Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), its many violations of human dignity, and its horrifying implications.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. What is IVF, in vitro, fertilization all about? And why should everyone but particularly Christians and pro-lifers be against it, be even horrified by it? Now for context, recently the Southern Baptist Convention put out what appeared to be an anti IVF statement. More on that in a second. And I was asked over on Patreon, this is a subtle way of telling you, you should also join Patreon. That what do we need to know about this, right? And so originally I was asked for a book recommendation. I decided just to make this episode kind of exploring what is the deal with IVF because it’s something many pro-lifers are okay with or confused by. And so again, for context, there was what appeared to be an IVF statement or denunciation by the Southern Baptist Convention. Recently. In fact, Baptist Press, the official press of the Southern Baptist Convention put out an article saying, no, no, it’s not really against IVF.
And it said, media reports on the IVF resolution have led Southern Baptist to underscore that they did not condemn the procedure. So unless you think Southern Baptists are solidly on board the pro-life bandwagon, they want to let you know they’re not. Instead, they urged thoughtful, cautious use of it. So here you have the Southern Baptist Convention, very much the conservative wing of modern Protestantism announcing that it’s fine with IVF used appropriately. And in fact, if you read the IVF resolution that generated so many headlines, you’ll find that they reaffirm the unconditional value and write to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and they resolve to only use reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the IVF process. In other words, putting that in plain language, you can use IVF as long as you don’t make too many embryos in the factory, in the laboratory because if you make too many as we’re going to see you have to kill them or do something with them.
Now that is a very strange place to draw the moral line, but nevertheless, I wanted to highlight that this was there. I also wanted to point out the Baptist press again, the official publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, even put out something called our IVF journey, a first person account of a woman saying that she and her husband are pro-life and pro IVF and making an argument for why this is so. Those are the people allegedly anti IVF making one of the weakest kind of arguments in terms of where they’re ending up. Now, I would suggest that this points to a much broader problem. Plenty of pro-lifers are fine with IVF have even used IVF and are unaware of the moral problems that are generated by IVF, which are bigger than I hear anybody talking about. So for that reason, I would suggest unmasking is needed.
Now, unmasking might sound overdramatic, it might sound like, oh, come on, give me a break. But I would suggest that’s quite literally what needs to happen here, that there is language that’s intended to obscure reality and we need to pull back the mask as it were, so we can see plainly what’s going on. And then here I’m indebted to George Orwell in his famous essay politics and English language from 1946. He lamented even then that political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible that if you were to just say, here’s what I want to do, people would be horrified. Thus he says, we’ve largely got a political language that consists of euphemism question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. So think about something like abortion, something like IVF, and think about how much people refuse to speak clearly and plainly on the topic.
So you’ll have things like a women’s reproductive freedom. That’s literally as we’re going to see scientifically not what’s happening. The process of reproduction is done by the time abortion’s even a question or it’ll just be the word abortion itself, which just means that the pregnancy stops. That could be a miscarriage or it could be someone intentionally killing the unborn child. The language is intentionally imprecise because to say what you’re doing is that much worse, people wouldn’t support these things. In orwell’s language, defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out of the countryside, the cattle and machine gun, the hu set on fire with incendiary bullets and all of this gets called ification, right? We use these kind of words, this kind of language when we don’t want to speak plainly about the things being described because they’re not pretty to look at head on.
And so he warns that the inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism, and he puts it really beautifully. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuddle fish spurting out ink. Now that’s not to say long words are always bad or that Latin phrases or scientific ones are bad of themselves, but it does mean that we should watch out when they’re being used in a way that obscures rather than reveals what’s being described. Orwell lays out six rules or six points that he suggests that you follow to write clearly, and the fifth one is most relevant. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. So I’m going to try to follow that and lay out as clearly as I can what’s going on in IVF and why might this be a problem. So let’s start here. Part one, what happens in IVF? There’s several things happening scientifically here, so let’s go through one by one First. Fertility drugs are given to the woman to help her body to produce multiple mature eggs.
CLIP:
The first step is taking fertility medications in the form of shots to help your ovaries produce several mature eggs. The goal is to make 10 to 15 eggs. It takes about two weeks until your eggs are ready for retrieval,
Joe:
So make sure we got that. You’re intentionally producing 10 to 15 hopefully eggs that will then be retrieved. That then leads to step two egg retrieval. They’re removed from your body. Step three, they’re then fertilized in the lab. Now there’s an important detail here I want to make sure you don’t miss.
CLIP:
Now comes the part everyone’s most familiar with, combining sperm with your best eggs.
Joe:
So the phrase I want to focus on there is your best eggs, and there’s two things you should notice there. Number one, what makes a particular egg best? One obvious answer is that it’s more likely to survive, but there are other considerations as we’re going to see related to what genetic qualities you want your child to have, which invite all sorts of eugenic playground sort of questions. Oh look, this egg has the genes for such and such a trait. This one doesn’t. But also you’ll notice it says your best eggs plural. That’s because typically you are not producing simply one child but through fertilization. Now, we’ll get into why I’m using the language of child here in a moment, but notice that you’re not just producing one embryo, you are producing multiple ones and you’re deciding which eggs to turn into embryos on the basis of some factor by which you consider them the best ones.
