This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born

God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born with a severe intellectual disability. Or go blind. Or become obese. A regular baby might not even make it to childbirth. Any of those things could still happen to an Orchid baby, yes, but the risk, says 29-year-old Noor Siddiqui, plummets if you choose her method. It’s often called “genetic enhancement.”

Whenever I bring up Orchid in polite company, people squirm. “I’m uncomfortable,” they say. “Not for me.” “So unnatural.” Inevitably, Nazis get mentioned, as does a related word that starts with “eu” and ends in “genics.” (Orchid prefers I not utter it.) One new mom I was talking to was particularly, headshakingly disturbed. Then, a few minutes later, in an attempt to change the subject, she announced to the room that she’d just fed her 6-month-old his first peanut, and that in three months’ time she’d be feeding him...