I think something that is missed in the “privilege” comment is that many parents of children with disabilities or additional needs do actually see themselves as experiencing privilege…as in “it’s a privilege/gift/blessing to be the ones to care for this human being”. It seems oddly inhuman to only view genetically “healthy” humans as privileged, a sort of flattening of the spectrum of human experience.
And then there will be fewer needy people around, and then we will collectively forget how to care for needy people (and forget that we have a responsibility to do so).
Right - and should something like that happen, I would much rather live in a society where people understand what to do with weakness and vulnerability, where most people have the "taking responsibility for caring for others" muscle in shape.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but in a world where most people want a set number of children, that's true for *every* child! My second child prevented the birth of all other children I could have had just as surely as embryo selection would have.
If my first had had additional needs, we wouldn't have had *any* more children; that child would not only have prevented the alternative first children from being born, but also my second.
I think there is a meaningful difference between aiming not to conceive any more children versus conceiving a number and then eventually throwing out the siblings who are excess to requirements.
Following up on this, to clarify your position: are you against IVF entirely, then? (This isn't a gotcha or anything, I'm just trying out understand the exact point of disagreement).
The thing that strikes me about her assertion of privilege for those comfortable enough with their genetics to conceive the old-fashioned way, is that her alternative costs more than 2 grand. That's for the... unprivileged?
That is terrifyingly logical and I think it will catch on, to my horror and our enormous loss. We don't have enough confidence in philosophy or ethics as a culture to give weight to the right arguments. You can't measure the reality of a lived relationship--especially one that doesn't exist yet--but efficiency and risk-mitigation are very measurable, and very persuasive.
I think obviously what begins as free will end as mandatory. Once the government is paying you to choose the healthiest embryos, it is unlikely to continue allowing you to freely bear the unhealthiest embryos.
Do you have any examples of this? I'm not convinced at all that this will be the case. Many places subsidize e.g. museums and libraries for people to use but these are far from mandatory.
> "She wants it covered with no copay by insurance because they’ll save money if you pick healthier babies."
Will the parents sign up to agree to permit embryo adoption for any viable un-used embryos within N years?
I say this from the position of being frankly scared that ALL the incentives line up in the direction to grease this change (widespread IVF with embryo screening for child selection in wealthy nations) down the tracks, and it is completely unstoppable - at least on a scale of decades.
I just remember watching the rise of social media: Basically nobody benefits on-net from the impact of social media and smartphones in their lives, but yet... economics dictates that social media will persist, and not only that, but be a powerful juggernaut.
To be fair, that's a blip of an add-on given the monetary cost of IVF, which rises to the tens of thousands of dollars before it works AFAIK. It's the "extended warranty" equivalent.
I read this interview and was really glad that Ross pushed on her as much as he did. The poem was also beautiful. I don't know if she really "got it" though. I was surprised about how dismissive she was generally. Even though IVF has been described as absolutely a brutal experience, emotionally and physically, by many people, both men and women, she basically dismissed the whole conversation by saying she had no problem with harvesting her eggs. She seemed extremely reticent to discuss larger moral questions, and probably doesn't realize how hurtful it is to many people to hear her dismissals of anyone with a disability, genetic disease, or even autism, as someone who probably shouldn't have existed in her paradigm. I don't know if there's a way to really convey the mystery and the awe inherent in the connection between sex and procreation... Ross was trying to get there with the poem. It's ineffable. It's beyond us. It's weighty with the immensity of the experience. I don't know how you calculate that. Probably you can't. And that's probably why it has no place in her business model. A thoroughly depressing approach to life.
As someone who sees radical injustice Iike this and fears for the future, I’d like to offer a few everyday ways for us to push back: Honor the relationship between sex and procreation in your life. (Acknowledge it, practice it, ponder it, talk about it.) Celebrate human life in all forms and stages of health. (If this is not already a part of your day, find one intentional way to go out of your way to do so regularly.) Openly discuss the beauty and dignity of “the old fashioned way” with others from a place of charity + courage (remember, many who hear this siren song right now are those struggling to have a healthy pregnancy, not those who want to custom create babies). Pray. Pray. Pray.
