child is born (whether or not they triumphed over their siblings in meritocratic rankings), you will keep discovering you are their parent, not their author. You hold them loosely, looser than is “safe” for the sake of seeing them as they actually are.

What do you think of Siddiqui’s framing of not screening children as a privileged position?

How, if you are open to sharing, does sex’s connection to conception shape your experience of it?