Saving embryos and implanting them later can help many women conceive; and, in theory, this may mean more life rather than less. The American Republican Party has made IVF an election issue, by promising to subsidize it or to require private insurance companies to pay for it. Donald Trump justified it like this: “we want to make it easier for mothers and families to have babies, not harder.”
In principle, most pro-lifers would favour any policy that makes it easier to have children. The question is whether IVF actually does that. In many cases, it doesn’t actually make conception any easier, and it is by no means free of risk or potential complications.
IVF means harvesting eggs from a woman’s ovaries, fertilizing them with sperm in a test tube, and then implanting the embryo in the womb. This can be done “fresh”, or the eggs may be frozen through cryopreservation for use later. Either way, IVF has been associated with higher rates of severe maternal morbidity, the need for blood transfusions, and caesarian delivery in low-risk pregnancies without major comorbidities. Moreover, animal studies of frozen eggs show increases in mitochondrial DNA mutations in embryos. We still await long-term human studies, and this raises questions about informed consent. There may also be problems with IVF that are not yet known. A good parallel case is the birth-control pill, whose ill-effects (including higher chance of cancer) were discovered only gradually over the past 60 years.
But even if IVF were a sure-fire way to conceive, and did not pose a risk to mothers and children, it would still raise ethical problems, some of which are very serious.
If we believe, for instance, that an embryo is a person, we can well ask whether it is humane to place that person in a sort of suspended reality by freezing him or her for an indefinite amount of time.
Even “fresh” implantation poses problems, though. When eggs are harvested, specialists take several at a time and inspect them for flaws or imperfections. A similar inspection is done on fertilized embryos also. If, at either stage, any problems are discovered, the eggs or embryos are destroyed. An example of an alleged imperfection is the missing chromosome that causes Down syndrome. If we are destroying such embryos, we are implying that those with Down syndrome do not have a right to life. This is not a theoretical concern. About half of all embryos created in the IVF process are discarded. Between 1991 and 2012, 3.5 million embryos fertilized in American laboratories, and 1.7 million embryos were discarded. Accordingly, the Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that the disposal of embryos is now deemed as “wrongful death,” and so it is illegal to discard them there.
Finding the perfect embryo may well yield a higher chance of implantation success. But the whole process smacks of selective breeding and eugenics. It is, in fact, not far from the pagan practice of exposing weak or deformed infants to die, or sex-selective abortions which are unfortunately still common in certain places – it is legal in Canada. This state of affairs merits much more attention and discussion than it has had so far.
We are still in the midst of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s with the female birth control pill. Like that pill, IVF allows couples to separate the act of sex from pregnancy. How much further can this revolution go? The application of science and technology to human reproduction suggests that we are nowhere near the limit of what may be achieved for good or ill. And commodifying reproduction by funding it or subjecting it to market forces is likely to lead to many unpleasant directions.
Alexandra Jackson-Bonner is a mother of 3. Having graduated with honors from philosophy at the UofT, she is now completing her Masters in Theology. In her free time, she loves to be in the kitchen with her kids and sell real estate on the side.