Now, there’s several other questions that aren’t explored here but are going to be really relevant as well. Number one, like whose sperm and whose egg this are going to be? Maybe it seems obvious to you. Well, obviously it’s the husband and wife. Well, frequently, it’s actually not frequently, and we’re going to get into all of the issues involved here. You have donors, you have sperm donors, you have egg donors, and you also have surrogates. We’ll get into surrogates in the next step. In fact, as we play around with these things, the guardian announced a little over a year ago that the first UK baby with DNA from three people was born after a new IVF procedure that if you’re going to be combining sperm and egg, then maybe you can play around with the genetics a little more.
One question we should also be asking right here, and this is remember step three, the embryo is not yet in the womb of the mother or the gestational host as they sometimes refer to IVF surrogates. And the question we should have is the embryo at this point, a living human being. Now I’ve already laid my cards on the table by referring to it as a child earlier. So what do we make of this? And I word this question fairly precisely because it makes it very easy to answer because a human being a distinct concept. You have human cells, you have skin cells for instance, and then you have a human organism, a being and an organism is different than the cells that make up the organism. Now, some organisms are very small, they’re called for instance, single cell organisms, but a cell in an organism aren’t the same thing.
An organism is the unit of life, so to speak. What I mean by that is a single celled organism is a living being, whereas the cells of a living organism that has a lot of cells, those are not living beings. Your skin cells aren’t separate beings that are just hanging onto you because we’re buds. No, they’re part of your body. They might survive for a while outside as living tissue, but they’re not living organisms. I hope that distinction is really clear. It might be very basic to some of you, but it’s really important for questions like abortion and the morality of how we treat the embryos produced in laboratories and IVF. So here I would turn to the biology of reproduction, a science book by Giuseppe Fusco and Alessandra Minnelli, and you can turn to any number of other biology and reproduction books that talk about the same thing, but they put it fairly clearly.
They say sexual reproduction and they’re looking not only at humans, but humans and any creatures that reproduce sexually is a form of reproduction that generates new individuals with the genetic makeup resulting from the association and or the reassortment of genetic material of different origins. Like I said, fairly clearly. All that means is you are genetically not your mom or your dad. In the case of asexual reproduction where you’ve got a cell that breaks off and it multiplies itself and then it breaks in half, all of it is genetically of one thing. So you have a hard time saying if a single celled organism splits in two, well who’s the parent and who’s the child there? It’s tricky to answer that question. In the case of sexual reproduction, it’s not tricky to answer that question. You can look at the genes and say, okay, this is the child and these are the two parents.
Or in the weird case of that British child, here are the three parents anyway, and minelli go on to say in the most canonical form of sexual reproduction, there are weird cases like with plants and things. The new genome is formed by the union of partial copies of the genomes of two parents through fertilization in plainer language, sperm and egg from mom and dad, dad and mom, I guess keep that parallel come together usually in the womb of the mother here in a laboratory and form a new human organism. So I want to suggest this should put the abortion debate completely to rest. Now you might say, what does this have to do with abortion? We’re going to see it has a lot to do with abortion later on, but what should be really clear is there’s a living human organism here that is growing in the laboratory and is clearly not mom and clearly not dad, but like you and me is genetically descended from both of them.
That is abundantly clear. Scientists do not have the ability to create life from non-living matter. They can take living cells and in this case gametes, which are like haplos, which they’ve got half of a chromosome and they can combine that, but they can’t just take a non-living thing and turn it into a living thing. So the obvious question of when does human life begin, we have an answer right here in the laboratory because otherwise it raises all sorts of other questions. So remember I mentioned that, and we’re going to look at this more directly later. You have things like IVF surrogacy, so you might put Mr and Mrs. Smith’s sperm and egg together, but because Mrs. Smith may past childbearing years in terms of carrying a child in pregnancy, they hire a younger woman to carry the baby in her womb. Well, when this baby is growing in her womb, whose baby is it?
Well, biologically Mr. And Mrs. Smith’s, it’s quite clearly, but from the abortion standpoint for decades, they made the argument that the unborn child in the womb was just part of the mother’s body. Now that is obviously not true when you’re looking at the embryo growing in a lab, and that’s obviously not true when an embryo that is not biologically your child is growing in your womb as an IVF surrogate, but nevertheless, that lie persists and people still believe it. So I just call it out to say we can unmask more than just the horrors of IVF, but also the lies about abortion here because quite clearly undeniably unambiguously you have a living organism here in the lab and this organism is a being meaning it’s not just gametes, it’s not just cells, it’s actually growing on its own and it’s a human being. It’s not an animal, it’s not a plant. There’s no question what kind of being that it is. So is there a living human being in the lab? Well, quite clearly the answer to that is yes. Let’s go back to this video to talk more about the growth of this because you’ll find that to be even clearer as we go.
CLIP:
The fertilized egg then divides cells until it reaches the blast assist stage five to six days after fertilization.
