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Is there a wrong way to have a baby? Stephanie Gray Connors, author of Conceived by Science explains the human rights issues with in vitro fertilization.
Cy Kellet:
Everybody loves a baby, but is IVF a moral way to get one? Stephanie Gray Connors is next. Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. The better we get at reproductive technology, biological technology, the finer the distinctions become that we need to make. And this can really drive people crazy. They can say things like, “You’re just splitting hairs.” Or, “Why are you being so obtuse about this?” That’s not the point, human life is precious in all of its stages. And so when we come up with new ways of creating human life, for example, as we do with in vitro fertilization, we have to ask ourselves, what are the moral implications of this? Is this fair to the person being created? Is it fair to the people who are doing the creating? Is it a good for society? All of those things need to be asked before we just willy-nilly do what we want.
Cy Kellet:
And so we thought we would ask a really fine pro-life speaker, thinker, Stephanie Gray Connors. What do you think about in vitro fertilization? What can you tell us about the moral implications of this technology? And here’s what Stephanie had to say. Stephanie Gray Connors, author of Conceived by Science: Thinking Carefully and Compassionately about Infertility and IVF. Welcome and thanks for being with us.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Thanks for having me on.
Cy Kellet:
Congratulations on the new baby. You thought I was going to say book, but I said, baby.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Giving birth to a book is like giving birth to a baby. They both have their challenges but its sweet relief when it’s done.
Cy Kellet:
Yeah. Right. Eventually, the book will move into the past. The baby’s never going to do that. Well, also congratulations on the book. I know this has been a long time project of yours and we do want to think carefully and compassionately about infertility and IVF. But I want to start and I’m sure you’ll be doing lots and lots of interviews on this, but first of all, I want to start by asking you what kind of question this is. Meaning, is this a question for the Catholic faithful, a religious question? The question of whether or not, transubstantiation or consubstantiation happens in the Eucharist. So is it a religious question for Catholics or does it have a level of interest, a meaning beyond just the Catholic conversation?
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Great. I would say it definitely has an interest in a meaning beyond. On one hand, we could say, really this is a question that pertains to the topic of human rights, because it involves the most vulnerable of our kind, children. Pre-born children, as well as born children. And how we treat them and what they have a right to, and that they not be used. There is a religious element to this debate and topic. And that’s certainly what I dive into very explicitly in my book, I make a lot of different religious references, although I don’t think it needs to be specific to the Catholic faith so much as Christianity in general. You can make a case against IVF, but even without a religious worldview, there are reasons to be concerned about how IVF is practiced.
Cy Kellet:
Okay. So the average person, however, is going to say… Well, first of all, what’s IVF? What is this process that you’re objecting to? And is it any kind of conception that doesn’t just happen in the natural way?
Stephanie Gray Connors:
So in vitro fertilization basically involves taking the sperm and the egg outside of the body, instead of the husband giving his sperm to his wife during an act of sex and her eggs receiving the sperm within her body. It’s really the husband providing a sperm sample to a lab. A lab extracting eggs from a woman and putting those together in a Petri dish so that the resulting child comes into existence, not beneath the mother’s heart, but in a glass dish. And so the problem with it at its heart, although we’re going to dive into this more, is that it’s manufacturing a human being into existence at the hands of a stranger, as opposed to receiving a human from an act of love between spouses and marriage.
Cy Kellet:
Why is this different from other medical interventions though? Because if my child can’t breathe, then I’m perfectly willing to let medical professionals take the child away from me and do all kinds of things that don’t occur in nature to get the child to breathe. Why is this different than that?