Listened to the whole interview and have so many thoughts...kinda crazy how it essentially boils down to "I invented this technology so people like my mom are never born." I truly am so curious to hear how her mom would talk about her condition. Is it all depression and constant suffering/pain, or does her mom have moments where she feels she's growing in strength and resilience in the face of an intense challenge, where the joyful moments are all the more sweet because of the pain?
Lumping all these diseases/conditions together and putting them under the blanket statement of "suffering" is crazy. She asks "is your child going to suffer for a lifetime from a disease that you could have prevented?” But some of the things they're screening for are things like diabetes, (which admittedly I don't have) but don't imagine someone with diabetes sees their life as pure suffering. A lot of these things can be managed and treated. My husband was born without an arm, but it pretty minimally impacts his day to day and he lives a joyful, full, loved life. Would it screen for that under "birth defects?" Again, does she see her mom's life as not worth living? Crazy stuff.
She says at the end that "every human life is equally valid" which is literally hilarious. More like, "Every human life is equally valid but if you have any sort of disease or challenge your life should be discarded for the greater good of costing less to society and to avoid your loved ones having to care for you."
I'm glad Ross pushed back on her a lot but I wish he could've done a bit more when she dodged so much. I have so many questions for her on what makes a life worth living.
She says not to stigmatize parents that use Orchid, then stigmatizes us normal humans by painting the decision to have kids "the old fashioned way" (a stupid, dismissive framing) as this negligent act. Crazily enough, my parenting isn't driven by the desire "to get an outcome that isn’t going to lead to diseases," it's to love the kids God gives me, no matter what challenges they face.
"She says not to stigmatize parents that use Orchid, then stigmatizes us normal humans by painting the decision to have kids "the old fashioned way" (a stupid, dismissive framing) as this negligent act."
Yes, this is the most dangerous part of her entire project.
When procreation outcomes can be "optimized", then only negligent or radical luddities would choose to make a baby the "old fashioned way". Doesn't take a genius to see how dangerous this mindset is, and where it very clearly leads.
Not a slippery slope fallacy, because she is explicitly stating this to be her philosophy and purpose.
Well, it's both worse and oddly comforting that she doesn't need to be philosophically convinced of everything she's saying, because she's ultimately trying to make money. That's usually behind philosophical inconsistencies. We can't read her heart and it's stupid to try, but we do know she stands to make a lot of money from manipulating people's emotions.
It is one thing to want to be as healthy as possible before pregnancy to give your children the best shot at a health. It’s quite a different thing to create children and then pick the healthiest to birth. She is confusing these things.
One of the more striking things about Siddiqui's overarching morality was the privileging of freedom and autonomy as THE moral standard by which all decisions must be evaluated and an insistence that if these choices are made freely and consensually they are other wise neutral while simultaneously undercutting her own claims to neutrality by asserting that embryonic screening is the "maximally" loving and caring position for parents to choose. Freedom as a moral standard is never neutral though many of its champions assert this and their other commitments eventually betray them. There is a similar two step I find many abortion supporters assert. It's about freedom, no one is "forcing" anyone to have an abortion and yet they often find themselves believing that people choosing not to abort in certain circumstances is the cruel choice (teen pregnancies, pregnancies with disability diagnoses, pregnant women in precarious economic or social situations, etc).
