I’ll admit, I did not expect that in vitro fertilization, or “IVF,” would be a major part of the political discourse of 2024.
But a court ruling in Alabama declaring unused IVF embryos as legal people has thrust the issue into the national political spotlight and prompted Republicans everywhere to announce quickly that they support the procedure and do not want to see it restricted before Democrats claim that they do.
Now, IVF has been around for decades and has primarily been used by women who suffer from infertility. It is a procedure where an egg is fertilized with sperm outside of a woman’s uterus, where it is later implanted. Because of the delicate nature of the procedure, most IVF procedures involve the fertilization and implantation of numerous eggs because it has a high rate of failure. Unused embryos are typically frozen for later use if the implantations are unsuccessful.
The case in Alabama involved the accidental destruction of frozen embryos. The couple to whom the embryos belonged filed a lawsuit against the hospital, and the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in favor of the couple and said the frozen embryos were human beings and entitled to legal protections.
The ruling has laid bare the fundamental ethical and moral problems with IVF, even as the procedure enjoys widespread political support across both sides of the aisle. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have issued statements iterating their support for the accessibility of the procedure.
As much as IVF offers an ostensible path forward for women struggling with infertility, it creates a moral conundrum, as the use of such technology begins with the creation of new human lives, the vast majority of which will die. Furthermore, it opens the door for a eugenic approach to creating new human beings.
The problem with IVF is that it treats the creation of a child as a commodity to be bought and sold. A woman who wants her own children without a relationship with a man can walk into a hospital or fertility clinic and get pregnant using a sperm donor she preselected for specific physical characteristics. A woman in a relationship with a man who is sterile can do the same, and a couple seeking to be unburdened by pregnancy can rent a surrogate and conceive their biological child in a test tube.
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The effect, in many cases, is that children are no longer viewed as a blessing and a gift born out of the physical love of two people but rather as a human accessory that has a commercial value and confers social status. As for an unused IVF embryo, that perfectly unique human life is robbed of its potential to live as it is discarded as unwanted waste.
There may be little political or moral appetite to confront the problems presented by IVF. But a culture of life cannot exist when human beings can be bought, sold, and killed, even at the earliest stage of development. It is a problem that will not go away.