TORONTO, Oct. 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The Ontario Liberal government announced Thursday that it will provide funding for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments for Ontarians “with all forms of infertility, regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation or family status.”
The Liberals have added $50 million to the already $20 million they spend annually “to help an additional 4,000 Ontarians grow their families each year,” through “one IVF cycle per eligible patient per lifetime,” according to a Ministry of Health press release, which stipulates that the treatment is only available to women under age 43.
In IVF, an egg is taken from a woman’s womb, fertilized in a laboratory, and the embryonic human life is then implanted back in her womb – or in another woman’s.
The ministry states that one IVF cycle “includes one egg retrieval, which may yield multiple eggs and result in multiple embryos” and the subsequent implantations of single viable embryo at a time, to “reduce the occurrence of higher-risk multiple births.”
Health Minister Eric Hoskins announced the funding expansion at a daycare where young children conceived through IVF toddled about, and where parents spoke movingly of their struggle to conceive. Hoskins pointed out that about two percent of live births in Ontario are through IVF.
The pro-life movement, while pointing out that it’s self-evident that children created through IVF have all the dignity afforded to any other human person made in the image and likeness of God, argue that the IVF process is itself morally indefensible.
Steve Phelan of the Virginia-based pro-life, pro-family advocacy group Human Life International, explains that this is not only because human embryos destroyed in the IVF process – itself a grave evil – but because these embryos are unnaturally created in the first place, brought into being in a laboratory and not through the God-given means of the conjugal act.
“The basic point is that a human being from the moment of conception has the same dignity you and I have, and has the right to be conceived as God intended, in a mother’s womb,” he told LifeSiteNews in an email. The essential immorality of IVF is “the unnatural act of creating a person in an artificial way.”
“The entire IVF process treats a human being from his or her beginning as a commodity, as an object to be used for profit, gratification, or research,” he added.
Moreover, “the odds are stacked against the children who survive IVF, given the unnaturalness of the procedure,” observed Phelan. “Nine out of ten tiny babies conceived in this artificial process are never born, as they either die somewhere during the process, end up frozen indefinitely, or are used as subjects of research.”
Parents contemplating IVF who accept that a new human life exists at the moment of conception should realize that almost all of these lives they cooperate in creating unnaturally, will die, he said.
IVF may also involve what is euphemistically termed “selective reduction,” which is the aborting of smaller in utero babies in a multi-child pregnancy to allow the stronger one, or more, to survive.
Such “abuses only reinforce the basic fact that the entire process is dehumanizing to mother and child alike,” stated Phelan.
According to the National Post, the Liberal government’s expansion of state-funded IVF treatments specifically includes what it calls “social infertility,” which refers to the biologically insurmountable infertility of homosexual and lesbian sexual relations.
Mary-Ellen Douglas, Ontario president of Campaign Life Coalition, says this latest Liberal government accommodation of the LGBTQ lobby is “another nail in the coffin of the family.”
What began as the homosexual lobby’s demand for acceptance has now become “we want to be the same,” Douglas told LifeSiteNews in a telephone interview.
“And it’s not the same, and it can never be the same, because we weren’t created that way,” she said, adding that “it’s been proven over and over again” that “the child needs a father and mother for parents. That is the best situation for them to be raised in, because it’s natural.”
Douglas also noted that there is no getting around nature’s laws. “In reality, no matter what weird science gets involved here, children have a father and a mother,” she said. “Even if there are two lesbians, there has to be a male involved somewhere.”
A mother of five children and a grandmother who knows “what a blessing” children are, Douglas observed that it’s “truly tragic” when a married couple who badly want a child cannot conceive.
“But the reality with IVF and the frozen embryos, those embryos are destroyed if they are not used,” she said. “We weren’t meant to be made and frozen. I mourn for these babies.”
According to a CP report, IVF treatments have a 30 percent success rate, and IVF accounts for about two percent of live births in Ontario. The Liberals will begin negotiations with the 18 existing private fertility clinics for a December 2015 start to the program.