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Great question. So to have concerns about IVF is to not be against or concerned about the use of technology in general, the whole reason we use certain aspects of technology such as maybe a breathing machine or a pacemaker if you have heart issues, is that these are things which are addressing a human part and restoring it to its proper function so that it can achieve its proper end. So a heart that isn’t beating, should be beating, so you get a pacemaker. Or if you’re having trouble breathing, then something is going to aid in your breathing, your body is supposed to breathe. The difference with using technology to create life is that you’re no longer restoring a part to its normal function, but you’re actually bringing into existence, a human who didn’t previously exist. And where that becomes problematic is human beings are subjects, not objects.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Objects are things that we can bring into existence, that we can manufacture where we can put parts together. And the way objects work is that we use them because of their functionality. And when they’re no longer useful, we dispose of them or we replace them or we get our money back. Subjects are different than objects. Subjects should not be treated like objects and therefore shouldn’t come into existence the way objects do. So the problem with the technology of IVF is that it’s not correcting an underlying problem and restoring the body to the function it normally should have, the way let’s say a pacemaker would or some breathing device would.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Having said that, there are approaches of technology that would be acceptable morally when it comes to trying to establish a pregnancy. If, for example, a woman’s ovaries are not ovulating, then she can take medicine that would cause her body part, the ovary, to do what it should do, release an egg. If her fallopian tubes are blocked, she can have surgery to unblock the fallopian tube so the sperm, the egg and the embryos can travel through the fallopian tube as designed. So using technology to aid the sexual act in achieving its end of pregnancy is acceptable. But replacing the act of sex entirely so that you manufacture a human being into existence in a way they would normally not come into existence, is overriding nature entirely and not correcting some pathology, but creating a whole new method of manufacturing an individual into existence.
Cy Kellet:
All of what you’ve said so far, is related to the child as a person and it’s a violation of that person to bring that person into existence in a way that’s beneath what that person deserves. But what about the… Did I say that wrong? You look like you want to correct me.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Yeah. I appreciate what you’ve said there, I think that’s good. And the point we want to get across related to what you’ve just said is that because persons are subjects and not objects, we cannot claim a right to another individual. So for example, if I were to say to someone, “Why is slavery wrong?” We all agree it’s wrong. Why is it wrong? Well, the reason that it’s wrong is it treats one group of human beings, those who are enslaved as though they are objects, not subjects. It creates a relationship where you have superiority and inferiority rather than equality and in which the party that is superior, or at least behaving superiorly is acting as though they have a right to the party that is treated in an inferior manner. And so the whole response as people of goodwill to that is to say, “Whoa, that’s wrong.”
Stephanie Gray Connors:
We may not claim a right to another. We may not claim ownership to another. The human person is a gift from God, not someone we can claim a right to. So therefore, if that’s true in that context, that means as much as it is a good and normal desire for someone to have a child, we may not claim a right to a child. In the same way, as much as it is a good and ordered desire to want a spouse, we can’t claim I have a right to marry this man. He may be a gift that has to agree to marry me and me to agree to marry him.
Cy Kellet:
Okay. Fair enough. There are lots of people who take a common sense approach to the single cell human life. And the common sense approach, I do not believe is correct, but it is what the current common sense of things produces. And that is you’re wrong, Stephanie, to talk about that single cell organism as a subject, that we’ll say it’s a potential subject, but it is not in fact a subject.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
So if an individual says that, then the question we want to ask is, well, what does science say about when a subject comes into existence? If people will agree that you and I are subjects and not objects, when biologically did we begin our lives? Was it five years ago? 10 years ago? Was it our birthdays? Was it sometime before our birthdays? And our birthdays really were a change of location. So the question then becomes if not our birthdays, what point prior to birth? Well, if we say eight months, or if we say a month before birth, or we say three months before birth, or six months before birth, what is happening a month or three months or six months prior? Just a maturity, a maturing, a growth in development, an increase in our size. But if we want to go to the precise point in which it’s more than a change of development, but something new coming into existence entirely, that would be nine months before birth, give or take.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
But the point is, what happens nine months before birth is the moment of fertilization or sperm infusion, where prior to that moment, you have human parts, the sperm and the egg that aren’t human beings. But when they come together, the genetic information which distinguishes you from me and each of us from our parents, was determined at that moment. And from that point forward, all that changes is the maturation of the individual. We become more developed. We become more independent. We become larger. But our identity as different from our parents, began biologically scientifically at the moment of sperm infusion and therefore that is when a subject comes into existence. And quite frankly, the IVF industry at least acknowledges that, because an IVF specialist is not satisfied with just a sperm sample or just the harvesting of eggs. The one moment an IVF specialist is trying to achieve in the lab, is the moment of fertilization. It’s not a month prior to birth or six months prior to birth. It’s what happens nine months prior to birth, that moment of sperm infusion. That’s the start of the offspring.
