It’s time to face the ugly truth about in vitro fertilization

In a recent decision, the Supreme Court of Alabama shocked the world by stating that babies in infertility clinics that are frozen, kept in suspended animation, and often forgotten, are human beings with a right to life. Three couples who had stored their frozen embryos in an Alabama IVF (in-vitro fertilization) clinic sued it for wrongful death after a client had opened a freezer and dropped the embryos, thus causing their demise in 2020.

A circuit court judge had originally thrown out the case, agreeing with the clinic that the “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act” did not apply in this case, since frozen embryos are considered property and not persons. The couples appealed and the Alabama Supreme Court of Justice decided in their favor in an 8 to 1 decision, with Judge Jay Mitchell explaining that the “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act” applied “to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”

These frozen babies, of which there are about 1 million in the US alone, should never have been put into that position; but now that they are there, they need to be treated with as much respect as any of us. Their precarious existence is finally reaching the public eye.

Yet everyone is running for the hills—even those who should know better, even those who claim to be pro-life politicians, including Donald Trump or Kari Lake. They are afraid of condemning something that has become the new normal but would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

Since the first live birth of test-tube baby Louise Brown in 1978, IVF has not just been used by those suffering from the terrible burden of infertility, but also by those who don’t have time for children as yet, or haven’t found the right partner or don’t feel quite ready but want the option of having children later. What they often don’t realize is that when they have their embryos frozen (though some only have their eggs or sperm stored), they already have children—albeit children who are in a kind of limbo, waiting to be implanted or killed at some later point.

I understand the tremendous pain behind this. I have experienced it myself. My husband and I suffered from infertility for nine years before our daughter was born. And then we went through it again; after a miscarriage, we experienced many years of secondary infertility, continuing to hope beyond hope. Yes, we are blessed to have one child and there’s a world of difference between having one rather than having none. But we know this journey from the inside and can understand the tremendous pull of being told that IVF will fix your problems and give you the long-desired child that will mend your broken heart.

People suffering from infertility are quickly being proposed IVF as their only and most successful option, when treatments like the Creighton fertility awareness method and Napro-Technology are much more promising.

What they don’t realize is the nasty underbelly of the procedure. And whatever couples facing infertility feel, does not change the fact that a great injustice is being done to them and their children, whether they are aware of it or not, and whether they are ready to face this or not. In IVF, the children are conceived in a petri-dish in an aseptic and impersonal laboratory, when the gametes of their parents are brought together. Then technicians decide over their life and death: those looking less healthy are discarded while those that seem fine are used for now or frozen for later. Should any individual be empowered to adopt worryingly eugenicist attitudes to determine who is worthy of life and who isn’t?

What precedes this hasn’t been pleasant for the potential parents either. The woman has had to take strong hormones to make her hyperovulate so as to produce many eggs at the same time that will then be used for in-vitro. What this does to her psychologically, when she is already vulnerable, can only be imagined. The testimonies of people having gone through this show that it is no walk in the park. Then the man is supposed to masturbate at the infertility-clinic, often using porn to get him “into the mood.” If one of the spouses is sterile, then the semen or eggs are harvested from a third party, making this more of a commodification than a co-creation for everyone involved. Apart from the ethical considerations, this is clearly no loving context for a child to be conceived.

Once a few children (or blastocytes, as they are called at this point in their development, but I’m referring to “children” throughout this article rather than using the medical terms to underline their human dignity; a woman will always say that she’s expecting a baby and not a zygote, fetus etc.) are inserted into the woman, one needs to wait and see if they implant and survive. Often, they don’t and the ensuing miscarriage only adds to the couple’s excruciating pain. Or more children than expected have survived and the couple decides to eliminate some through “selective reduction” abortions.

This shows just how utilitarian this procedure is: children are created, discarded, aborted, with no regard for their rights. Whatever this is, this is not responsible, loving parenthood. Nor is it prolife, for prolife means respecting the dignity of people and not creating life at any cost.