Joe:
So as we just heard, it’s growing and it’s becoming a blais. Now you’re going to get to step four implantation.
CLIP:
Multiple embryos are then transferred back into your uterus in the hopes that at least one will implant itself and to begin to develop
Joe:
Two things. One, this raises of course is that step four that we have the question of who’s womb because this is where it actually becomes relevant because you already have the creation of a living human being before. Now this living human being may end up in someone else’s body, so that’s going to be one of the ethical questions we have to explore. But two, you might notice again that use of the plural that they’re intentionally implanting multiple fertilized embryos. In other words, they’re implanting multiple unborn human beings into your womb hoping that at least one will take, which leads to part two. What happens now, let’s say it works. In fact, let’s say it works so much that you have multiple children who survive implantation and they don’t die as the doctors are trying to implant them, and as IVF technology gets better and better, this becomes more and more likely.
What do you do now? Well, this is the first of many of the ethical questions that this raises with what’s called selective reduction. Now, selective reduction like ification is a very euphemistic way of saying we’re going to kill some people. In this case, it’s choosing which of your children you want to kill, and then the reasons why create something called eugenic abortions. So this is a loaded kind of question, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists committee on ethics describe it like this. They say selective reduction is somewhat different than multi-feed pregnancy reduction in multi-feed pregnancy reduction. The fetuses to be reduced are chosen based on technical considerations such as which is most accessible to intervention In selective reduction, fetuses are chosen based on health status. So in other words, do you just choose the child that it’s easiest to get to or do you target one or more of them on the basis of health?
Now, what they’re describing is not actually true. Those are not the only two reasons that they might choose to kill some of the unborn children and not others as they go on to say in the same document. For some women, a multi fatal pregnancy reduction to a single 10, meaning you don’t want to have a bunch of kids, you just want to have one maybe appropriate or desired option for medical reasons or non-medical reasons such as financial, social, or emotional concerns, you just, it’s a lot of money to raise kids. I know I’ve got three, it’d be a lot cheaper if I just killed two of them. I’m not going to do that. Don’t worry kids if you’re watching this, I promise. But the point is that’s the argument being made. Hey, look, you’ve got three living children because biologically you do. Wouldn’t it be cheaper if you just had one?
They then point out, this is again the ethics committee that is governing this sort of thing. They say the use of sex alone is a consideration in determining which fetus to reduce poses, ethical challenges that are beyond the scope of this committee opinion and are discussed by others elsewhere. That is literally your job. You’re the committee on ethics. The question of whether you can just abort children because they’re girls rather than boys is a moral question and an ethical one that absolutely has to be asked. Particularly when you look at cultures that put a very high premium on having a son and look down on having a daughter. This notion of what’s sometimes called gender side, right? You’re going to die because you are a baby girl. That is not a health reason. That is not the accessibility. You just happen to be closer. So if you decide to do this, this raises the obvious question, how do you decide which of your children to kill Harvard Medical School may?
So I guess two months ago now, released three months ago now almost a thing on what’s called polygenic screening. Polygenic meaning it’s looking at several different genes. So polygenic screening is what’s used to determine what are the likely traits of your child going to be because if you’re going to kill them, don’t at least want to know, well, what are they going to be like? You can choose a favorite and let the other ones die. I realize this is horrific, I’m just describing, but when polled, three quarters of Americans actually support the use of this screening for looking at things like diabetes, heart disease, and depression before an embryo is implanted. Now, there’s going to be two reasons this is relevant. One is you’ve got the child fertilized in a Petri dish somewhere and you want to know, should I take the trouble of implanting the baby in my womb so that they can be born?
Or do we just leave them in this very limited state of human development? Well, what are they going to be like? What’s their future earning potential? What is their health risk going to be? Those are the kind of questions you can look at and ask based on the genes, and so for things like health reasons, three quarters of Americans were comfortable with it for other reasons such as intelligence heights and skin color, they were far less likely to support it. Let’s break down the numbers a little bit in terms of what people were okay with using polygenic screening. For instance, 77% were fine with using polygenic screening to look for certain physical health conditions and 72% for certain psychiatric conditions. We can break that down even more in terms of people who strongly approved or approved using polygenic screening, things like cancer and heart disease, very popular, but you also find a majority of people who approve or strongly approve of screening for things as simple as A DHD, autism, bipolarity diabetes, OCD, high blood pressure and obesity.
Now, the obesity one’s going to be kind of funny and I’ll explain why because it’s far less popular to screen for behavioral traits or physical traits. So you can screen for risk of obesity, but you can’t screen for BMI body mass index. Now, if you know anything about what obesity is, it’s A BMI of 30 or above. So if you say we’re going to screen to find out if your child is going to be fat, people are like, oh, that’s horrible. But if you say, we’re going to screen to find out if your child is at risk of obesity, people are like, oh, good. This is medical. My point is there’s no clearly principled reason why people are okay with using some of these and not others. What’s really striking is people are very uncomfortable, although it still comes out to closer to a 50 50 split than you might imagine with screening for things like intelligence, can you choose to let some children die and others live because some of the children are smarter than others or just because some of them have higher blood pressure than others or lower blood pressure probably.
