IVF: They Shoot Embryos, Don't They?

pjmedia.com

IVF is bad public policy and will not reverse declining birth rates. In fact, it will make them worse as more and more women forgo marrying and having children in the prime of fertility in their teens and twenties. Too many will assume they can win the fertility game in the last two minutes of play. Since IVF has a very high failure rate, this is a foolish bet. It is also expensive and fundamentally immoral. Designer babies are not the solution.

As a famous UK female OB/GYN used to tell people, “My advice to young couples is to catch the first bus. There might not be a second. And, if all else fails, adopt. You’d be surprised how many people get pregnant after adopting.”

For those struggling to give birth ethically, there are many natural pro-life technologies available that respect the dignity of the human person and claim a higher success rate than IVF. They are also a lot cheaper. Here is a directory of clinics in America and Europe, and the Gianna Center is a nationally recognized resource in the United States.

And here is a national doctor's directory. A sound approach to body ecology should not be ignored. Yes, infertility is a tragedy and causes sadness for many, but it needs to be met with a moral response.

It is not surprising to see people on the right joining people on the left, such as The New Republic magazine, asking Trump to embrace IVF. The magazine optimistically reports on the president's executive order, "A White House official told NOTUS Tuesday that this order was the Trump administration’s 'first step' toward realizing that promise."

This is the pull of emotion. People want a child; therefore, they have a right to a child. Thus, the government should ensure this right. This is, of course, materialism, utilitarianism, and consumerism. These are subsets of practical atheism, which is not the denial of God but simply living as if He did not exist. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

People, often out of ignorance, act on the belief that they, not God, are the creator of human life. So they go out and pay someone to create a baby. People are human persons, not marketplace commodities. They are not things to be manufactured.

One of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s early pre-Hitler motos was “To breed a race of thoroughbreds.” The funny thing is that if a horse is conceived by artificial insemination, it is no longer deemed a thoroughbred and is banned from racing. It is odd that there are higher standards for animals than for humans.

IVF is not simply creating a single test tube baby. In reality, only about 7% or fewer of fertilized eggs go on to be born. The rest are either aborted or frozen as popsicle kids. There are over a million frozen embryos in the United States at this time. The older you are, the more they implant on each attempt. If more than one takes, they abort the rest.

And some doctors simply use their own sperm. Consider the Indiana quack who had 94 kids. It is America's version of The Boys From Brazil: Indiana. Children are meant to be the natural fruit of the love between a mother and a father, not the frozen fruit of a Frankenstein lab experiment.

Pope Francis called consumerism "a virus which attacks the faith." If we reject sound principles in the question of life, it will change our individual character, our national character, and even put our eternity at risk. Playing God is the ultimate form of idolatry.

Stick to principles. Either human life begins at conception or it doesn't. That is the scientific and natural law principle upon which being pro-life begins and ends. Sound religious teaching acknowledges that as also something God has revealed.

Imagine a lineup of eight or 10 children, some healthy, some sickly, some beautiful, some ugly, some male, some female. You choose the most beautiful and healthy one and shoot the rest. This is what IVF does, except the doctor or technician does the shooting.