Is in vitro fertilization a moral or ethical practice, and should I, as a pro-life Christian, support it? Perhaps you've never asked, or been asked, this question before, but it's important for us, as principled individuals, to have a clear and well-defined philosophy on any Life issue.
For the purposes of this post, IVF is defined as the process by which a mother and father's egg and sperm are combined to create a new life outside the womb, and then that new life is either implanted in the womb or frozen in a kind of stasis until the parents decide what should be done with it.
This practice is wrong. It is not ethically consistent with either a pro-life or a Christian Life ethic, and we need to start thinking about it more critically.
Before going further, I want to fully acknowledge that this is a sensitive and painful topic. I've heard many families' heartbreaking stories about infertility, and I know that the decision to attempt IVF is not made lightly by anyone. Feel free to disagree with me on this, but regardless of the difficulty, I think my claim is valid. Here's why:
On a basic level, IVF is both selfish and wasteful. Selfish because it creates tiny humans who are then subject to the will of others, the question of whether they will have a chance to grow answered not by natural means, but by the parents' choice. Wasteful because even in the most hopeful of circumstances, it is generally accepted and even expected that not all babies created through IVF will survive to be born, or even be implanted in their mother's womb. This has created a consumerist attitude toward IVF babies, where their futures are determined either by convenience or desperation.
A mother who experiences one successful pregnancy may decide she doesn't desire to repeat the process with her leftover embryos. She may die, or develop health problems that make it unwise for her to become pregnant, before having the chance to bear all her children. On the other hand, a mother may choose to implant the last of her IVF children only because the process hasn't been successful yet. The result is either that the remaining babies are never prioritized for a chance at life, or the one successful pregnancy leaves behind it a trail of miscarried siblings.
Those miscarried babies are precious lives lost, every one a tragedy. And those extra embryos, the ones never implanted, are often left behind in "storage," never to be implanted unless a new family comes to adopt them from their biological parents.
Creating a human and then essentially putting them into cryo-sleep until it suits you to give them a chance at growing (possibly never) is unethical, no matter one's reasoning. IVF treats human lives as products. There is no dignity in it for the person created in the process.
And the industry itself displays an ironic callousness toward unborn lives, regardless of how the parents feel about their embryos. Use of IVF is always accompanied by the basic assumption that not all embryos created this way will survive--and if those children do miraculously beat the odds, it actually complicates the situation further. Parents are warned against implanting too many of their children at a time, lest those babies actually grow and the pregnancy become threatening to the mother's health.
In this case, many OBGYNs will advise their IVF patients that "selective reduction"--ending the life of one or more of the growing embryos--is a desirable way to prevent too many of them from surviving until a dangerous point. So not only are babies selectively chosen for life during the implantation process, they are also often selectively marked for destruction if the process is too successful.
Even if we leave all these extenuating circumstances behind, even if you acknowledge the humanity of your artificially created children, and desire them all to survive and be born, does that justify the selfish act of suspending them in limbo? Does it justify creating a buffer of multiple babies out of the statistically-supported fear that less than half of them actually will survive?
There is, perhaps, somewhat of a gray area here in which one might make a moral case for creating and implanting only one embryo at a time, simulating the circumstances of most natural pregnancies. But even then the question becomes: where does it end? A single embryo created through IVF has only a 47% chance of surviving a pregnancy. That's about twice the usual risk to the embryo as in a natural pregnancy, which is why so many parents choose--and many doctors advise-- to create and implant multiple babies at a time.
Every child, from zygote to newborn and beyond, is a unique and beautiful creation. IVF cheapens that creation by causing society to value them less, and view them as products rather than people. Children created through IVF are of the same worth as every other child created in the image of God. They are not potential children, they are children. Children created to become essentially the unwitting subjects of a lab experiment. The question posed by this experiment: will this baby live or die?
Human lives are not ours to control and manipulate. The humanity of IVF babies demands dignity. A pro-life person knows this. A Christian knows this.
So we cannot be casual about IVF anymore. We can't be casual about the commodification of life. We should be champions of selflessness and patient endurance of trials, even the heartbreaking trial of infertility. We should be champions of adoption--including the adoption of the children who have spent their entire lives frozen in test tubes, waiting for the chance to be born.
If you are struggling with infertility, my heart hurts for you in your struggle. God's heart hurts with you. But suffering has never justified injustice. Together we should fight to create a world in which the value of every human life is fully acknowledged.
