In vitro fertilization (IVF) has always benefitted from certain strange coincidences redounding to its benefit. The first IVF baby was born in 1978, five years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion-on-demand in the U.S. People who fought abortion because they said it took the life of an unborn baby vacillated on IVF. Legislators not wanting to reprise the abortion battles gave IVF wide berth. It’s one reason why Jennifer Lahl has called America the “Wild West” of Big Fertility: the U.S. places almost no regulation on the fertility industry.

Even today, many who applauded the Dobbs decision allowing states to protect embryonic and fetal life see no incongruity with preventing states from regulating IVF. IVF sells itself (and that verb is deliberately chosen, because there’s big bucks behind Big Fertility) as “pro-life,” even though globally there are millions of babies in cryogenic freezes with no clear prospect to ever be born. Just this year, a baby was born who was conceived in 1994. He’s been in cold storage 31 years. (See here.)

Justifiably or not, IVF has managed to separate itself from the “life questions” the abortion debate poses. IVF apologists try to dismiss these inconvenient facts by focusing discussion on the “simple case,” i.e., a baby conceived in a Petri dish from gametes of the parents who will gestate and raise that child, immediately implanted in its mother without “surplus” embryos being fertilized. That’s a nice theoretical construct. It just almost never happens that way. The truth is that as IVF is routinely practiced, harvesting and fertilizing multiple ova is deemed economically necessary and medically permissible. One or more fertilized eggs voted “most likely to succeed” are placed in the mother for implantation; surplus pregnancies can then be “selectively reduced” (aborted). Unused fertilized eggs are frozen, discarded, or used for experimental purposes.

When IVF first came out, it also marketed itself as a “medical remedy” to infertility. It remedies nothing. Just as a detour doesn’t fix a damaged road, IVF does not cure the underlying pathology responsible for infertility. It’s a workaround. Serious research on true infertility cures took place in Catholic facilities (which meant a limited amount of such research), but broader interest in “restorative reproductive medicine” is in lots of ways a phenomenon just a year or two old. It’s worth development, especially now that it is acquiring broader, non-Catholic interest.

Still, IVF enjoys great approval ratings. So, what’s wrong with IVF?

Stacy Trasancos, who teaches science and theology at Seton Hall University, makes that case in IVF Is Not the Way: The False Promises of Artificial Procreation, a new book from Sophia Institute Press (here). Trasancos makes a detailed, step-by-step case for the moral wrong of IVF. The book is divided into three main parts of multiple chapters each. Part I clarifies “history and terminology.” It’s an essential discussion because IVF profits from being sold publicly as a “way to have the baby you want” while the public knows virtually nothing about what having “the baby you want” involves. Included are discussions of the history of artificial procreation and of Church teaching about it.

Part II, the heart of the book, makes the book’s argument, leading from discussion of God’s existence to how that grounds human dignity; what human dignity entails when talking about children, before and after conception; and essential differences between the birth of children by “doing what comes naturally” versus artificial procreation, after which Trasancos concludes, “IVF is not the way.”

Part III is a series of case studies, beginning with the “simple case” discussed above (homologous artificial procreation) and expanding it to the actual, practical consequences of IVF — embryos destroyed, frozen, used for experiment — and the ethics of the embryo adoption movement. The truth is these actual, practical consequences of IVF are the norm because – regardless of one’s intent – IVF in principle (and American law in practice) in no way requires “simple case” (husband and wife using their gametes to fertilize one egg they implant and birth) outcomes. IVF in principle in no way requires that either the gestational woman or the people who raise that baby have any biological relationship to it. IVF by itself is indifferent to whether the people who raise a baby are even sexually differentiated, i.e., there is a “mother” and a “father.” IVF in itself doesn’t even require that anything at all happen to those fertilized ova. Being born is a nice idea, but not required. Want to use them for research purposes? Production of embryonic stem cells? For economic benefit? (Last year, The New York Times tax advisor fielded a question whether you can get a deduction for donating your fertilized ova.) The choice is yours; IVF is a laissez-faire world. And even with the best of intentions in the “simple case,” all it takes is a mislabeled test tube for you to lose your baby and get somebody else’s (see here). There’s only two ways that happens: via a lab tech or by committing adultery.

Readers looking for a serious, deep dive into the problems of IVF will find Trasancos’s book valuable. She often poses valuable insights that discussions of IVF ignore because they don’t do that deep thinking, e.g., if we really talk about children as “gifts,” then what does the phenomenology of a genuine “gift” imply? I found the book rewarding, usually forward moving, though sometimes a tougher slog because Trasancos very deliberately builds a syllogistic-style case for her argument. It’s evident she’s an academic. And while, as a Catholic theologian, I understand that the problem of IVF as an assault on human dignity is ultimately grounded in seeing the person made in God’s image and likeness, I would have appreciated a more explicit discussion on how to make the case against IVF without even philosophical theism. Those reservations do not deter me, however, from praising this book as a solid and accessible contribution (albeit with special appeal to believers) for general readers wanting to understand better what the moral case against IVF is about.

Decades ago, the late Professor William May, who taught Catholic bioethics in Washington, pointed out that accepting IVF means having to accept in principle – even if you don’t intend it or don’t prefer it – the splitting up of motherhood into genetic (ovum), gestational (womb), and social (raising a child) components. The same is true but for the gestational piece of fatherhood. Like it or not, IVF leaves open the question Who gets the Mother’s Day card(s)?