During Wednesday’s NBC Today airing, correspondent Morgan Radford shared the heart-warming story of a company that offers a service anyone would want: choosing which babies get to live. The “future of fertility,” eerily reminiscent of eugenics practices first employed over 100 years ago, was sugar-coated under morning program joviality with only a single short-and-sweet counter-argument brought to bear.
The pre-taped story began with a family’s daughter who suffers from a rare genetic disorder as a set-up for the desire to screen fetal infants:
CROWNOVER: We did all of the tests available.
RADFORD: And nothing showed up?
CROWNOVER: Correct.
Very sad. No one would argue with that. But NBC was playing a dirty trick: lulling its audience not into apathy, but into emotional agreement with the supposed solution that was about to be presented.
Radford then introduced Noor Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Orchid Health, a company that offers an embryonic screening service: “So, what Orchid is able to do is actually read that entire genome to scan for many, many thousands more anomalies or genetic conditions that could affect a future baby.”
Wait a minute. An embryo was the initial form of a human’s development in the womb. Those weren’t “future babies” — they already existed. It’s like the STEM cell controversy never happened.
The NBC reporter gave the twisted innovator a platform to defend the technology under the guise of pushback:
RADFORD: I mean, the idea of being able to decide which child, which embryo you put in your body, I mean, this is a generally new concept. What about people who say you're playing God?
SIDDIQUI: I don't think that's — what I'd say is, you know, do we think we're playing God when, you know, we put a seatbelts or a car seat in the car? Or when we go get chemotherapy when someone is diagnosed with cancer, right? All of civilization is using the latest and greatest science and medicine to improve people's lives.
Uh huh. The practice wasn’t improving anyone’s lives. It’s unnatural selection, deeming who was fit to live.
A brief clip from an interview with bioethicist Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz was played to fulfill NBC’s journalistic duty of presenting an opposing perspective on the issue: “I would say most people in the bioethics community have concerns about different aspects of this […] concerns about whether these technologies could lead to or promote eugenics thinking and practices.”
The entire segment was about five minutes and 20 seconds long. Of that, only 26 seconds was allotted to a figure with an opposing position, roughly eight percent of the entire story.
NBC practically hid the opposition by sandwiching it between a libertarian retort by Siddiqui: “I think that it's wrong to stigmatize this type of screening, especially when, you know, these people are — you know, they’re coming because they specifically want to minimize the chance that their child is gonna be affected by these diseases.”
No one in their right mind would want their child to suffer from any sort of mutation or disease. Was picking and choosing who gets to live suddenly morally acceptable?
To relieve the audience from any sour taste in the mouth, the pre-taped piece left on a hopeful note by returning to the Crownover family:
RADFORD: And the embryo that you're carrying, your child, has already been genetically screened?
CROWNOVER: Yes.
RADFORD: How do you feel knowing that?
CROWNOVER: It's actually a huge relief. I think especially where we are in the process, I think that we have a lot of hope, that we're on the right path.
It would have been inappropriate to Radford to ask, but it’s a question everyone was thinking. Would the Crownovers have kept the baby had the screening come back with unfortunate results?
All under the cover of light-hearted normalcy. Next up in real-life dystopia, customize your child like The Sims with CRISPR!
The transcript is below. Click "expand" read:
NBC’s Today
October 15, 2025
8:33:41 a.m. EST
(…)
CRAIG MELVIN: Turning now to a medical advancement that some are calling the future of fertility.
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Yeah, it's a new type of genetic testing that allows people going through IVF to do a detailed screening on their embryos before implanting them. And NBC's Morgan Radford is here with the story. Hi, Morgan. Good morning.
MORGAN RADFORD: Hey there, guys. Good morning. This is a really interesting question because this genetic screening can test for everything, from the future risk of heart disease to even psychological conditions. So it's raising this important question: if you could know more about your baby's future health, would you want to know that information? One company is not making parents wait to find out.
[Cuts to video]
JOY BETH CROWNOVER: Hey.
RADFORD: For Joy Beth and Adam Crownover, their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mia, is the center of their universe.
CROWNOVER: We did all of the tests available.
RADFORD: And nothing showed up?
CROWNOVER: Correct.
RADFORD: Standard testing during their natural pregnancy missed a rare genetic disease called lissencephaly, a brain malformation that can lead to severe and even life threatening symptoms.
