Audio only:
In this episode, Trent responds to conservatives who support or have confusing messages about IVF in light of the Alabama State Supreme Court’s ruling on the matter.
Transcript:
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court declared that human embryos used in IVF labs were legal persons, which caused several IVF clinics in the state to pause their services since IVF involves the willful killing of some of these human beings. But several conservatives who have opposed abortion, at least in the past, have said in response that they object to the court’s ruling and they see nothing wrong with IVF and they think it should be legal. And in today’s episode, I’m going to show you why they’re wrong. But to do that, I need to give you some background on IVF and also on what happened in the state of Alabama. So IVF or in vitro fertilization is a process where a woman’s eggs are fertilized by a man’s sperm but not inside her body. Instead, this happens in a laboratory Petri dish. Some of the newly created human embryos, which are just young human beings, are then placed back into the woman’s body where they continue to develop and are born nine months later.
Embryos that are not placed in the woman’s body are either destroyed or placed indefinitely in cryogenic preservation. In 2020, a patient at the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Alabama wandered into a storage area and accessed some of the frozen embryos. The patient burnt their hand from the extreme cold used to preserve the embryos and dropped them, causing some of them to die. Four parents of the embryos later sued the clinic for the wrongful death of these children. This would be no different than a group of parents suing a daycare for being so lax with safety standards that a stranger could walk in and accidentally kill their newborns. This month, the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled that human embryos qualify as children under the state’s wrongful death statutes. While many media outlets quoted one of the concurring opinions in the ruling that mentioned God, the court’s main opinion doesn’t talk about God.
Instead, it says, “All parties to these cases, like all members of this court, agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends a death. The parties further agree that an unborn child usually qualifies as a human life, human being, or person, as those words are used in ordinary conversation and in the text of Alabama’s wrongful death statutes.” That is true as everyone acknowledges throughout all stages of an unborn child’s development regardless of viability. When it comes to abortion, the unborn child is usually treated as an unwanted child or not even as a child at all. However, in vitro fertilization, it’s different. The parents usually treat these human embryos as their own children. That means if their children die because of negligence, the parents want this to be treated as the wrongful death of a child and not merely as the wrongful destruction of personal property.
But you can’t treat these embryos as human beings only when it’s convenient and then ignore their humanity when you do something else like purposefully destroy them. For example, imagine a couple of the frozen embryos and the father has the embryos destroyed. Could the mother sue for the wrongful death of her own children? What makes the most sense is to treat these human embryos as human beings because that’s what they are. Even IVF customers and IVF clinics agree they’re human beings, but if these human embryos are human beings, how should the law treat them? Let’s get into what some conservatives who are pro IVF have said about this case. They basically come in two types, IVF is great or IVF is bad, at least in some ways, but we can reform it. Donald Trump represents the first option.
I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious little beautiful baby. I support it. And today, I’m calling on the Alabama legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in Alabama, and I’m sure they’re going to do that.
And the National Republican Senatorial Committee has advised Senate candidates to, “Clearly and concisely reject efforts by the government to restrict IVF. It is imperative that our candidates align with the public’s overwhelming support for IVF and fertility treatments.” And here’s Jack Posobiec, a Catholic commenter who’s going to speak at an event sponsored by Catholics for Catholics who probably represents the second reform IVF group. He wrote on X, “Embrace adoption for IVF embryos. Don’t end IVF. This is the pro-life answer.” He then said this.
I think there’s an interesting question here that we could bring up possibly for the debate. And Charlie, this might be something that we could brainstorm over because if the issue is the discarding of the embryos that the pro-life community… And I personally believe rightfully so that we should talk about this because we do believe that it’s human life as pro-lifers, then the real question is, shouldn’t we try to find perhaps a productive use for this? And I’m not talking about scientific experimentation, but what about a donation bank or something of this if there are extra embryos that are made and then not used.
So there’s a lot of issues that need to be teased out here. But before we do that, don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to our channel and support us at trendhornpodcast.com. All right, so what are these issues? Well, one thing is that we have to separate the different moral arguments against IVF from one another. The main argument most pro-life conservative support is that IVF is wrong because it involves destroying human embryos. Although someone like Posobiec might say, “We can get around that by just adopting all the abandoned embryos.” But there are other reasons to morally oppose IVF. The most basic reason would be that children have a right to come into existence inside their mother’s body and be protected from coming into existence in a laboratory, where they might be shipped off to their mother’s womb or a stranger’s womb or to cold storage indefinitely. The moral argument often gets obscured by pointing to children who came from IVF and assuming that their intrinsic goodness validates the method that brought them into existence.