But things, I mean, the fact is right now polygenic screening is trying to create a situation in which you can determine which children to bring to birth based on their intelligence, neuroticism, body mass index, life satisfaction, conscientiousness, height, educational attainment, agreeableness, baldness, openness to experience extroversion and skin color. Now, I will say there are enormous questions about how likely it is that these predictions actually work, how well these genetic screens are actually screening for the things they claim to be, how well you can actually design the sort of designer baby of the future. But the point is that they’re trying and a lot of people are okay with it. In fact, where people were not okay with it, it was in no small part because they were worried that they were overselling things. 92% of people expressed a concern about it leading to false expectations for the child.
We prepackaged the genius package and your child should be an amazing virtuo, whatever they do, and then the kid’s just a normal kid. That’s going to lead to a lot of disappointed parents and a lot of pressure on a lot of poor children. Additionally, about half were very or extremely concerned about negative outcomes for individuals or society. Thank you, because whether people realize it or not is a nightmare scenario. So first, as I say, Sasha Gusev, who I believe is a geneticist, has warned that we’re still more at the realm of science fiction than science fact that there’s not a lot to go on to suggest they can actually deliver on these promises, but second, it does create a sort of genetic arms race and we’ll get into that. So when people were worried about this, one of the things they were most worried about was the false expectations, but the second thing they were worried about was eugenics, and rightly so, and we’ll talk about this because some people I know don’t think eugenics is something we need to be worried about.
In fact, you can see that in the numbers, a sizable minority of Americans are comfortable with eugenics or at least don’t seem to be worried about it. 82% said they would be at least slightly interested in using polygenic embryonic screening if they were already undergoing IVF, and here’s the crazy thing, 30% said they would consider undergoing IVF to gain access to polygenic embryo screening. Here’s what I think is happening there with that 30%, if you know everyone around you is using IVF to produce stronger, smarter, taller, more agreeable, more charming babies, and you’re still doing it the old fashioned way with sex, you might be saying, well, look, our kids are going to be average, but average a generation ago, back when it was like an IQ of a hundred and a height of five 10, at least I hope that’s what the height average is for men in a generation, those scores could be dramatically raised, and so now your kid who was average is way behind.
So this is what I mean by genetic arms race that they’re going to compete in the world of tomorrow with these scientifically adapted babies. Now, the first layer is just using something like polygenic testing to screen out babies with negative traits or unremarkable traits to select for the most genetically promising, but as we’ve already seen with the UK example, they can already use things like gene therapy and the like to try to remove negative traits and enhance positive ones, so there’s no reason they couldn’t try to turn the dial up to 11 on some of these skills in the genes. This is all right there, which raises the question we should be asking. Well, is this a beautiful, wonderful new future or is this a nightmare scenario as I keep suggesting that it is, why should we care about eugenics here? I want to recommend some of the Thinking Fund in CS Lewis’s book, the Abolition of Man, this is I think one of his sort of slept on, has essay that doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and a lot of people are under impressed with it, but I think he does a very good job with it.
He begins by talking about how it was very, this is mid 20th century, there’s all this talk about man’s conquest of nature. He suggests we need to think more deeply about this. It’s not quite so simple. He looks at three popular examples, airplane, the wireless like the radio and the contraceptive, but he says, in peace time, civilized man can use any of these, but he’s not actually individually exercising his power over nature. When you use a smartphone or when you go on an airplane or when you use a contraceptive, it’s not your scientific genius. You’re not flying through the air by your own power. You’re a passenger.
There’s always this scenario like, oh, what if you time traveled back and you had an iPhone? Could you conquer the world? And it’s like, no. You don’t actually know how your iPhone works once it doesn’t have a tower to connect to and there’s nowhere to recharge it. You’re 30 minutes away from just being the town idiot. That’s kind of the idea here, that you don’t actually control these things. You’re a user of them. CS Lewis was, you’re a patient of them and if I pay you to carry me, I’m not myself a strong man. If I pay you to fly me around an airplane, I don’t have the gift of flight. I don’t even have the gift of aviation. And so what we call man’s power is in reality, a power possessed by some men, which they may or may not allow other men to profit by.
Get the idea like the people who own the airlines, the people who own the media of communication, the people who own the contraceptives. Those are the people who are deciding who gets to use their products and who doesn’t, and this creates a second set of relationship as well. The reason he mentions contraceptives is because all the future generations are sort of the patient of that product in a negative sense that you decide if everyone decided to constantly use a hundred percent effective contraceptive, you could stop the next generation from existing at all. So it is a patient in the negative sense by contraceptive simply, the future generations are denied existence by contraceptive used as a means of selective breeding. They are without consenting made to be what one generation for its own reasons may choose to prefer. Let’s pause here and explain what that means.
