| A group of well-heeled, 30-something women sat down to dinner last spring at a table set with pregnancy-friendly mocktails and orchids, ready to hear a talk about how to optimize their offspring. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of an embryo-screening start-up and the guest of honor at the backyard event in Austin, offered a grand vision of custom-built algorithms and genome analysis that would help eradicate illness and disease. Shivon Zilis, a tech executive who had just given birth to Elon Musk’s then-secret 13th child, and other guests donned pastel-colored baseball hats Siddiqui handed out. They were emblazoned with a single word: BABIES. Siddiqui is a rising star in the realm of fertility start-ups backed by tech investors. Her company, San Francisco-based Orchid Health, screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses, letting prospective parents plan their families with far more information about their progeny than ever before. For now, her approach has been taken up mostly in her moneyed social circle. But one day, maybe not far off, it could change the way many babies are made everywhere — posing new moral and political questions as reproduction could increasingly become an outcome not of sex but of genetic preselection and data-mining. “For something as consequential as your child, I don’t think people want to roll the dice,” the 30-year-old entrepreneur told The Post. Click here to read the whole story. | 