Cy Kellet:
In the book you talk about, I think you use the word commodity and commodification, that is turning what is in fact a subject and a person into a thing or a commodity to be gained. I want to ask you about this because it seems to me that this is a very difficult topic to convince people on. This idea that IVF is wrong, morally wrong, not just a religious violation, but a moral wrong, first and foremost, because it turns a human being into a commodity. And I think there’s an emotional reason for that, I want to run it by you. I think, especially young women are treated as a kind of commodity and they’re, for example, they’re often put on birth control at a very young age by their parents. So they associate their own body, not with the mystery and beauty of their womanhood, but as a kind of problem to be solved, as a kind of commodity to be managed.
Cy Kellet:
And then they have to get good grades so they can go to college because life is a commodity and you want to spend it well, and you want to acquire all the goods that make life worthy. And then one thing to add to that is the good of a child when I’m ready on my schedule. I don’t think that’s accusing this young woman who’s been raised this way of anything. It’s seeing her as a victim of this commodification in which she turns around and says, “Well, I’ll just have the baby made when I’m ready.”
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. Certainly we are living in a world in which we are affected by what’s going on around us and the mentality around us. And the fact that we are obsessed, for example, with control and doing things on our timelines based on achievement or how other people perceive us, has an effect then on some of these other issues. So what I think is really important when discussing this topic is to talk less about what’s motivating or what has motivated someone to do IVF and do they have malicious intentions or do they have good intentions at the end of the day. That has no bearing overall on whether the act of IVF is right or wrong. It can increase or decrease, you could say, someone’s perhaps personal culpability in participation, in an immoral act. But at the end of the day, someone could have good motivations and it’d still be wrong.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Someone could have bad motivations and it’d still be wrong. An example I give in the book is, if someone steals my wallet and their intention is to give the money they find in it away to the poor, someone might say, “Well, they had good intentions with what they did.” Indeed, they did have good intentions, but the good intentions they had to share my money with the poor doesn’t make the action of stealing my wallet from me moral. And so in the same way someone might think, “Look, I desire to have a child. It’s good to have a child. And by the way, if I can plan it around the perfect unraveling of my life as I see fit, that would be ideal. So therefore IVF works best with that.” Maybe they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, but the question is, what is the action itself doing? Is it manufacturing another individual? And also is there, getting to this commodification you’re bringing up, the buying and selling of humans, of our gametes and the treatment of humans as though we are objects.
Cy Kellet:
Yeah. So the child that’s created in this way, however, doesn’t have a story. Do you see what I’m saying? The mother and father, the doctor, everybody’s got a story, but the child doesn’t have a story. There’s no narrative. And it’s very hard for us as human beings to sympathize with a creature that doesn’t have a narrative yet, that we can’t even, in a certain sense, identify as a creature at least using our eyes. We need microscopes to tell us whether it’s there or not. It strikes me that’s one of the things you tried to correct in this book, to tell the stories of people who are the product. No, that’s not right to say the people who are the product, but the people whose existence is owed to the use of this IVF.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. We often, when talking about IVF, think about the people who live with the burden of infertility and the struggles they’ve been through. And those stories need to be heard. I include very intentionally those stories in my book at the very beginning. I begin with those stories of people who have suffered greatly. And yet, as you point out, we should not overlook the stories of people who have come into existence as a result of IVF. And although some people would understandably say if they have a good life, that they’re grateful for their life and realize if IVF didn’t happen, they wouldn’t exist. There are other people, and I cite them in the book, who say, “Look, I can be grateful that I’m alive, but still have concerns about how I came into existence.” And I share some really heartbreaking stories of people who were conceived this way.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
They found out who their biological parents were, because their parents who raised them had enlisted sperm sellers and egg sellers and so forth. And they talk about the emotional distress that being conceived this way has caused them and knowing that their biological father doesn’t want to meet them. And this desperate yearning they have to know their roots and to know their kin and to know their kinship and have people who are their biological relatives, keep them at arms length and say, “No, I don’t want anything to do with you.” So there are aspects to this debate that we need to consider that go beyond responding to the crisis in the moment. Certainly the crisis of infertility demands a response. But what I’m trying to propose is we evaluate which response is the right response. And just because we have an option available to us, doesn’t mean that it’s an ethical option.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
And so an example I give is, you could have four individuals. One conceived on their parents’ honeymoon, that’s blissful. One conceived by a hookup. One conceived through the violence of rape and one conceived through IVF. All four individuals have value. They are unrepeatable, irreplaceable and stamped with God’s image in their being, in their very nature. So they are equal, but we would never say the four ways those individuals came into existence are equal. We can clearly object to the violence, the hookup and say, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if someone came into existence as a result of their parents’ love on their honeymoon?” Where these two people love each other so much, they want to see the other continue on in the world through offspring.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
That’s something that’s good, but coming into existence as a result or two people rather having a hookup or even worse than that, someone committing the act of rape, these are things that are wrong. So if we can object to those methods of someone coming into existence, then why can’t we object to the method of IVF, while at the same time, not criticizing the individual who comes into existence. All four individuals are valuable. All four individuals are good, but not all four ways they came into existence are equal.