It's interesting that the first thing Siddiqui does in the interview is cast the process as an extra way to "protect your children before pregnancy." Yes. You'd be protecting your children from certain genetic diseases, malformations, etc. but how far does that protection go? I lost a friend at the age of 15 to aggressive leukemia. Would something like that have been detectable at the embryo stage? It goes without saying that our lives would be different if her parents could have selected another embryonic child over her. Or if it wouldn't have been detectable, she'd been selected and it happened anyway? What was the point? Taking that mindset to its logical extent, we can try to remove or bulldoze every risk in their path, at some point they're no longer benefiting and in fact, they're being harmed. We can either view children as walking disasters waiting to happen (and not worth having if the worst should happen), or we can view them as risks worth taking because we would be better off having loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
I've even heard abortion itself discussed in these terms. Most women who get abortions are not callously using it as birth control, but discuss the decision in terms of their maternal prerogative to protect babies from suffering, either in the flawed circumstances they're in or from adoption. It's part of why the debate is so emotionally charged and why the most common accusation flung around is "not caring if children don't have healthcare/are food insecure/are in foster care/are in border camps" etc etc. Abortion is seen as protective from those things.
Yes, there is a connection with abortion in that countries that offer abortion with no restrictions can become choice destinations for wealthy people who want to abort a fetus once they discover it's not the gender they want. This popped to mind immediately when the Democratic Party swung way over to treating abortion as only the woman's business, and more or less like getting her teeth cleaned. I voted Democratic, but I didn't agree with this approach to abortion, which to me seems radical.
I would go further than "risk mitigation." This model of care equates love with control. I see this in other fields, as well. It came up in your earlier piece on risk. Many people take it for granted that if you do not control your child to the maximum, it is neglect. The elimination of risk is the most insidious form of control seeking because it does stem from a natural impulse.
I see this undercurrent in the screen-time debates, of all places, and in other contexts. Many parents see screen time as an unfortunate trade off for being unable to help having divided attention, due to schedules and lack of support. But many also see it as a form of control: If they are on a screen at least they're safe at home, and anyway even if they do go out with their friends, I can track their location. As long as I monitor their activity it's better. How could you not want to know where your teen is at ALL times? Don't you care about their safety? How could you allow risky play? A good parent would never.
Even "gentle parenting" is not immune. For all the conservative hand wringing about this topic, I find many people do not turn to it out of a strong sense of a child's agency, but as a technique to control behavior. Trying to get a certain outcome by yielding instead of dominating is still attempting to control. Most questions in parenting threads have some form of "I tried x and it didn't work." I wonder if linguistic confusion about the increasingly frequent word "regulation" is partly responsible.
This is what I thought of too, if this level of control over choosing which children to even birth and raise based on their genetic risk for certain types of suffering, where does that control end, and ultimately how do you face the truth that everyone does suffer somehow, no matter what you do to try to prevent it?
Siddiqui's response to Douthat's reading of the Kinnell poem reveals quite a bit.
Ross reads, apologizes for getting emotional, then asks, "Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife in a relationship with a child?"
Siddiqui: "What do you mean?"
A perfect example of what Erwin Chargaff meant when he said: "Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question ‘how?’ but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question ‘why?’"
Yes, I usually read podcast transcripts, but after reading I went and watched that clip and the difference in affect is as striking as the actual speech.
I’m pregnant at the moment with my IVF baby. I’m so so grateful to have the opportunity. And yet time and again the sense of loss comes back to me, that my baby was not created in love and intimacy. I’m not suggesting that they are worse off for it. But, irrational as it is, it feels just a little discordant. There was no privacy in my baby’s creation - it involved doctors and nurses and technicians and insurers and a whole host of wonderful people who made it possible. For this reason, I have resisted sharing my baby’s sex with anyone, just because I feel like it can be one thing that is just for me (and sure, my medical team as well, but leave me to my delusions :-) )
Also, yeah, it’s physically brutal as a process. I can’t imagine thinking “sure, the world would be way better if everyone was going through this medical and admin gauntlet of hell”
Yes, I think it's a real false note in her pitch that she treats IVF as trivial. (She's harvested eggs and saved embryos, but not done transfers yet). There's no one I know who's done IVF who treats it as trivial, and it's certainly not a way to sidestep suffering or uncertainty. You have *different* crosses to bear.
I hope you have an easy labor and a joyful meeting face to face.
