Pray for an end to IVF and the protection of human embryos: Join our prayer pledge
(LifeSiteNews) — Nervous Republican lawmakers have scrambled to defend the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry in the days since Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are indeed children.
Among them is U.S. House Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who is currently seeking co-sponsors for a resolution condemning the Alabama court ruling while urging strong support from Congress for the IVF industry. Her Republican colleagues must resist her efforts.
Even U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has come out in support of IVF treatments, saying “I believe the life of every single child has inestimable dignity and value.”
Here’s the thing: Speaker Johnson’s declaration makes a far better case for ending the practice of IVF than it does for protecting it. While every child born through IVF absolutely does possess “inestimable dignity and value,” so do the 93 percent of their siblings – millions of children created via IVF – who have been or will be disposed of as unwanted medical waste.
READ: Former IVF user says procedure killed 30 babies to create one who survived
‘Republicans should not fall for the left’s trap’
Republicans who support IVF are wrong. Despite their good intentions, they’re playing with fire.
“In the wake of the Alabama ruling, well-meaning Republicans are doing the bidding of Democrats,” declared Katy Faust, founder and president of the children’s rights organization Them Before Us.
“The most pro-abortion senators last month proposed the ‘Right to Build Families Act’ protecting IVF access. Now Republicans like Nancy Mace are reinforcing those anti-child policy objectives,” Faust told LifeSiteNews.
“The reality is, IVF is responsible for the loss of more embryonic life every year than abortion. And protecting a ‘right to IVF’ simply means hundreds of thousands of little lives donated to research, stored for decades in freezers, or sex-selected out of existence, or simply discarded,” she explained. “Just as in the abortion debate, Republicans need to take their eyes off of adult desires, and put them onto protecting the rights of children.”
Dr. Michael Sirilla, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, didn’t mince words in demanding that Republicans reject supporting the IVF industry which he says engages in “genocide.”
“There’s a whole class of people being targeted for elimination for various reasons and one of those reasons is to select a child and to freeze or eliminate the rest. The destruction of embryos created by IVF is part of the genocide of abortion,” Sirilla told LifeSiteNews.
“That’s what is happening within the IVF industry,” he said. “Life begins at conception, and so these are human beings. Period.”
“It’s a genocide,” he again emphasized, “so in no way should members of Congress co-sponsor this resolution, or be mealy-mouthed or milquetoast about the horrors associated with IVF.”
Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. writing for First Things Wednesday, explained:
IVF itself treats children as products of technical manufacture. It thus fails to respect the equal dignity of human beings in their very origins. Or as some have put it, persons should be begotten, not made. They are to be welcomed as the fruit of an act of marital love.
Relating to a child instead as a producer relates to a product is the seed of all the abuses of the IVF industry – the causal creation and destruction of ‘spares,’ the filtering out of ‘defectives,’ the selection for sex (boys) and other specs (eye color), the commodification of (often poor) women’s bodies as incubators.
Nor are the fundamental moral concerns about IVF sectarian. While today the Catholic Church most prominently teaches that IVF itself is wrong, the three most prominent moral thinkers who opposed IVF’s introduction in the 1970s and ’80s were non-Catholic: The University of Chicago’s Leon Kass (Jewish), Princeton’s Paul Ramsey (Methodist), and Oxford’s Oliver O’Donovan (Anglican).
Republicans should not fall for the left’s trap here. They should not hesitate to say that America’s best social and political reforms were suffused with religious conviction. Or that the deepest reasons for our laws lie in God’s eternal law.
Nor should Republicans follow pollsters selling them on new government entitlements to IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies. There is no political appetite for bans on these procedures, and the GOP should call out the media’s lies suggesting there is. But our current state of unregulated embryo fabricating, freezing, and destroying does need fixing. The medically superior alternatives to IVF warrant promotion.
And at the very least, embryos created through IVF deserve legal protection. The Alabama ruling was legally and morally correct. And if Republicans would speak up, more Americans could learn the truth about it.
READ: Alabama Republicans, national Democrats scramble to protect IVF, ignoring right to life
Father Roger Landry, writing at National Catholic Register, has offered an comprehensive list of reasons why IVF treatments are morally objectionable from start to finish:
In IVF, children are not begotten but manufactured.
Men must masturbate to obtain the sperm for the laboratory insemination.
Women are impregnated not by a husband but by a technician with a pipette.
Because of the costs and pain involved in egg retrieval, excess embryos are created, with some implanted, some deep frozen, and others destroyed.
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is often done to discriminate among the embryos based on sex or other qualities.
If all implanted embryos take, one or more are often selectively aborted.
The process promotes sperm and egg donors and the law often prevents children conceived from ever discovering their biological parents’ identity.
It allows various doctors to substitute their own sperm and father hundreds of children.
It fuels the whole surrogacy industry, which exploits poor women and promotes human trafficking.
It allows situations where children can be conceived in a circumstance of a half-dozen parental claims, from egg mom, sperm dad, surrogate mother, legal (paying) dad(s), legal mom(s) and, with new techniques for the manipulation of eggs, even stranger combinations.
It produces what the Vatican has called the “absurd fate” of huge cryogenic orphanages.
It permits the development of destructive embryonic research, where human beings are treated as raw material for medical experimentation.
And because of its wealth and prominence, it makes far more difficult ethical research to address soluble underlying morphological and endocrinological reasons for infertility.
There is, in short, an increasing array of ethical abuses, all fruit produced from morally corrupt IVF roots.
“Relatively few have had the courage to confront these issues,” wrote Landry. “Yet, now, the ART (Artificial Reproductive Technologies) industry is increasingly being employed to manufacture made-to-order children for otherwise fertile couples who prefer to use surrogates, for single women who want to choose sperm donors and sometimes egg donors from catalogs, by same-sex couples and others who look to IVF as option A, not as a reluctant last resort.”
Pray for an end to IVF and the protection of human embryos: Join our prayer pledge