Cy Kellet:
Right. And so we can, in a sense, say to them, “You didn’t get what you deserved.”
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. Right. Because we deserve to come into existence as the fruit of love, not violence, lust, or manufactured at the hands of a stranger.
Cy Kellet:
One of the problems with the manufacturing thing is, this is not the core problem, but it spirals out into these other things. For example, what if we get better at manufacturing, then we start tinkering with life in a God-like way? What if we don’t get better at manufacturing, and so what we start to do is select some to live and some to die? Then we have the surrogacy issue where women all around the world are horribly exploited. I have yet to see any millionaire women taking up surrogacy, I may have missed that, but that wasn’t a big story. But you certainly see women who are in abject poverty taking on the role of surrogate. So you have all these other things that all spiral out from this core. And we don’t need, I guess, Stephanie, again correct me if I’m wrong, to point to all of those things in order to say that IVF is wrong, but certainly those wrongs couldn’t occur without us accepting IVF.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. If you look at what we touched on at the beginning, which is that you can come from a religious perspective, which I certainly spent a lot of time on in the book, but you can also come from a nonreligious, more human rights perspective. So when we highlight the fact that IVF involves killing some pre-born children to create other pre-born children, that typically five, 10, even 15 embryos may come into existence, one or two be implanted, five to 10 of them be thrown out or donated to science, which means they’ll be experimented on until they die. Maybe two to four more will be frozen, if they pass a quality test that they’re good enough to be considered something worth freezing. That mistreats the human person.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
The fact that some of these embryos are subjected to genetic testing, where if they are deemed to be less fit, then they aren’t used, that they’re disposed of, in other words, they’re killed. Sometimes when the embryos are inserted in the mother’s body and implanted and the pregnancy begins to progress and testing is done whether through ultrasound or otherwise, and it’s discovered the IVF conceived child has, for example, Down syndrome or some other genetic anomaly, some parents will then pursue abortion, or selective abortion of some, but not all of the children.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
The point is, even if someone is not religious, these are examples that we should use to cause them to say, “Whoa, that doesn’t sit right. It doesn’t sit right with me.” Same as you say, with poor women. You can search the internet for documentaries of poor women in India who leave their families and live in these homes for surrogates, where they’re lined up on beds as though they are animals and not humans. And they basically gestate some rich foreigner’s child for months, then they are typically given a C-section. So then that’s going to leave surgical complications to them down the road if they want to have their own children. I saw one documentary where the baby was taken through C-section and immediately whisked out of the room to the waiting parents who were the adoptive slash maybe sperm and egg providing parents, but not the woman who gestated the child.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
This is going to take a toll on these poor women, but why do they do it? Well, because they have the financial incentive to want to help their other kids. So those are reasons to be concerned. But then there’s a more fundamental reason that as I point out, even if we tried to narrow the parameters and say, “Let’s just make one or two embryos. Let’s just use the sperm and the egg of a husband and wife. Let’s not subject the embryo to genetic testing.” The problem even with that, is that it divides as opposed to, creates a communion of persons. The man typically masturbates. So he is giving his sperm away to a stranger rather than his wife. The woman’s eggs should receive sperm, as I said earlier, in her body. But with IVF, she can go on her own and have the eggs retrieved.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Then the child comes into existence, not when the parents are there, but at the hands of a stranger in a Petri dish. Sex is entirely unnecessary for a child to come into existence with IVF. Every party involved doesn’t have to be with the other party. So there’s total division and separation. Whereas we were meant to come into existence imaging the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We were meant to be a communion of persons. The husband and wife through sex have to come together for sex to be the method with which a child comes into existence. And then once a child comes into existence that way, the child has to be in the mother’s body for that to happen. And once again, you have a communion of persons, you have a bringing together, a uniting of people and a relationship rather than a fracturing, dividing and separating.
