I tell her that when I was pregnant with my second son in the States, I had an ultrasound that showed he might have Trisomy 18, also known as Edwards’ syndrome, a chromosomal condition that affects the heart and lungs and is so severe that most children do not live beyond the first two weeks of life and fewer than 10 per cent beyond the first year. I was called in for a meeting at my local hospital with a doctor who asked me if, given the risks, I wanted to continue with the pregnancy. They offered me counselling and made it sound almost a certainty that he would be born with the condition (even though there was a much higher chance that he would be born without it).
Twenty-one years have passed since then. Obviously, if I had terminated the pregnancy, I wouldn’t have my healthy, kind, beautiful 6ft 7in son Joe. Or if I’d had the choice of several embryos, I would be unlikely to choose one with an elevated risk of such a condition.
“But you’d have a different son,” Siddiqui says cheerfully, “whom you’d also love.”
She has the same answer to the suggestion that her mother might not have been born if her grandmother had been given a choice of embryos and could see that her mother had a heightened risk of blindness. “I’d have a different mother.” Clearly, Siddiqui herself would not exist either, but she thinks I am far too stuck on people who wouldn’t have been born. “People are always thinking about [one] person who wouldn’t exist. You immediately say, ‘I wouldn’t have my son.’ But what about all these future people who wouldn’t exist if you don’t use this technology.”
Perhaps doubting the efficacy of her positivity, she continues, “Think about this: my grandma had my mum whenshe was 16. Now women go to college and choose when they get married. You killed all the babies that you [could have] had at 16 and 17. And 18 and 19. All those eggs… There are trillions of children and children’s children who didn’t happen because we as a society have said we value women having autonomy over who and when they marry, when they have kids… I don’t think anyone in society would say that women should all be forced to have kids at 16.”