I mean, I’ve done egg freezing, IUI, and IVF. I don’t think embryo transfer is anywhere near the most stressful part. But yes, I think the mental stress of the stakes when you are actually *trying to have a baby* heightens the difficulty of everything. And of course there is a huge privilege element of (leaving aside the financial cost which she believes can be offset by future savings) structuring your life around going to clinics for tests every couple of days. I have a job where I had an element of flexibility, which most people do not have; however, I was still relying on public transport, which stretched everything into an even longer trip. This is simply not a reasonable expectation of an average woman with a family and a job.
I listened to the interview and found it really hard to stomach. Two of my five kids with the same vision loss disease (retinitis pigmentosa) that her mother has, although the type my kids have started in childhood and is also combined with profound hearing loss. I won’t bullshit: it is devastating to walk my kids through losing their vision BUT the idea that they’d just be better off not being here is absurd and offensive. After our kids were diagnosed with Usher syndrome we met with a genetic counselor and part of the meeting was so that they could offer/suggest that if we wanted more kids we should create embryos and pre-screen them. We said no thanks and went on to have two more kids. How could I look my daughters in the face knowing I’d thrown away their siblings to avoid having kids “just like them”?
I listened to the podcast this afternoon after reading your post Leah. To your second question, I like Abigail Favale's framing that sex is a profound act of hospitality: a woman's body accepts the stranger before her mind can reject them. From a child's perspective, parents willingness to roll the dice on you genetically could translate into (and teach) genetgenerosity in other way! Oppenenss to difficult personalities, human idiosyncrasies, whatever.
Orchid's vision sets sex as hospitality and a lesson in generous aside. While Noor uses the language of love, the process she proposes, it seems to me, is ironically sterile because it lacks the generous risk taking that sex requires.
On a more practical note, I found myself wondering what the long-term privacy rights of children conceived using this service are. There's no legal framework to say you have a right to be conceived privately or that your parents ought to forego embryonic / fetal medical testing to preserve fetal embryonic privacy. But sequencing a whole genome without that individual's consent that seems violative.
Sex making babies doesn't guarantee their health and well-being, sure. But I dunno, sex as an act of hospitality - and accepting that risk and being with that person come what may- calls to that mysterious and creative love humans yearn for.
> What do you think of Siddiqui’s framing of not screening children as a privileged position?
Everything cynical leaps up inside me and rattles at the keys to its cage!!
I do not think that your argument that 'she retreats to the language of “privilege” to describe the most universal human experience' is a good one. (Me commenting on my own side's tactics so that I can calm down, here.) She's not pointing to the near-universal blessing that God grants children through sexual procreation; she's pointing at the people who are highly-intelligent and/or attractive, and have no markers for major diseases that have a known genetic basis. This is re-appropriating* an old, old tactic: point towards the "tall poppies" that others tend to be envious of, and work with that jealousy of The Many. So, she's waving a hand at those "tall poppies," while also implying a standard that is so high no one can attain to.
But... okay, okay, I see why there's a point in what you're saying: this implication that having kids in the usual way* is _definitely_ irresponsible for all except for the most-healthy/most-intelligent/most-genetically-thrivey is one gear in the machinery of the logical argumentation for REMOVING the near-universality of this blessing.
* I kinda want to quote Markus from Seveneves, but I won't here. That said, Dinah was right in her final assessment of him. (yes, they are both fictional.)
** I like how I got the word "appropriate" in there.
I think something that is missed in the “privilege” comment is that many parents of children with disabilities or additional needs do actually see themselves as experiencing privilege…as in “it’s a privilege/gift/blessing to be the ones to care for this human being”. It seems oddly inhuman to only view genetically “healthy” humans as privileged, a sort of flattening of the spectrum of human experience.
Yes, and she doesn’t want to serve that group better… she wants to prevent them from being born!
And then there will be fewer needy people around, and then we will collectively forget how to care for needy people (and forget that we have a responsibility to do so).
Yes, though any one of us -- at any age -- can have an accident or sudden condition that requires care no one anticipated.