Cy Kellet:
And that fracturing, dividing it, and separating has consequences that roll on down. We have a human nature. God gave us this nature. Our nature as sexual creatures is beautiful nature. And we turn it into something else at great peril. There really are costs to people for this.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
And this is where it’s important. In the world of economics and business, people talk about thinking beyond stage one. You might come up with an idea and think this is amazing. But think beyond the initial response as to what potential outcomes could come after that. And then beyond that, and then beyond that, and then you start to see whether your idea is good or bad. And so the same is true with IVF. Someone might just be thinking that present moment, I want a baby, I want offspring. This is good. What are the consequences when we do this? And then what will be beyond that, and that? How is this going to affect a child who comes to know they were conceived that way? And I cite some examples, as we mentioned in the book, this creating of human life. What does that do when we realize, if I have a power to do this, then do I have a duty to genetically select a, quote unquote, genetically better child, once that power is in my hands.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
And even if you think you don’t have that, once this ability to do that exists, will some people pursue that path. And then on and on it goes. And what about for the couple who wants to have a child, but maybe one of the spouses is permanently infertile, or maybe the man has absolutely no sperm count. So some people might say, “Well, in that case, maybe you could get a sperm donor, not a seller. Don’t compensate them.” And then someone else says, “But why not compensate them, if you’re going to allow for a third party to provide their sperm, why not give them compensation?” And then on and on it goes. So someone at the very outset may not expect these other effects to happen. But once you open the door to manufacturing a human person, as opposed to receiving the other as gift from God, not from our own hands, it changes everything.
Cy Kellet:
So having had this experience of writing this book and talking to all these folks, what do you say to the couple who really cannot conceive, for whatever reason they cannot conceive? What’s the answer, from your experience of couples who have gone through this, couples who have not gone through this? What’s the answer? What do you say to that couple?
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. The first thing I would say is, I’m terribly sorry for that type of suffering and I don’t pretend to know it. I know suffering, but not that specific type of suffering. I know want. One of the examples I use in my book, is my own experience of longing to be married. All the way back into my twenties, I had journals to Jesus begging him for a husband. And my twenties ended, and my thirties came and 35 came and 36 came and 37 came. I had a biblical wait of 40 years before I met and married my husband. And in all that time, I remember looking at couples who were happily married at church, and my heart would hurt when I would see them thinking, “God, why don’t I get that?”
Stephanie Gray Connors:
And so for the couple who maybe has been blessed with the gift of a spouse, but not the gift of a child, I can understand that when they go to church, instead of looking longingly at the happily married couple, they look longingly at the happy family and the couple with the baby and their heart breaks every time they see that. So I think the first thing to say is to acknowledge that is a pain, that is a cross, that is a suffering. And someone may not know that specific suffering, but we can acknowledge that that is something to grieve. The next thing is to know that you’re not alone. And that’s why in the book, I explicitly sought out friends who gave me permission to share their stories of that being their suffering. So, although it wasn’t mine, it was theirs. And some of my friends managed to conceive by pursuing what I talk about in my book called restorative reproductive medicine, where they had interventions for things like PCOS or endometriosis or blocked fallopian tubes. And that actually resulted in them being able to conceive naturally through sexual intimacy.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
But then I share the stories because I wanted to be fully upfront that not everyone has the happily ever after, as they perceive it is. I share the stories of people who never conceived, but have found fulfillment and joy and purpose in their life without biological children. And for some that means pursuing spiritual motherhood and fatherhood as my friend Bethany does. I really feature her story at the end of my book, which touched me the most, of all the interviews that I did. And then I talk about friends of mine who pursued adoption. Some of them pursued fostering, knowing that they would only have those children for a short season. So there are things that we can do. But the point is that we, at the end of the day, don’t have full control.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
So we have to say, “Okay, what is within the realm of my control?” If I have actual known physiological problems, sure, let’s go get meds. Let’s go get surgeons try to fix it. Whether that works in the end is out of our control. If you want to pursue adoption, open the door to that, start the home interviews and so forth. But it may or may not happen. All we can do is do our best and then surrender it to God’s mighty power in hand and see what he wants to unfold in our life.
