they don't think about it

Bethel McGrew, on the recent Interesting Times interview with Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui:

The dystopian horror of a future where “defective” embryos are targeted for destruction should be obvious, though to many it is evidently not. Siddiqui retweeted someone saying he can’t understand the outrage over intentional embryo sorting, when the very process of IVF (as most commonly practiced) guarantees not all embryos once created can be implanted. If people are unbothered by the fact that embryos in general are discarded all the time, whence the squeamishness at the proposal to focus on some embryos in particular? He does have a point. Perhaps the simple answer is that people are unbothered about the inevitable consequence of IVF precisely to the extent that they don’t think about it. Bringing specific embryos into focus, with their specific little genomes and the specific sorts of illnesses they might suffer with, if they were ever born to grow and die, makes this impossible. It names the truth that was always lurking, always waiting to be named.