The Tragedy of IVF

Several times over the last year, I have criticized IVF in my lectures. Each time I have been asked the same question afterward: “Do you think that children born by IVF are human beings?” The questioner is usually someone with a vested interest in the answer—the parent or the grandparent of a child born as a result of IVF or surrogacy. It therefore has an emotional power that the same question asked in a college seminar lacks. Seminars trade in abstractions and hypothetical situations. But real life happens at a personal level. Our children and grandchildren are individual persons, not generalized abstractions. They have faces. “Do you think my child is human?” has a sharp, understandable edge to it.

On the surface, the question is easy to answer. In critiquing IVF and surrogacy, I am in no way implying that children born by such means are not human. Simply because I disagree with the ways in which the human person has been conceived and brought to term does not mean I deny his or her intrinsic humanity. There are other ways that children are conceived with which I disagree—for example, anonymous one-night stands where neither love nor any real relationship exists between the parents. That does not mean that I think those children are not human. A sperm has fertilized an egg. A human person is the result.

Yet at another level the question is more difficult. While I do not deny the humanity of the child born by IVF or surrogacy, the procedures do. The child in the womb is treated not as a person but as a thing, not as a subject but as an object, not as intrinsically valuable but as having value only as instrumental to some other end.

This is something that many Christians fail to see. Ask about the moral problems of IVF and surrogacy and one is often greeted with confused looks. Perhaps some have hesitations over the fate of the surplus fertilized eggs that are disposed of or cryogenically frozen, but that is likely the only area of unease. And in my experience, even that is not a common concern. The happiness of the infertile couple relativizes all other considerations. And so the question of how these reproductive technologies inevitably inform society’s outlook on conception and children is never raised.

This is partly understandable. We want couples to have children. We live in a time where having children is increasingly regarded as dangerous (it damages women’s bodies, it hinders their careers, it soaks up income that could be spent on living a more lavish life) or irresponsible (the world is becoming a worse place; do you want to inflict that on progeny?). Thus it is a refreshing delight when young married couples declare that they want to have children. The absence of such a desire should surely be a cause for concern.

And yet, how easy it is in our highly technological world to allow this legitimate and appropriate desire for children to take on supreme moral significance and to reshape the tricky and often nebulous moral imagination of society. That neither of the major political parties in the U.S. grasp this not only points to the lack of moral understanding that now characterizes our politics, right and left; it also indicates the deep utilitarianism that shapes Western society and to which Christians have proven vulnerable. Even raising concerns about such matters is greeted with accusations of extremism in the broader culture and confusion in many churches and other Christian organizations.

Once IVF and surrogacy became realities, it was inevitable that the transformation of the baby in the womb from person to thing—a transformation already necessary for abortion to be regarded as an acceptable act—was bound to accelerate. If nothing else, laws have to be passed that treat the child as an object of commercial transaction and the parties involved as service providers and consumers respectively. Is the embryo that tests positive for Down syndrome a person with rights or a substandard product to be thrown away? And what of the children who make it to term but do not meet the specifications of the parents who paid good money for a particular outcome? Do parents have any natural obligations toward them? Or are those obligations defined by legal contracts such that, perhaps, they can simply return them to the manufacturer under warranty for a refund? It might seem tasteless to ask such questions, but they are unavoidable. We cannot pretend otherwise.

Hegel saw the essence of tragedy as lying in the collision of two legitimate but irreconcilable moral demands. Antigone was thus the quintessential tragic heroine, caught between the need to honor her dead brother through burial and the king’s command that no rebel should be thus honored. IVF involves another kind of existential paradox. IVF and surrogacy witness to the most natural and most glorious of human desires, that of a man and a woman wanting together to create the life of another person. Yet the very procedures require society to treat that person as a thing, a commodity. It is the quintessential tragedy of our modern, technological age.

And so to return to my opening question: Do I regard children born via IVF and surrogacy as human? Of course I do, unequivocally. But tragically, a society that sanctions IVF and surrogacy cannot say the same.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. 

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image in the public domain.