The United States government was secretly sterilizing Puerto Rican women into I believe, the 1970s for pretty racist reasons, right? And you had four sterilization and contraceptives for people, for instance in low income areas. So the kind of prejudices and biases of one generation were being imposed on the next generation such that some people don’t exist today because of the prejudices and biases of the people in power, not even the entire generation, just the people in power in that generation. I hope that makes it clear. Again, all this is to say what we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercise by some men over other men with nature as its instrument that when you become hooked on your phone, you are both a user of the product, but you now have a new power relationship with the companies that control all of your data with the platforms that allow you to speak.
I mean, right now, if YouTube decides I’ve done something wrong, my livelihood in a seriously can be put into jeopardy. Again, join Patreon, but you get the idea right that this creates the power of some men over other nature. Now, Lewis is not saying anarchy. Now he’s not saying we need to a communist utopia to get rid of this. He’s remarking on this so that we won’t buy into the easy lie that things are just getting onward and upward better and better. It doesn’t mean any of these things are automatically inherently bad. I don’t actually know what Lewis’s views on contraceptive were. He certainly wasn’t against the wireless or the airplane. He gave one of his most famous set of talks what became mere Christianity over the radio, but he was aware that the idea that this was democratizing power is just a fiction. He goes on to say, remember this relationship between the generation contracepting the next generation.
There’s this generational tension where one generation can be at odds with the next. He says, each generation exercises power over its successors in each and so far as it modifies the environment that reath to it and rebels against tradition resists and limits the power of its predecessors. Now, this is, again, he’s putting this I think fairly neutrally. When you educate your children, you’re trying to shape the world of tomorrow, you’re trying to make the world a better place for after you’re gone. You are trying to mold the next generation. This is not an inherently bad thing. Likewise, when you break away from the way your parents did things, you’re resisting the way they tried to do that to you, or you may uphold those traditions and continue happily to go along with the way you were formed and shaped. This is a generational tension that’s worth acknowledging.
Why does this matter? Because when we get to eugenics, we can imagine a world in which we get really good at the stuff we claim to be good at now, but aren’t really good at, which is polygenic screening and all of these things, and with eugenics and scientific education, we can design the next generation to our liking. And CS Lewis says, if we ever get to that point, all men who live after that will become the patients of that power. They’re weaker, not stronger. They may have wonderful machines in their hands, but we have preordained how they’re to use them and if as is almost certain the age which has cetain maximum power over posterity over the future is also the age most emancipated from tradition. So we don’t care about how prior generations did it because we’re obsessed with the idea of technology and progress.
It would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. You get the idea that we are talking about the creation of a class of men who are both liberated from in the sense of rejecting the traditions of their elders and are genetically designing future generations to be whatever they want them to be. They’re at war with the past and the future, but we can talk about this as all humanity or something, but it’s not as Lewis notes within what he calls this master generation. It’s itself an infinitesimal minority of the species. That kind of power won’t be wielded by everybody, but by an even smaller minority and so man’s conquest of nature, if this is to come true means a rule of a few hundreds of men over billions of billions of people or of men.
I know it’s long, but I wanted to offer that as I think a helpful thing to consider that we shouldn’t just blindly say, oh yeah, use polygenic screening to create whatever kind of thing. Get rid of all diseases, and if you want to make them smarter or stronger, maybe more extroverted, maybe more agreeable, maybe more docile, maybe more whatever, what power are we giving to people? Who is making these decisions? What are the ethical guidelines controlling any of this? These questions are just not being seriously analyzed and as we’re going to see a lot of this right now is the absolute wild west where things are happening without any clear rules that any clear oversight or guidance, and you have things like the ethics committees just kicking the can and saying that’s somebody else’s problem, who’s who is deciding what you can and can’t genetically engineer the next generation of humans to be like, that’s not a power I hold, right?
I’m not genetically engineering people, but there are people who are hard at work doing this and we’re saying, oh yeah, that’ll be nice. I’d like to know if my kids at higher risk at Alzheimer’s without any thought of what this concretely means. Now, to make all this even worse in real life practical terms, what this means is there are plenty of false positives or to put it in another way, someone being at heightened risk of Alzheimer’s. It’s still at a really, really low risk of Alzheimer’s, but that child, that embryo is not going to be implanted because it’s got a 0.08% risk rather than a 0.05% risk. That’s the kind of difference we’re talking about, and this is making life or death kind of determinations. Which leads to the question, what about the other unborn children? Because as we’ve seen, the problem here is, well, one of the problems here is there are more embryos than the moms want to carry.
They don’t want to have all of these children. They don’t want, if you remember the kind of famous Octo mom situation, people lambasted this woman for bringing eight of her children to birth that were produced in an IVF lab because she’d taken fertility treatments, those kinds of things, or least I’m 99% sure that’s the backstory to how that happened. But if any case people have this strong urge to not have a bunch of children, understandably, I’m not suggesting that is a smart idea to go out and have eight kids at once. It’s clearly a tremendous difficulty to undertake that, but if you don’t do that and you’ve got these unborn children in a lab, what happens there? Well, NBC actually talked about this in an article called Nation’s Fertility Clinic Struggle with a growing number of abandoned embryos. Now, this is from 2019 and in it Mary Flu, the author talks about how storage fees for frozen embryos typically run from $500 to a thousand dollars a year and can go up even from there and that we don’t know.
