Conservative Christians are typically very vocally pro-life. But after the Alabama Supreme Court's recent ruling that embryos are in fact human beings, no matter where they are located, many Christians have been openly mourning the fact that IVF has been indefinitely paused in the state.
Many of these people share heartwarming stories about how they were enabled to give birth to biological children only because of the advances in reproductive technology, and understandably, they don't want to deny that opportunity to others. But what they leave out is that while their children were given the chance at life, the vast majority of children conceived through IVF are not.
Katy Foust, who is doing excellent work with the children's rights organization, Them Before Us, explains the reasoning well:
According to Them Before Us,
Only 7% of lab-created embryos will be born alive. IVF treats babies like disposable commodities. "Undesirable" embryos are discarded routinely; many babies won't survive the thaw or transfer, the few that do implant may be "selectively reduced" (aborted), or have their siblings "selected" for disposal. And many will spend their lives in a freezer.
Currently, there are over a million embryos that are frozen in the U.S. with some estimates saying that around 20% of those have been abandoned after their parents stopped paying the storage fee leaving the clinic to dispose of the forgotten babies.
Of course, the Christians jumping to the defense of the IVF industry will tell you that they pursued IVF in the most ethical way possible, only retrieving a small number of embryos and committing to implant each one.
What they don't tell you, is that many people say they'll follow the same ethical path, but then life happens. They welcome one, two, or three children into their lives, but then their lives get busy and their finances become strained from years of expensive fertility treatments. Their bodies start to age. Some women have to undergo hysterectomies (sometimes as a result of the toll the IVF process has taken on their bodies.) Sadly many couples divorce, leading to their embryos becoming assets to fight over in divorce court. Many women develop a myriad of health issues leading to the inability to go through the IVF process as many times as they have embryos for (because even "mini-IVF" retrievals aim to get 6-8 eggs, but often get more…and that's the mini version!) Sometimes one or both parents die prematurely, leaving no parent to birth and raise their children.
And these are just the reasons embryos are unintentionally abandoned. Most of the children simply won't survive the thawing or implantation process.
These pro-life Christian conservatives defending IVF definitely aren't telling you how they pay thousands and thousands of dollars to doctors and clinics who make their profit off of killing excess embryos. And frankly, I don't think they're willing to admit that to themselves either.
Even if you can find a doctor to "ethically" perform IVF for you, which is rare, the industry as a whole makes its money off of creating perfect embryos for high-paying clients, often with the use of donor eggs or sperm that parents can quite literally pick out of a catalog.
The pro-life position is very simple: Killing babies is always wrong, no matter when or where.
But because Christians (hopefully) aren't intentionally using IVF services in this way, they are tempted to think too simplistically about the issue. They believe that Pro-life=pro-baby and since IVF=more babies IVF=good.
And while every life is equally valuable, every method of conception is not equally moral. In most circumstances that can be very obvious, yet when it comes to IVF the lines somehow get a little blurry.
In a perfect world, IVF could be done ethically, but we don't live in a perfect world, and if we did IVF wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
In the fallen world we live in, IVF necessitates the murder of more children than abortion and facilitates the abandonment of countless others, while profiting off of the commodification of precious human lives.
So when this grave injustice is suddenly stopped, why do Christians mourn and blame politicians for taking them at their word when they said that every life matters?
Because in the process of saving the lives of millions of other people's children, the law suddenly interfered with their own well-laid plans for their children.