Right - and should something like that happen, I would much rather live in a society where people understand what to do with weakness and vulnerability, where most people have the "taking responsibility for caring for others" muscle in shape.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but in a world where most people want a set number of children, that's true for *every* child! My second child prevented the birth of all other children I could have had just as surely as embryo selection would have.
If my first had had additional needs, we wouldn't have had *any* more children; that child would not only have prevented the alternative first children from being born, but also my second.
You can't really get away from it.
I think there is a meaningful difference between aiming not to conceive any more children versus conceiving a number and then eventually throwing out the siblings who are excess to requirements.
Following up on this, to clarify your position: are you against IVF entirely, then? (This isn't a gotcha or anything, I'm just trying out understand the exact point of disagreement).
Yes, I am.
Ok, that's consistent. In that case I definitely don't have any arguments that will be persuasive to you!
This is, indeed, the crux of the deeper disagreement I think, but I do think it's something on which reasonable people can disagree.
I would argue that it's two different definitions at this point.
The thing that strikes me about her assertion of privilege for those comfortable enough with their genetics to conceive the old-fashioned way, is that her alternative costs more than 2 grand. That's for the... unprivileged?
She wants it covered with no copay by insurance because they’ll save money if you pick healthier babies.
That is terrifyingly logical and I think it will catch on, to my horror and our enormous loss. We don't have enough confidence in philosophy or ethics as a culture to give weight to the right arguments. You can't measure the reality of a lived relationship--especially one that doesn't exist yet--but efficiency and risk-mitigation are very measurable, and very persuasive.
I think obviously what begins as free will end as mandatory. Once the government is paying you to choose the healthiest embryos, it is unlikely to continue allowing you to freely bear the unhealthiest embryos.
Social pressure from peers is a much stronger force than the government in such matters.
Do you have any examples of this? I'm not convinced at all that this will be the case. Many places subsidize e.g. museums and libraries for people to use but these are far from mandatory.
> "She wants it covered with no copay by insurance because they’ll save money if you pick healthier babies."
Will the parents sign up to agree to permit embryo adoption for any viable un-used embryos within N years?
I say this from the position of being frankly scared that ALL the incentives line up in the direction to grease this change (widespread IVF with embryo screening for child selection in wealthy nations) down the tracks, and it is completely unstoppable - at least on a scale of decades.
I just remember watching the rise of social media: Basically nobody benefits on-net from the impact of social media and smartphones in their lives, but yet... economics dictates that social media will persist, and not only that, but be a powerful juggernaut.
To be fair, that's a blip of an add-on given the monetary cost of IVF, which rises to the tens of thousands of dollars before it works AFAIK. It's the "extended warranty" equivalent.
I read this interview and was really glad that Ross pushed on her as much as he did. The poem was also beautiful. I don't know if she really "got it" though. I was surprised about how dismissive she was generally. Even though IVF has been described as absolutely a brutal experience, emotionally and physically, by many people, both men and women, she basically dismissed the whole conversation by saying she had no problem with harvesting her eggs. She seemed extremely reticent to discuss larger moral questions, and probably doesn't realize how hurtful it is to many people to hear her dismissals of anyone with a disability, genetic disease, or even autism, as someone who probably shouldn't have existed in her paradigm. I don't know if there's a way to really convey the mystery and the awe inherent in the connection between sex and procreation... Ross was trying to get there with the poem. It's ineffable. It's beyond us. It's weighty with the immensity of the experience. I don't know how you calculate that. Probably you can't. And that's probably why it has no place in her business model. A thoroughly depressing approach to life.
As someone who sees radical injustice Iike this and fears for the future, I’d like to offer a few everyday ways for us to push back: Honor the relationship between sex and procreation in your life. (Acknowledge it, practice it, ponder it, talk about it.) Celebrate human life in all forms and stages of health. (If this is not already a part of your day, find one intentional way to go out of your way to do so regularly.) Openly discuss the beauty and dignity of “the old fashioned way” with others from a place of charity + courage (remember, many who hear this siren song right now are those struggling to have a healthy pregnancy, not those who want to custom create babies). Pray. Pray. Pray.