Remember, it’s the Wild West. We don’t know precisely how many frozen embryos have been abandoned in the more than 500 fertility clinics in the United States because clinics are not required by the CDC in prevention. Well, centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, the nation’s primary organization dedicated to assisted reproductive technologies to report those numbers, they aren’t even asking. They don’t want to know how many frozen embryos have been abandoned. These are not eggs, right? These are not just eggs or sperm that are in a test tube somewhere. These are unborn human beings that are capable of growing and are being frozen to prevent cellular growth or death. Experts say hundreds of thousands of embryos have been cast aside if not more. In fact, in a paper coauthored in the Scientific journal, nature Biotechnology by Dr. Arthur Kaplan, one of the nation’s leading bioethicists and professor at NYU’s medical School, he said there are at least 90,000 embryos, but other studies indicate the number is much higher.
Oh, excuse me, 90,000 frozen embryos considered abandoned in the us, not 90,000 total, 90,000 abandoned in the us, but that number could be higher possibly in the millions. So should pro-lifers care about this. Obviously, you’ve got millions of children being abandoned and left to die and you get a weak statement at best on this from the Southern Baptist followed by a quick, don’t worry, but you don’t really mean it. Here’s a story about how amazing IVF is and how compatible it is with being pro-life. This is abhor, this is outrageous, and it’s much more widespread than people realize. Millions of children are dying these horribly dehumanizing sort of death by just being abandoned by mom and dad and left to die because guess what? At some point, that’s what’s going to happen when they’re just abandoned by their parents. Patrizio En Sweet who both are involved in this said the issue of abandoned embryos is sometimes discussed at global fertility conferences.
Now, if memory serve, both of them actually do IVF treatments. They’re not like anti iiv IVF advocates to my knowledge. There was no one interviewed in this article who was not on board with all of this, but sweet calls this the elephant in the room that we don’t know what to do with all these abandoned embryos, and Alan said, the clinics are fertilizing too many eggs. Eventually they interview one of the women involved in this and she had gone through this process and had fertilized more embryos than she was willing to bring to birth, and it then leads to this issue where she’s not sure what to do with the rest and the IVF clinic gives her four choices. She can continue to pay storage fees, she can donate them to another woman. She can give the clinic permission to destroy them or she can give them to the lab for research purposes.
That’s ultimately what she decides to do. I want to stress here is a living human being who is being turned over to a science lab to test on for research purposes. All of that I think should be undeniable and should raise some serious alarm bells. Now, so far I’ve only really focused on one issue when you’ve produced more children through the IVF process and you mean to bring to birth, I haven’t even looked at things like what does this do to the relationship of sex and marriage and what does this do to relationship of sex and birth? What does this do to any of those kind of questions? I understand people who aren’t Catholic or who don’t have a deeply rooted sense of the nature of things may not even understand why is it a problem to totally divorce sex from reproduction or to separate reproduction from mom and dad in any coherent sense of this term?
Why is it a problem to create children with three parents or create a situation where children don’t know who their parents are on purpose? I understand some of those things may be hard for some people to understand why they’re a problem. I hope they’re not, but I get that I’m focusing on just particular issues here. So in part one, kind of overproduction part two, there’s this whole realm of things with IVF donors and surrogates because what happens when you’re using IVF, not because you and your spouse are going to use sperm and egg, but because you’re going to use somebody else’s sperm or somebody else’s egg or somebody else’s womb rather than when it’s no longer just the two of you when it’s now a third person as well. First thing I’d say is I was alarmed by the language around surrogacy because of how obviously dehumanizing it is.
For instance, Yale Medicine’s article on surrogacy begins by talking about surrogate mothers, but pretty quickly goes on to talk about these women as gestational carriers, and it goes on to say though they are paid for their services, most gestational surrogates have altruistic motivations and enjoy being pregnant. One of the women promoting this says, now it just rankles me. It bothers me. It makes my skin crawl. You have women who are in need of money and are selling their bodies. I mean, let’s be very clear about what’s happening here. They’re selling their bodies reproductively so that wealthier people who can’t have kids can use them as surrogates. For some reason, the people who like to dress up like they’re in Handmaid’s Tale are not protesting this, even though this is as far as I can tell, basically the scenario described as dystopian in a Handmaid’s Tale, but fine, neither here nor there.
We’ll just pretend this is a totally normal way to talk about people who need money. They’re gestational carriers because they’re pregnant with your child, but they have to kind of use this language because the alternative is to acknowledge that you’ve complicated the question of motherhood in some really disturbing sort of ways. What about the children though? What do they have to say? How do the children of IVF feel about it and particularly the children of IVF in which donors have been used? Sometimes egg donors, but typically sperm donors? Well, Harvard Center for Bioethics actually took the trouble to ask a number of them and what they found in the survey that 91% of them had been conceived through anonymous sperm donation and 2.9% through anonymous egg donation. So overwhelmingly when we’re talking about donors, we’re talking about sperm donation 80% of the time, a little over 80% of the time.