This becomes visible too in the number of deaths among the unborn that one is willing to accept in the process. About 12 million babies have been born through IVF throughout the world since 1978. If you count a 10% chance of survival per child (and not per cycle), then a staggering 110 million of children can be estimated to have died in the process.

As Cardinal William Levada wrote pertinently in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s instruction Dignitas Personae: “One is struck by the fact that, in any other area of medicine, ordinary professional ethics and the healthcare authorities themselves would never allow a medical procedure which involved such a high number of failures and fatalities. In fact, techniques of in vitro fertilization are accepted based on the presupposition that the individual embryo is not deserving of full respect in the presence of the competing desire for offspring which must be satisfied.” Yet, one of the inventors of IVF, Dr. Robert Edwards, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 2010.

To be quite clear: the Catholic Church is not against science. On the contrary! It is in favor of it, but wants to make sure that every procedure upholds human dignity. Most people see the good of some bioethical restrictions on science. Most people would agree that cloning human beings, creating a monstrous mix of human and animal, or killing people to extract their organs would be grave violations of human rights. Everyone has their line in the sand. But like frogs who don’t feel that they are being boiled if the temperature is raised gradually, we are no longer sensitive to what we are doing to our unborn children.

What the Alabama decision has brought to the surface is the scandalized reaction of disbelief that the frozen, unborn children in clinics should have any rights at all. In reality, we should be appalled by the practice itself.

Donor-conceived Lynne Spencer states: “If my life is for other people’s purposes, and not my own, then what is the purpose of my life?” Her existential experience reveals the terrible consequences of this utilitarian approach. If one is not loved for one’s own sake, one loses one’s sense of meaning; one feels lost. Of course, parents of IVF- conceived children can and often are wonderful parents who love their children deeply. But this doesn’t do away with the fact that they have inflicted an injustice on their children by the way they were brought into existence and this can leave deep scars.

The prenatal psychologist Karlton Terry describes a case in which a little girl conceived by IVF told her parents that she dreamt she had siblings—three sisters and four brothers—who were freezing in a cave, were crying, and needed to be saved. The parents confirmed that seven embryos remained frozen. He also mentions the story of a one-year-old IVF twin who consistently looked up to her left while standing, having a very sad expression of intense longing on her face. He held various objects to the spot she was looking at, but only when he put two naked baby dolls, did she react strongly, tremble, cry, and run to her parents. Already before this experiment, the parents thought that she was looking for her frozen siblings, which the experiment seemed to confirm.

Of course, children conceived through IVF are no less precious than those coming into existence the natural way. It is precisely because of the infinite value of every human being that no human being should be subjected to IVF. No human being should be treated as a mere object, which they are during the different stages of IVF. It is because they are so precious that they deserve to be conceived, born and raised in a context of love. Indeed, children are meant to be the fruit of their parents’ love, coming into being in an act of mutual-self-gift.

Sadly, reality often falls short of this, but we should try to, at least, reject all interventions that are intrinsically turned against the human person. It can be hard to see the evil of IVF, if one has living children that were conceived through the technology, and even harder if one owes one’s own existence to it.

But everyone who exists has infinite value and is infinitely precious to God and should be so to all other human beings. Analogously, some people have to deal with the fact that their parents had an unhappy marriage, that they really shouldn’t have been married and become parents together; and yet here they are and just as worthy of love as if their parents had been happy together. Others are unwanted and some have even been conceived in rape. Though they should have been wanted and rape should never happen, once they are there, they should be wanted and loved.

Hannah Arendt famously wrote that dark times are those moments where evil causes no outrage and is not openly discussed. Though the crimes committed are neither secret nor mysterious, they are not easy to see and are not noticed. For evil is “covered up” by “double-talk” and “speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet.” The culture of death has done this for a long time. The reversal of Roe versus Wade has uncovered some of this, shining the light of truth on the reality of abortion and the horrid abuse of the unborn.

Now we’re getting a further glimpse into the true nature of anti-human practices like IVF. But those who should applaud this are shying away from this revelation for fear of bad press and of losing votes. Instead of running to the hills for cover behind this big fat lie of IVF being beneficial, they should face the truth that alone can make us free.

Catholic World Report