It’s challenging because by default I don’t want to talk about it personally.
This very post is a great example of talking about it, in my opinion!
Listened to the whole interview and have so many thoughts...kinda crazy how it essentially boils down to "I invented this technology so people like my mom are never born." I truly am so curious to hear how her mom would talk about her condition. Is it all depression and constant suffering/pain, or does her mom have moments where she feels she's growing in strength and resilience in the face of an intense challenge, where the joyful moments are all the more sweet because of the pain?
Lumping all these diseases/conditions together and putting them under the blanket statement of "suffering" is crazy. She asks "is your child going to suffer for a lifetime from a disease that you could have prevented?” But some of the things they're screening for are things like diabetes, (which admittedly I don't have) but don't imagine someone with diabetes sees their life as pure suffering. A lot of these things can be managed and treated. My husband was born without an arm, but it pretty minimally impacts his day to day and he lives a joyful, full, loved life. Would it screen for that under "birth defects?" Again, does she see her mom's life as not worth living? Crazy stuff.
She says at the end that "every human life is equally valid" which is literally hilarious. More like, "Every human life is equally valid but if you have any sort of disease or challenge your life should be discarded for the greater good of costing less to society and to avoid your loved ones having to care for you."
I'm glad Ross pushed back on her a lot but I wish he could've done a bit more when she dodged so much. I have so many questions for her on what makes a life worth living.
She says not to stigmatize parents that use Orchid, then stigmatizes us normal humans by painting the decision to have kids "the old fashioned way" (a stupid, dismissive framing) as this negligent act. Crazily enough, my parenting isn't driven by the desire "to get an outcome that isn’t going to lead to diseases," it's to love the kids God gives me, no matter what challenges they face.
"She says not to stigmatize parents that use Orchid, then stigmatizes us normal humans by painting the decision to have kids "the old fashioned way" (a stupid, dismissive framing) as this negligent act."
Yes, this is the most dangerous part of her entire project.
When procreation outcomes can be "optimized", then only negligent or radical luddities would choose to make a baby the "old fashioned way". Doesn't take a genius to see how dangerous this mindset is, and where it very clearly leads.
Not a slippery slope fallacy, because she is explicitly stating this to be her philosophy and purpose.
This woman is a dangerous person.
Well, it's both worse and oddly comforting that she doesn't need to be philosophically convinced of everything she's saying, because she's ultimately trying to make money. That's usually behind philosophical inconsistencies. We can't read her heart and it's stupid to try, but we do know she stands to make a lot of money from manipulating people's emotions.
It is one thing to want to be as healthy as possible before pregnancy to give your children the best shot at a health. It’s quite a different thing to create children and then pick the healthiest to birth. She is confusing these things.
One of the more striking things about Siddiqui's overarching morality was the privileging of freedom and autonomy as THE moral standard by which all decisions must be evaluated and an insistence that if these choices are made freely and consensually they are other wise neutral while simultaneously undercutting her own claims to neutrality by asserting that embryonic screening is the "maximally" loving and caring position for parents to choose. Freedom as a moral standard is never neutral though many of its champions assert this and their other commitments eventually betray them. There is a similar two step I find many abortion supporters assert. It's about freedom, no one is "forcing" anyone to have an abortion and yet they often find themselves believing that people choosing not to abort in certain circumstances is the cruel choice (teen pregnancies, pregnancies with disability diagnoses, pregnant women in precarious economic or social situations, etc).
Leah, your closing lines, and “you will keep discovering you are their parent,” - SO beautiful.
