Optimizing Suffering Out of Existence

And the courage to allow your children to suffer

Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

I’ve written about Orchid and the “conquest of nature” before, last time they were in the news. Since then, they have only doubled down on their agenda to purify the genetic pool by selecting embryos for optimal qualities, aka: eugenics. In a new series of Tweets, the founder of Orchid, Noor Siddiqui, promoted the company after a recent podcast interview with Ross Douthat by asking some questions:

What if your baby never walks? What if they are never able to live independently? What if you could have stopped it… but chose not to? That’s the question OrchidInc’s embryo screening forces. You optimize everything… career, diet, skincare… but you’re going to chance it on your child’s genome, one of the most significant determinants of their health?

That’s the first tweet. She ends the thread by concluding: “Just be honest: you’re okay with your kid potentially suffering for life so you can feel morally superior.”

A number of things were remarkable about her comments.

First of all, the claim that “You optimize everything.” I think she’s right. This was Jacques Ellul’s point about technique, that it would conquer all areas of human life like juggernaut crushing human values and human beings underneath it—as it does in this case. This should be a red flag to us, a reminder of why we should not be optimizing everything, why technique inevitably leads to evil consequences like eugenics. Because it has no moral values, only efficient values! If you’re interested in more on this subject, see You Are Not Your Own.

But what’s more interesting to me is the first and last things she says: “What if your baby never walks” and “You’re okay with your kid potentially suffering for life.” This stuck with me because my good friend

Jenna Klaassen

has just published a beautiful essay at Plough articulating why a disabled parent would desire to have children, even knowing that there’s a 50/50 chance that their children might inherit the disability. Everyone should read it. Jenna’s article puts Siddiqui’s questions in an entirely different light, showing what real people with real experience with these questions have answered and why. Ultimately, every child enters this world not with potential suffering, as Siddiqui fears, but with guaranteed suffering. And for life. Her framing of the accusation that some people are okay with their “kid potentially suffering for life” is profoundly ignorant of the reality of life itself. But as Christians, we don’t deny suffering, but we turn to hope in Christ and courage to allow us to endure for the sake of what is good.