They didn’t know about this, so that’s good to know. It might be suggestive that there’s a reason they’re not telling them you’re not actually your father’s biological child, and it should raise some other questions. I mean, I’m sort of surprised to see so many Protestant Christians comfortable with this. Some other guy got your wife pregnant because you couldn’t get her pregnant, and you’re just like, oh, yeah, this is totally normal. This is natural. This is the way Christian visions of marriage and family look. Are you kidding me? This is bizarre and it’s bizarre for the kids when they learn about this. So a lot of them learn about it between the ages of 19 and 49. Most of the time that’s when they learn about it. About a quarter were still children and about 20% were over age of 50. Now, I imagine all of that’s going to change as the technology gets older.
In any case, 85%, almost 85% reported a shift in their sense of self when they discovered the true nature of their conception, and about half of them sought psychological help in order to cope. Now, think about that. Think about the number of people who are severely psychologically harmed by something and don’t go seek psychological help. So if you’ve got 50% who are seeking it, or roughly 50% who are seeking it, how many of them were actually psychologically traumatized or at least seriously damaged by this seemingly a lot higher? Nearly 74% said they often or very often think about the nature of their conception, which is gross. You should not be in a situation where you’re often or nearly often thinking about the nature of your conception. 62.2% felt that the exchange of money for donor gametes was wrong. That’s a really remarkable stat. These are children produced through this still saying, it’s gross.
It’s gross that my mom or my dad had me because of money. Some guy got paid to provide the sperm, and that’s my biological father. There’s something gross and dehumanizing about that. This starts to look a great deal like prostitution and finding out that you had a parent hired to have you understandably creates a sense that this isn’t right. This is not how children were meant to be brought into the world, and you don’t need to be a particular religion to understand that this is a basic thing. And so 62.2% of the people who are produced in this way are saying this is gross and wrong, and they’re right. It’s the study goes on to say that individuals experience significant distress upon learning about the nature of their conception. That strikes me maybe a little bit of an understatement, and the study authors say, our finding suggests a great thought, aren’t you?
Go into not IVFA decision to test one’s own DNA. In other words, the problem is ancestry.com or 23 and me told you the truth that you’re not your parents’ biological child. It’s like, that’s not the problem. The problem is these people are producing children for money by giving sperm samples and egg donations and IVF surrogate, and that’s actually just the tip of the iceberg. The people who feel weird and gross about this, it could get a lot worse introducing the IVF incest problem. Yeah, because one of the problems is when you’ve got sperm donors, they can have a lot of children. So for instance, Dylan Stone Miller, who was a college student at Georgia State University in 2011 decided to make some extra money on the side by donating sperm, and he now knows he’s the biological father of at least 97 children. But because there’s only about 40% of recipients parents who report the birth back to the sperm bank, that means there’s probably another 60% that he doesn’t know about, which would mean that he probably has about 250 children and about 150 different families, and by no means is this a one-off sort of problem.
Des Moines Register article talks about an Iowa man who discovers that his mother’s doctor was his biological father. In fact, I recently spoke to a couple where the wife shared her own story of finding this out, the same sort of thing she did genetic testing, realized she was her mother’s biological daughter. She was not her father’s biological daughter, and what’s more, she was not the biological daughter of the man that her mother thought was going to be the biological sperm donor. Instead, he didn’t show up, and so the doctor used his own sperm, which sounds like a shocking sort of abuse, but it turns out physicians in 20 different states have been accused of doing this, resulting in hundreds of children. In one case, Dr. Donald Klein of Indianapolis fathered 48 children. Eventually, he had to surrender his medical license. Quincy Forer treated patients well with 90 siren more than 20, and you’ll be probably alarmed to know no doctor in the US has lost his license for this behavior, and at least one Kim mc worries who admitted to using his own sperm on a patient in Texas.
He’s still practicing. I have to imagine that there’s probably more practicing that are not announcing to the world that they use their own sperm because of how grossly unethical that appears to be and is. But notice that it’s basically legal in the sense that nobody’s suffering any real consequences for this behavior. What’s the incest dimension? You say? Well, when you have hundreds of people sometimes in a local area who are genetically related and don’t realize they’re related, that can lead to situations like this One mentioned in a CNN article from earlier this year where a woman has the horror of realizing that she’s been sleeping with her half brother, and this is the first time we’ve confirmed a case of accidental incest. You can imagine why people don’t normally volunteer to be part of articles where they have a picture of them taken at the top announcing that they’ve slept with their brother, but this is a growing risk and probably a growing problem.
This is part of what’s sometimes called fertility fraud, but CNN realized that fertility fraud doesn’t really have any consequence. Most states, including Connecticut’s have no law against it. Victims of this form of deception where the doctor’s using his own sperm have long odds in getting any recourse. The doctors who are accused of it have an enormous advantage in court, meaning they rarely face consequences and in some cases have continued practicing. So that’s the state of the field. Let’s add one more just IVF related horror to the story. What about when you have a surrogate womb where you’ve hired a young woman to carry your and your spouse’s biological child, and the question of abortion comes up? Remember when I talked about how this is going to be important for the issue of abortion? This is one other related issue. Pro-choice advocates have been saying her body, her choice, and the question now become, well, whose body?