It's interesting that the first thing Siddiqui does in the interview is cast the process as an extra way to "protect your children before pregnancy." Yes. You'd be protecting your children from certain genetic diseases, malformations, etc. but how far does that protection go? I lost a friend at the age of 15 to aggressive leukemia. Would something like that have been detectable at the embryo stage? It goes without saying that our lives would be different if her parents could have selected another embryonic child over her. Or if it wouldn't have been detectable, she'd been selected and it happened anyway? What was the point? Taking that mindset to its logical extent, we can try to remove or bulldoze every risk in their path, at some point they're no longer benefiting and in fact, they're being harmed. We can either view children as walking disasters waiting to happen (and not worth having if the worst should happen), or we can view them as risks worth taking because we would be better off having loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
What drives me crazy is that you’re not protecting the child at risk. You’re swapping them for an alternative kid.
Iceland has eradicated Down Syndrome! (The worst way possible.)
Don’t forget the fact that some people are diagnosed at birth… raises the question beyond abortion to infanticide.
I've even heard abortion itself discussed in these terms. Most women who get abortions are not callously using it as birth control, but discuss the decision in terms of their maternal prerogative to protect babies from suffering, either in the flawed circumstances they're in or from adoption. It's part of why the debate is so emotionally charged and why the most common accusation flung around is "not caring if children don't have healthcare/are food insecure/are in foster care/are in border camps" etc etc. Abortion is seen as protective from those things.
Yes, there is a connection with abortion in that countries that offer abortion with no restrictions can become choice destinations for wealthy people who want to abort a fetus once they discover it's not the gender they want. This popped to mind immediately when the Democratic Party swung way over to treating abortion as only the woman's business, and more or less like getting her teeth cleaned. I voted Democratic, but I didn't agree with this approach to abortion, which to me seems radical.
I would go further than "risk mitigation." This model of care equates love with control. I see this in other fields, as well. It came up in your earlier piece on risk. Many people take it for granted that if you do not control your child to the maximum, it is neglect. The elimination of risk is the most insidious form of control seeking because it does stem from a natural impulse.
I see this undercurrent in the screen-time debates, of all places, and in other contexts. Many parents see screen time as an unfortunate trade off for being unable to help having divided attention, due to schedules and lack of support. But many also see it as a form of control: If they are on a screen at least they're safe at home, and anyway even if they do go out with their friends, I can track their location. As long as I monitor their activity it's better. How could you not want to know where your teen is at ALL times? Don't you care about their safety? How could you allow risky play? A good parent would never.
Even "gentle parenting" is not immune. For all the conservative hand wringing about this topic, I find many people do not turn to it out of a strong sense of a child's agency, but as a technique to control behavior. Trying to get a certain outcome by yielding instead of dominating is still attempting to control. Most questions in parenting threads have some form of "I tried x and it didn't work." I wonder if linguistic confusion about the increasingly frequent word "regulation" is partly responsible.
This is what I thought of too, if this level of control over choosing which children to even birth and raise based on their genetic risk for certain types of suffering, where does that control end, and ultimately how do you face the truth that everyone does suffer somehow, no matter what you do to try to prevent it?
I might need to re-watch but I'll say it for the umpteenth time: didn't we learn anything from the movie "Gatacca"?
The protagonist of gattacca was a fucking asshole. He risked blowing up a spaceship for of people for his own ego.
Siddiqui's response to Douthat's reading of the Kinnell poem reveals quite a bit.
Ross reads, apologizes for getting emotional, then asks, "Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife in a relationship with a child?"
Siddiqui: "What do you mean?"
A perfect example of what Erwin Chargaff meant when he said: "Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question ‘how?’ but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question ‘why?’"
Yes, I usually read podcast transcripts, but after reading I went and watched that clip and the difference in affect is as striking as the actual speech.
I’m pregnant at the moment with my IVF baby. I’m so so grateful to have the opportunity. And yet time and again the sense of loss comes back to me, that my baby was not created in love and intimacy. I’m not suggesting that they are worse off for it. But, irrational as it is, it feels just a little discordant. There was no privacy in my baby’s creation - it involved doctors and nurses and technicians and insurers and a whole host of wonderful people who made it possible. For this reason, I have resisted sharing my baby’s sex with anyone, just because I feel like it can be one thing that is just for me (and sure, my medical team as well, but leave me to my delusions :-) )
Also, yeah, it’s physically brutal as a process. I can’t imagine thinking “sure, the world would be way better if everyone was going through this medical and admin gauntlet of hell”
Yes, I think it's a real false note in her pitch that she treats IVF as trivial. (She's harvested eggs and saved embryos, but not done transfers yet). There's no one I know who's done IVF who treats it as trivial, and it's certainly not a way to sidestep suffering or uncertainty. You have *different* crosses to bear.