But children who came into existence through acts of adultery, fornication, rape, prostitution, or via surrogacy, those children’s lives are intrinsically good. But that does not mean the way they came into the world is good or that that way should be defended. Other practical arguments against IVF include its connection to exploitative practices like surrogacy or commercial egg donation. The documentary exploitation, which is linked below exposes how young college age women who are often struggling financially are coerced by offers of tens of thousands of dollars to donate their eggs, even at great risk to themselves. Or they might be coerced into carrying these IVO embryos to term as surrogate mothers. Pope Francis has recently called for a global ban on surrogacy, saying, “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
Another practical argument against IVF is that there is no objective way to stop its use at just infertile married couples. The US once tried to make contraceptives only legal for married couples, but the right of single people to have what married people can access was later upheld in the 1972 Supreme Court case of Eisenstadt v. Baird. So there’s nothing to keep a man from ordering a sperm donor, an egg donor, have embryos created from that in IVF, use a surrogate womb to gestate the child, and then have the child delivered to him the consumer. Here’s one story about John, an unmarried self-identified gay man in Atlanta who saved up hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire a child through the IVF process. And another story of an unmarried man in Britain who hoped to use IVF to become a single father after this became legal in 2019.
So whether it’s someone like Trump who thinks IVF is tremendous, or someone like Posobiec who thinks it can be reformed, I would tell them that IVF is intrinsically evil. It is evil by its very nature because it perverts the maternal process of creating a child. And it’s also evil because it’s associated with a whole host of moral hazards that are bad for society like gamut donation and surrogacy. Now let me try to steelman Posobiec’s position. When he says don’t end IVF, I hope as a Catholic, he means it would not be prudent to try and ban IVF right now. Because we should end IVF. We should do that even if it would take a very long time by changing public opinion because in virtual fertilization is evil, it harms children, and it harms society. But perhaps what PO soc means is just don’t end IVF right now in this election cycle.
And from a strategy perspective, this can be acceptable. We as Catholics are allowed to recognize that it isn’t always politically feasible to achieve the goods that we want or to ban the evils that need to be banned. And this may be the case that’s not politically feasible to ban in feature fertilization right now due to its high level of popular support. In politics, you have to pick your battles. And given the difficulty pro-lifers have had with banning abortion at the ballot box since Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers have to be realistic about what they can accomplish with their finite resources. In fact, the Alabama Attorney General has even said he has no desire to prosecute IVF clinics. And the Alabama legislature and governor want to pass a bill that would exclude IVF embryos from being considered legal persons.
In the gospel of life. Pope St. John Paul II said the following of pro-abortion laws, which could also apply to laws dealing with IVF, “When it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well-known could illicitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality.” So Posobiec’s steelman position might be this, don’t outlaw IVF right now since you’re going to lose. Instead, prohibit the intentional destruction of embryos created through the IVF process, but keep IVF legal. However, IVF clinics would still shut down under those regulations because they all basically end up destroying human embryos that are considered as one poster on X called them low quality, which often refers to embryos with genetic conditions like down syndrome. Another part of IVFs dehumanizing process.
And as I noted, it would be hard to get a ban like this passed in the first place. But you don’t have to propose banning the destruction of IVF embryos. Instead, you can just ask people this question, parents who have children through IVF see these embryos as their babies, so shouldn’t those parents be allowed to treat those embryos like babies? This approach would allow parents to sue IVF clinics for wrongful death when embryos are negligently killed or tie up these clinics in family court proceedings where the embryos have to be treated like children in things like divorce cases. Instead of a controversial frontal assault on IVF, we could promote a solution most people in society can be on board with that ends up undermining IVF anyways and leads to clinics voluntarily shutting down.
This kind of approach is also called a Fabian strategy. It’s named after Quintus Fabius Maximus. He used small skirmishes to slowly wear down the much stronger Carthaginian army led by Hannibal in the second Punic war instead of a frontal assault. Hannibal, by the way, is the guy who crossed the Alps with elephants. So you win by slow attrition rather than by a full-frontal assault. A similar approach was used to end the slave trade in England in the 19th century. As dramatized in the 2006 film, Amazing Grace, abolitionists who oppose the slave trade passed a law that simply targeted the use of neutral flags during the 1806 war with France. And this had the unintended effect of making the slave trade unfeasible for most British slave trading companies. By the way, it’s a great film that I definitely recommend you go see. Finally, some people say human embryos aren’t persons because they’re just a few cells. But I remind them that humans are not constructed with cells like a building is constructed with bricks, where it would make sense to say a few bricks is not a building.
Instead, human beings develop like a photograph and we are present at the very beginning. When you take a Polaroid picture, everything is present the moment the picture is taken. It just takes time to recognize that once the image develops. And the same is true of human embryos. Everything that makes this child a human being is present from fertilization. It just takes time to develop so that we can recognize it. So when it comes to the issue of in vitro fertilization, we should heed Jesus’ advice in Matthew 10:16: “Be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.”
We should acknowledge the goodness of children who come into existence from IVF while also showing people the badness of everything associated with IVF, like killing unborn children, exploiting women, and allowing children to essentially be purchased by anyone through a commercial process. And then ask if this is a price we are willing to pay for fertility treatment. We should then be shrewd in discussing how the law should treat IVF. And as pro-lifers, we can offer a consistent solution that only focuses on helping parents who use IVF to treat their children like children, that would indirectly cripple the IVF industry. If you’d like to learn more about this subject, check out my interview with Stephanie Gray Connors, who’s written an entire book on IVF called Conceived by Science. And don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.