Cy Kellet:
It presents itself as a tremendous temptation though, this technological power that we have. In so many ways, technology presents us with new temptations, but this one’s certainly there. I imagine that there are also couples in which one part of the pair is quite enthusiastic to do IVF, the other doesn’t want to. And then do I owe this to my spouse? Those kinds of questions come up.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. Where a couple is not united, there is going to be great stress over this particular matter. In fact, a dear friend of mine, who’s my daughter’s godfather, Father Blake Britton. He’s an author, you can find him online. And he was in just promoting my book, he was sharing a story from his own pastoral ministry as a priest, where a couple came to him that were faced with infertility and they wanted to pursue IVF. And he pointed out to them all the problems with going down that path. And very sadly, they pursued that path and seven of their children were frozen. And then they came back to him, even though they hadn’t listened to his advice. And the husband then shared, the wife didn’t want to go back for the other children that were in the freezer, even though initially when they began the process, they had been united that they wanted several children and they would go back for all of them. And so now he’s in a situation, where as the man, he cannot just hate his own children and his wife doesn’t want to go back for them.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
So you have an issue that is so weighty and so grave in which a couple isn’t united, and now it doesn’t just affect them. It actually affects real living children who happen to be in a suspended state and prevented from maturing and growing. But they’re not dead because if they were dead, no one would ever go back for a frozen embryo. The very fact that people go back for some frozen embryos is proof that they are alive. So then it becomes a question of, “Oh my goodness, what are we doing to the youngest of our kind in this very vulnerable state?”
Cy Kellet:
Stephanie Gray Connors is our guest. Conceived by Science: Thinking Carefully and Compassionately about Infertility and IVF, is her new book. Congratulations, Stephanie, and thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us about a subject we just need to talk more about. At least from our experience here at Catholic Answers, is there are many people who are quite misinformed on this, and I think you do a great service to those and some who are informed who maybe just need a little help to think through it a little bit more. So thank you and congratulations on the book.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Sure. Do we have time for me to add just one more brief thing?
Cy Kellet:
We sure do. For you? Are you kidding me? Go ahead.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
Well, when you appreciate me addressing this topic, one thing I do address in the book that I want to talk about briefly, is that a lot of people think if they can’t get pregnant or they can’t sustain a pregnancy because they have miscarriages, that IVF is the way to help them. And even from my own experience, I’ve learned there are simple things that you can become aware of that can help you sustain a pregnancy. So my husband and I were blessed to get pregnant very early in our marriage, which was a huge blessing, because I was 40.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
But very sadly we miscarried our first child, Laelae. When I got pregnant again, several friends said to me, “Have you had your progesterone checked because if you have low levels, that could cause a miscarriage.” And I thought, “Oh, my hormone levels are fine.” My doctor thought they were fine. But so many friends brought this up to me that I pursued a physician to test my blood for progesterone and found out that my levels on the second pregnancy were dropping, which meant we could have miscarried our delightful, adorable six and a half month old baby, Violet. And because friends said to me, “Get your progesterone checked.” And I did that, we discovered it was low.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
And the simple fix was, it was every week to two weeks to every month, I was going and getting blood work. And my doctor was adjusting how much progesterone he administered based on what the blood test said. And I had to take it all the way until the 23rd week of pregnancy just to keep my baby alive in me. And so that’s one example, there’s many, but that’s one example where if people only knew about something like that, which I talk about in the book, that could cause them to say, “Hey, maybe if I do this, I could actually either achieve or sustain a pregnancy.” And IVF isn’t even something they consider it all. So again, the more we can share what we know and what our personal experience is, the more helpful it can be for others in a similar situation.
Cy Kellet:
Stephanie, thanks very much. We never fail to learn from you when we speak to you about all these pro-life issues. We’re very grateful for your ministry. Thanks, Stephanie.
Stephanie Gray Connors:
You’re welcome.
Cy Kellet:
Without question, infertility is a terrible cross from many couples to bear. There’s lots of new technology, new medicine that can help people overcome that infertility and bear a child. But in many cases, the medicine, the science, it’s not going to be able to do that. And so people are tempted to resort to in vitro fertilization. It is in fact a temptation in vitro fertilization. A baby’s so beautiful, everybody loves a baby. We want a baby and so we decide really not to consider all of the moral implications for society, for individuals, for families and for the baby that will come into the world. So I highly recommend Stephanie’s book. It’s called Conceived by Science. That’s Stephanie Gray Connors, Conceived by Science and all the other work that Stephanie does.
Cy Kellet:
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