I hope you have an easy labor and a joyful meeting face to face.
I mean, I’ve done egg freezing, IUI, and IVF. I don’t think embryo transfer is anywhere near the most stressful part. But yes, I think the mental stress of the stakes when you are actually *trying to have a baby* heightens the difficulty of everything. And of course there is a huge privilege element of (leaving aside the financial cost which she believes can be offset by future savings) structuring your life around going to clinics for tests every couple of days. I have a job where I had an element of flexibility, which most people do not have; however, I was still relying on public transport, which stretched everything into an even longer trip. This is simply not a reasonable expectation of an average woman with a family and a job.
I listened to the interview and found it really hard to stomach. Two of my five kids with the same vision loss disease (retinitis pigmentosa) that her mother has, although the type my kids have started in childhood and is also combined with profound hearing loss. I won’t bullshit: it is devastating to walk my kids through losing their vision BUT the idea that they’d just be better off not being here is absurd and offensive. After our kids were diagnosed with Usher syndrome we met with a genetic counselor and part of the meeting was so that they could offer/suggest that if we wanted more kids we should create embryos and pre-screen them. We said no thanks and went on to have two more kids. How could I look my daughters in the face knowing I’d thrown away their siblings to avoid having kids “just like them”?
I listened to the podcast this afternoon after reading your post Leah. To your second question, I like Abigail Favale's framing that sex is a profound act of hospitality: a woman's body accepts the stranger before her mind can reject them. From a child's perspective, parents willingness to roll the dice on you genetically could translate into (and teach) genetgenerosity in other way! Oppenenss to difficult personalities, human idiosyncrasies, whatever.
Orchid's vision sets sex as hospitality and a lesson in generous aside. While Noor uses the language of love, the process she proposes, it seems to me, is ironically sterile because it lacks the generous risk taking that sex requires.
On a more practical note, I found myself wondering what the long-term privacy rights of children conceived using this service are. There's no legal framework to say you have a right to be conceived privately or that your parents ought to forego embryonic / fetal medical testing to preserve fetal embryonic privacy. But sequencing a whole genome without that individual's consent that seems violative.
Sex making babies doesn't guarantee their health and well-being, sure. But I dunno, sex as an act of hospitality - and accepting that risk and being with that person come what may- calls to that mysterious and creative love humans yearn for.
> What do you think of Siddiqui’s framing of not screening children as a privileged position?
Everything cynical leaps up inside me and rattles at the keys to its cage!!
I do not think that your argument that 'she retreats to the language of “privilege” to describe the most universal human experience' is a good one. (Me commenting on my own side's tactics so that I can calm down, here.) She's not pointing to the near-universal blessing that God grants children through sexual procreation; she's pointing at the people who are highly-intelligent and/or attractive, and have no markers for major diseases that have a known genetic basis. This is re-appropriating* an old, old tactic: point towards the "tall poppies" that others tend to be envious of, and work with that jealousy of The Many. So, she's waving a hand at those "tall poppies," while also implying a standard that is so high no one can attain to.
But... okay, okay, I see why there's a point in what you're saying: this implication that having kids in the usual way* is _definitely_ irresponsible for all except for the most-healthy/most-intelligent/most-genetically-thrivey is one gear in the machinery of the logical argumentation for REMOVING the near-universality of this blessing.
* I kinda want to quote Markus from Seveneves, but I won't here. That said, Dinah was right in her final assessment of him. (yes, they are both fictional.)
** I like how I got the word "appropriate" in there.