ADAM CROWNOVER: And she started to have seizures at eight months. And then all of her overnight hospitalizations. [Transition] And I would say the first year of life, those were four really tough months.
RADFORD: So to expand their family, they decided to try a different approach: in vitro fertilization, using an embryo screened by a new kind of test offered by a company called Orchid Health. Orchid says they can sequence the entire genome, finding things other tests miss, like conditions that don't typically present until adulthood, including heart disease, schizophrenia, even the risk of adult onset cancers, and obesity.
ORCHID EMPLOYEE: Available patients can decide for which embryo to be transferred.
RADFORD: We saw the process at work at a fertility clinic in Charlotte.
RADFORD: So, is this the actual embryo?
ORCHID EMPLOYEE: Yes, that's an embryo. And right now she's going to take a few cells from the embryo to send for genetic testing.
NOOR SIDDIQUI: So our first baby was actually —
RADFORD: Orchid Health CEO, Noor Siddiqui, says the company has already screened thousands of embryos since they launched the technology in 2023.
RADFORD: You guys said that you sequenced more than 99 percent of an embryo's genome, while other existing tests read less than 1 percent. That's a big claim.
SIDDIQUI: Yeah, exactly. The testing that's available today on embryos really just looks at something called chromosomes. [Transition] So, what Orchid is able to do is actually read that entire genome to scan for many, many thousands more anomalies or genetic conditions that could affect a future baby.
RADFORD: I mean, the idea of being able to decide which child, which embryo you put in your body, I mean, this is a generally new concept. What about people who say you're playing God?
SIDDIQUI: I don't think that's — what I'd say is, you know, do we think we're playing God when, you know, we put a seatbelts or a car seat in the car? Or when we go get chemotherapy when someone is diagnosed with cancer, right? All of civilization is using the latest and greatest science and medicine to improve people's lives.
RADFORD: The price? $2,500 per embryo, a cost the company says isn't currently covered by insurance. It's a process that's been met with controversy.
GABRIEL LÁZARO-MUÑOZ: I would say most people in the bioethics community have concerns about different aspects of this, from ensuring that the patients and the individuals that are pursuing IVF, that they are aware of the limitations of these technologies. [Transition] Another aspect of this, concerns about whether these technologies could lead to or promote eugenics thinking and practices.
SIDDIQUI: I think that it's wrong to stigmatize this type of screening, especially when, you know, these people are — you know, they’re coming because they specifically want to minimize the chance that their child is gonna be affected by these diseases. So I think it's each family's own personal decision about do they want to seek out this information and what they want to go do with that information.
CROWNOVER: I know you’re sleepy.
RADFORD: Information the Crownover family has already used to make their decision.
RADFORD: Where are you in the process now?
CROWNOVER: I think in the IVF community, the way that they say it is that after transfer you're pregnant until proven otherwise.
RADFORD: You're pregnant now?
CROWNOVER: I am pregnant right now.
RADFORD: Congratulations. So is this your first transfer with Orchid?
CROWNOVER: Yeah.
RADFORD: And the embryo that you're carrying, your child, has already been genetically screened?
CROWNOVER: Yes.
RADFORD: How do you feel knowing that?
CROWNOVER: It's actually a huge relief. I think especially where we are in the process, I think that we have a lot of hope, that we're on the right path.
RADFORD: A path to a bigger family —
CROWNOVER: You have a little brother on the way.
RADFORD: — and a healthy future.
[Cuts back to live]
RADFORD: So, interestingly, Orchid is not the only company that's doing this kind of testing. There's actually a company called Genomic Prediction that started in New Jersey in 2017, and it tests for a lot of the same diseases using different technology. And there are even companies testing adults so that they can know the risks of passing on genetic conditions even before having children.
And one thing I thought was so interesting is that they did a poll last year, and two-thirds of Americans think that genetic testing on embryos is good if you're checking for disease —
MELVIN: Yes.
RADFORD: — but one-third said, eyyy, you know, not so much if you're doing it for, you know, cosmetic things.
CARSON DALY: Slippery slope.
[Crosstalk]
DALY: Eye color and sex.
RADFORD: Yeah, right? It does get a little interesting there.
DALY: Incredible technology, though. Amazing.
MELVIN: Morgan, thank you.
GUTHRIE: Thank you, Morgan.
