(LifeSiteNews) — The World Health Organization (WHO) recently called for free and easy access to embryo-destroying in-vitro fertilization (IVF) for everyone, including those in “gender-diverse relationships.”
The group’s “first global guideline on infertility” does make mention of some genuine areas of concern, suggesting that a “healthy diet, physical activity, and tobacco cessation” can help with problems. However, the language is also focused on identity politics and policies that are not child-centered, but rather on the mistaken idea that everyone has a right to create a child, no matter how many human-embryonic children are destroyed in the process.
“Implementation should also align with comprehensive, rights-based approaches to sexual and reproductive health – including fertility care – that empower people throughout their lives to make informed, individual decisions about whether and when to have children,” an accompanying news release states, suggesting that people have a “right” to kill their preborn baby in the womb.
A leader on the project used similar left-wing sexual language in a statement.
“The prevention and treatment of infertility must be grounded in gender equality and reproductive rights,” Dr. Pascale Allotey, director of WHO’s Department of Sexual, Reproductive, Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health and Aging and the United Nations’ Special Program on Human Reproduction,” stated in a news release. “Empowering people to make informed choices about their reproductive lives is a health imperative and a matter of social justice.”
Expert questions ‘human rights’ claim in report
The report claims that “human rights” include conceiving a baby, presumably with generous subsidization by insurance companies or taxpayers.
In one footnote, WHO states that “individuals who are single or who are in same-sex or gender-diverse relationships, may need services to fulfil their fertility preferences.”
“Providers of fertility care should consider the needs of, and provide equal care to, all individuals,” the group states.
However, this is misguided according to a child-rights advocacy group called Them Before Us.
“The WHO guideline treats infertility care primarily as an issue of access and equity, but it never addresses the child’s experience within IVF and related technologies,” Communications Manager Samantha DeLoach told LifeSiteNews via email. “IVF is marketed as a compassionate solution for adults, yet it routinely imposes significant, lifelong losses on the resulting children.”
“WHO’s framework focuses on what adults want, not what children need,” DeLoach said.
Oftentimes IVF can separate “children from their biological mother or father by design,” such as when “donor sperm, donor eggs, or surrogacy are used,” DeLoach said.
This violates a “child’s right to be known and loved by the man and woman responsible for their existence,” she said. In “same-sex” or “gender-diverse” situations, “at least one biological parent is always missing by design.”
In-vitro fertilization also includes the intentional destruction of millions of human embryonic-children, a number that would increase if countries expanded access to the procedure. A LifeSiteNews estimate found that more than 250 million human-embryonic children have likely been killed since 1978 due to IVF or similar “assisted reproductive technology” techniques.
As DeLoach explained:
IVF is built on the creation and destruction of human embryos. Most embryos are never transferred, many are discarded, and others are abandoned in freezers indefinitely. When the WHO recommends expanding access to IVF, it implicitly endorses a system where countless children never even get the chance to be born. Millions of children will be purposefully destroyed.
She then emphasized the importance of protecting the rights of children and promoting life-affirming approaches to infertility.
“The desire for children is natural and deeply human, but no one has a right to a child because a child is not an entitlement, a commodity, or a reward owed to adult,” DeLoach told LifeSiteNews.
Instead, the child’s rights must be protected, including “the right to life,” “the right to their mothers and fathers,” and “the right to be born free, not bought and sold.”
Pushing for a “right” to IVF “means the desires of adults take precedence over the actual rights of children,” she said.
“Instead of expanding access to technologies that commodify children, we should expand access to ethical medical interventions that heal the body, not bypass it,” DeLoach said.
The World Health Organization did not directly address surrogacy, but noted in its report it planned to look at it in a subsequent study.
Surrogacy also violates the rights of children, DeLoach told LifeSiteNews.
“When global institutions promote reproduction through donor conception and commercial surrogacy, they normalize systems that violate children’s rights and well-being in the name of adult desires.”