The biological mother? It’s her egg, but it’s not in her body. It’s in some other woman’s body. You can’t scientifically say that this child implanted in her body is part of her body. You can be a surrogate with a child of a totally different ethnicity than you who’s biologically unrelated to you. That’s no problem. So I’m to believe that this is biologically your child. Well, of course it’s not. So the issue is it’s not the father’s body. It’s not the biological mother’s body. It’s not the surrogate mother’s body. It’s a separate living human being, but the law doesn’t want to recognize that, and so we find ourselves in this really horrifying situation. Katie O’Reilly in the Atlantic talks about this back in 2016 in an article called When Parents and Surrogates Disagree on Abortion. Now, remember again, there’s often a huge economic inequality between the biological parents who have the money to afford IVF and the women who are serving as surrogates who are in a position where they are prostituting their bodies to carry other people’s children.
And so Katie O’Reilly says, when a woman agrees to become a gestational surrogate, meaning she’ll gestate an IVF created embryos, it grows into a fetus. She and the commissioning parents will typically sign a legally binding contract. The term is vary widely from contract, contract and state to state. The vast majority will include a clause allowing the parents to make decisions about abortion. So that’s of course the biological parents, the wealthier people get to decide what happens for the surrogate mom. Now, in one sense, you can imagine, okay, well that kind of makes sense. You don’t want to pay a woman to carry your child and then she just runs down the Planned Parenthood and kills the child the next day. But what makes this horrifying is that there are times where they’re demanding the woman have an abortion and she does not want to have an abortion, and so we have this kind of horrifying situation.
Katie O’Reilly says, in surrogacy cases, since the most common reason for abortion is multiple pregnancies, this is the selective reduction problem. Just made a little more clear here, the likelihood of becoming pregnant with twins, triplets, and even four or five fetuses increases. Once IVF enters the picture for all the reasons I mentioned before, you’re using fertility drugs, you’re implanting multiple embryos on purpose, you’re certainly rolling the dice because you want to not have to do this over and over again. These are expensive, costly, and painful treatments, and so you might just get a woman pregnant with four children simultaneously and then kill three of them that you don’t want. So for various reasons, as she puts it, how financial or otherwise parents whose surrogate end up carrying multiple fetuses may request to selectively reduce or abort one or more. She then recounts a particularly famous case in 1986 of Baby M, so you’ve got the surrogate, a woman who supplies the egg and carries the intended parent’s child.
Now, this is slightly different because here she’s not just carrying another woman’s biological child. She’s carrying her own biological child, at least if she’s describing the case correctly, she’s supplied the egg, so the biological mother is the surrogate. She’s just got some other man’s sperm. The difference though is that she’s not legally going to be the owner of the child and not my son. Dehumanizing language to use for a child, are they really property to own and IVF? Yes, they are. They’re not human beings with rights to be respected. They’re just the property of wealthy parents who decided they wanted to have a kid.
So she went so far even to kidnap the child, her own child. Ultimately, the contract was deemed invalid and the baby was returned to the intended parents with visitation rights for the surrogate. So that was a really messy kind of case back in the eighties where a woman developed shockingly maternal feelings for her biological child that she bore her womb for nine months. But as KO says, the legacy of that case is that surrogacy agencies now recommend that surrogates do not supply genetic material. In other words, don’t use your own egg because you might grow attached to your baby, and they typically only accept women who have already given birth. The underlying belief here is such carrier candidates are less likely to get two attached to the fetuses they’re carrying. This is a shockingly horrific way to approach motherhood and pregnancy. You’re intentionally creating situations where pregnant women won’t feel attached to the children in their womb.
This is dystopian. It’s bizarre that more people don’t say, hold on. Have we created a series of nightmares? Because that’s exactly what’s happened here. But in any case, because surrogacy contracts allow someone else to mandate that a woman abort fetuses growing in her body, surrogacy has become more than a legal issue. It’s a charge for bioethical and political issue too. Who are the parents of the fetuses and who gets to make such decisions? And Katie O’Reilly asks, what are the implications for women’s reproductive autonomy? It’s bizarre to say these two people can force you to get an abortion that you don’t want to have for a child you’ve grown attached to because they no longer want the child. Or you’re pregnant with two children and they say, we want you to abort that one, and you say, I don’t want to, and they say, well, legally you have to.
That’s the situation that we’re in in the article. Ero Nanos, who’s an attorney involved in this, says that while surrogacy isn’t ethically a bad idea, it is. This shows why it is. It creates an absolute legal mess. What if there had been six children and she said, I’m pro-life, and refused to reduce them, and then as a result, they all died. Now, what could the father have insisted she reduced to three? The law doesn’t anticipate these kinds of Sophie’s choice type questions that people have to make once they’re creating babies in Petri dishes. I’m not sure I could leave you on a stronger note than that. We are creating Sophie’s choice like cases by creating babies in Petri dishes and where to believe this is ethically not a bad idea. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.