In Vitro Fertilization – Why Not?

What you may not know about IVF

Everyone generally sympathizes with the plight of couples desperate to conceive a child. Childlessness is a grave burden for much that medical science is rightly striving to alleviate.  Childless couple thirty years ago, had the choice to adopt, but not into today's society especially with proliferation of abortion centers and the abolishment of orphanages. 

Where do we start?

 "in vitro" literally means "in glass." In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a process whereby human life is generated in a laboratory environment, for example in a glass petri dish. 

The process of IVF begins when fertility technicians administer hormone treatments to a woman. The hormones hyper-stimulate the woman's ovaries to produce a number of eggs at one time. The eggs are collected from the woman’s body and then combined with sperm. The resulting embryos are nourished in laboratory cultures and inserted into the woman’s body with the hope that one embryo will successfully implant in the lining of the womb and develop. The process is very controlled and involves numerous trips to the IVF center.  Once the sperm has fertilized the eggs a new life has started.

“To accept the fact that, after fertilization has taken place, a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or of opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention. It is plain experimental evidence.” – Dr. Jerome Jejune, the “ father of modern genetics”.

This all sounds good, except that the IVF process involves the death of countless tiny embryonic human beings. The process almost always involves the freezing of “extra” embryos that are often used in destructive research.  Many unused embryos die in the transfer process since they are fragile or they are unwanted and will be eliminated because they are considered genetically inadequate.   While some are simply killed as they are washed down the sink.

Embryos will be selected for genetic “perfection”. This was a known practice at another time and country with the Nazi philosophy of Eugenics, with the elimination of “inferior” persons.  One philosopher has noted that if we do not remember the past, we will be condemned to repeating it.  Tell me it isn't so.

Because of the destruction of embryonic life, it raises a moral question and a reason why human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person if we are to have peace and justice for the rest of humanity. 

When this fundamental moral line is violated or obscured, categories of people become devalued and they become easily used for utilitarian purposes as seen in past world history.

Other problems can arise from this technique in that embryos can split, resulting in twins, twinning is 2 or 3 times more common in pregnancies associated with IVF.

When multiple babies are detected during ultrasound, parents are asked to consider selective reduction, another way of saying ‘abortion’.

Internationally infamous company, The Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Virginia reports that only 10-20% of the embryos ever reproduced for IVF ever progress to normal pregnancy, According to annual reports from the Center for Disease Control, at least 140,000 human embryos die in the IVF process or are locked in frozen storage every year in the US. No one knows what to do with these frozen humans, nor how many for certain are being held in freezers. 

What happens when a couple undergo IVF and says,” We want a child no matter what.”   It is the beginning of making the child an object.  It is a selective mentality that begins to emerge, whereby couples choose the kind of child they want. You possibly have heard about designer babies, this would be the beginning.  See an excerpt below from Focus on the Family on designer babies.

On a brighter note, in the year 2000, the Constitutional Court of Costa Rica declared that the In-vitro fertilization reproductive technology is unconstitutional because children conceived in this manner are at risk of death. The panel of judges recognized that human life begins at fertilization, and from that moment, these human beings are ‘persons’ under the law and thus entitled to legal protection.

However in North America and elsewhere where IVF is practiced, the child is reduced to a commodity, a thing to be bought, sold, experimented upon discarded or destroyed. We have seen in the past two or three years the uncovering of sale of baby parts for the scientific community.   It is this attitude that is eroding the dignity of the human person, inch by inch or should a say cell by cell. It leads and somehow depends on the general acceptance of abortion, euthanasia and the reduction of all persons born and unborn to the status of objects.

As in the past as a society has come to depend on medicine and the scientific community to solve immense social problems at the expense of human lives.  Hopefully it will not be the final solution to the man-made health care crisis in our country. 

From Focus on the Family: (which illustrates some of the problems that are arising from IVF) check out their web site for more information.  www.fotf.org

"Biologically speaking, life begins at conception," said Focus on the Family life-issues analyst Carrie Gordon. "All 46 human chromosomes are present." --Matt Kaufman

SEX SELECTION RAISES QUESTIONS

                   Ethicists are concerned about a new technique that would let parents select the sex
 of their children.

                   Researchers at the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., announced Sept. 9 that  they had developed a new method of sorting human sperm, thereby greatly  increasing the ability of couples that use artificial insemination to choose their
 baby’s sex. This, they said, could help couples seeking to "balance" their family with  both boys and girls or to avoid gender-related diseases such as hemophilia, which  mostly affect males.

                   But some fear that in a culture that has legitimized abortion, the method will be  abused and could contribute to the notion that children exist primarily to meet  adults’ wants and needs.

                   "In most cases this technique will be used to create designer babies," Nigel  Cameron, who chairs the board of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at  Trinity International University, told Citizen. "It [promotes] the idea that the wanted
 child is the one you design."

                   H. David Hager, M.D., a fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and  Gynecologists and a member of Focus on the Family's Physicians Resource Council, agreed.