Should All Parents Consider Embryo Selection?

Noor Siddiqui is the CEO and founder of Orchid, a genomics company that helps parents screen embryos for diseases before they are born (interviewed by me here). She caused a stir in August when she went on Ross Douthat’s podcast and implied that embryo selection is something all parents should consider. The madwoman actually said “Sex is for fun, Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.”

I have no moral objection to embryo selection and IVF, and I’m not going to take a position on the effectiveness of screening methods. In fact, I think we have a moral obligation to do what we can to create the healthiest, smartest, and best-looking children possible. I’m interested in a much narrower question here. Are IVF babies likely to be in some ways deficient compared to others? Setting aside the financial cost, inconvenience, and discomfort of going through IVF, is there a reason to suspect that your baby would be worse off relative to a child made the natural way?

Perhaps the best reason to suspect that the answer is yes is the existence of sperm competition. There is something deeply moving about how those little guys struggle so valiantly in the hopes of obtaining a future existence. And the selection mechanisms appear to be intense. According to one academic review,

In nearly all imaginable semen samples, IVF selects for another phenotype of spermatozoon to fertilize the oocyte than coitus does. IVF practitioners and researchers alike have long since acknowledged the differences between the selection of sperm in coitus compared with that in IVF, and they have used these differences to inspire research into how to select the most competent sperm for assisted reproduction and how to engineer methods for selection of spermatozoa in the IVF lab that mimics sperm selection after coitus. When reviewing that field of study, Sakkas et al. (2015) included a section on evolutionary mechanisms used to promote sperm selection after coitus. The spermatozoa ejaculated into the vagina first swim through the uterus and a fallopian tube, in close contact and interaction with female cells and secretions, and perhaps influenced by female peristalsis. Upon reaching the vicinity of the oocyte, spermatozoa are attracted to the oocyte by chemotaxis before penetrating the zona pellucida by applying a variety of means, both kinetic and chemical. In contrast, the phenotype of a spermatozoon selected for fertilizing the oocyte in

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