There has been an active campaign to promote a positive image for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Pro-abortionists (i.e., Congressional Democrats) have glommed on to the issue as part of a “reproductive rights” agenda, whose real intention is to advance abortion. Since unrestricted abortion for any reason whatsoever still encounters resistance, pro-abortionists need a prettier image than dismembered babies. And what better picture is there than a bouncing baby held by parents who might otherwise have difficulty conceiving?

Others, meanwhile, have largely fled from criticizing IVF because (a) everybody likes a happy ending with a baby, and (b) the ethical complexities of IVF can’t be explained, much less seriously pondered, in a 15-second soundbite. The misrepresentations following the February 2024 Alabama Supreme Court decision involving an IVF clinic (see here) were seized by abortion advocates and Big Fertility to define the issue. (“Big Fertility” is Jennifer Lahl’s term for the multi-million dollar IVF industry that benefits from IVF and surrogacy.) And much of American politics has degenerated from a reasoned debate about the pros and cons of issues to a pandering to feelings and emotions divorced from intellectual ethical analysis.

One of the abstract — but real — issues of ethical analysis raised by IVF and all artificial methods of reproduction is that they all in principle separate the creation of a child from a personal act of sexual intercourse. The human contact of conjugal intercourse is replaced by a procedure — a laboratory and clinical act, a technological “fix” — that substitutes for that human touch. If the personal act of spouses can be replaced by a technique, then in principle the creation of a child is not necessarily connected to marriage. The “partners” need not even be married. Nor is the creation of a child connected to biology. The child may, but does not have to be, the “fruit” of this man and this woman. It can be of this man and some other woman, this woman and some other man, or of neither of them and two completely different genetic parents. In principle, parenthood is separable into genetic (the man whose sperm it is, the woman whose egg it is), gestational (the woman who carries the baby), and social (the contracting parties with the checkbook that will raise the baby, who need not even be sexually differentiated, because a child seems no longer entitled by right to a “mother” and a “father”).

But, you say, IVF is a “miracle” because some infertile couples who can’t have a baby “can” through this technique. But accepting that “miracle” means necessarily having to accept all the rest of what I just outlined, because in principle and in law all of that is and must be allowed.

But IVF doesn’t just separate the human from reproduction. It separates the human from time. 

Social media on April 30 carried a picture of two boys: a 14-year-old holding an infant (see here). The boys are arguably fraternal twins. Both were the result of eggs extracted in 2010 during a single IVF cycle. Because “harvesting” of ova is a complex process, women are generally pumped with hormones to super-ovulate, multiple ova are retrieved, and then fertilized. One or several found “most likely to succeed” (i.e., survive till birth) are implanted. The remainder are destroyed or frozen. In the case of these boys, both were conceived in 2010. One was implanted; one was frozen. Fourteen years later, the latter was defrosted, implanted, and brought to birth. Are they “twins?” In a normal (i.e., human, biologically-based) pregnancy, they would have been. If you accept that life begins at conception, both their lives started in 2010. So, how can you have “twins” who are 14 and 1? Are they not fraternal “twins?” Do “twins” only exist if they are born together, not conceived together? On that logic, is a woman carrying two fertilized ova not bearing “twins” until birth? What then are they?

IVF, like transgenderism, entails a denial of biological human reality. Transgenderism pretends that “sex” has nothing normative about it, that you can be a “girl” in a “boy’s” body, a “boy” in a “girl’s” body, or something of Baskin Robbins’ 31 gender flavors in the other 30-flavor bodies. IVF likewise pretends that there is nothing normative about biology: you can be conceived simultaneously but you are not twins unless born in chronological proximity. So, like “sex,” age is now a fungible mental construct. Boy B, conceived at the same time as boy A, is “1” while his brother is “14.” Like the joking woman who says her clock stopped at 29, age now becomes a state of mind. What age do you “identify” the baby as?

Transgenderism brings in another parallel: the separation of age from normal biological development. Advocates of “puberty blockers” — hormones administered to prevent the normal sexual differentiation advanced by the onset of puberty — insist that there’s “nothing wrong” with delaying puberty. As the only way to know whether anything is “wrong” with an intervention involving reproduction is to attempt it and then see the consequences for the next generation, this means you implicitly say you must experiment with the development of human beings (without those future human beings’ consent) in order to find out whether the experiment is deleterious.

Now let’s address puberty as a biological phenomenon. But, as any parent can tell you, it is not just a biological phenomenon but is bound up with a whole complexus of psycho-social-sexual aspects. In normal human development, they all go together. The biological and the psycho-social-sexual normally happen somewhere between age ten and 13. We have no real data to say it is normal and/or healthy for these things to be happening, together or separately, at age 17 to 21. And we also have no real data to say how the psycho-social adjustments normally begun alongside the physiological/hormonal aspects of puberty start without the latter. Or, for that matter, what happens when the former and latter are separated? Was Qoheleth (3:2) that much ahead of his time when he wrote about “a time to be born and a time to die” (and a time to go through puberty and a time to have babies, etc.)?

An analogous phenomenon of time abolition is afoot in IVF. Just as “puberty blockers” say the transition of a child from childhood sexual immaturity to adult sexual maturity can be indefinitely delayed, IVF advocates are claiming that the transition from conception to birth can also be indefinitely delayed. Just erase the concept of “twin” or “age” or maybe even “sibling,” for that matter.

These are fundamentally revolutionary changes in how we envision the parent-child relationship. Should we be acquiescing in them because of tugs of the heart in hard cases?

The “age gap” identified in the April 30 social media post is nothing new. Back in 1987, almost 40 years ago, novelist Walker Percy (who was also a medical doctor by training) commented during an interview about two unborn children whose in vitro fertilization occurred simultaneously but who were implanted and brought to birth three years apart. He observed:

Okay. So what’s next? So, why not intervene in the generic apparatus of the unborn child? Certainly, it’s OK to correct defects. But why not make a better child? Why not make a blue-eyed child? Or why not get rid of undesirable, asocial children? In the Thanatos Syndrome [his novel about euthanasia of children], I have Father Smith say, ‘Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.’ Doctors and statesmen start changing life, intervening in life for “quality of life” reasons, and they end up killing Jews. (More Conversations with Walker Percy, eds. L. Lawson and V. Kramer, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, p. 184)

Our more unsavory contemporaries force us to reflect on what is a “defect.” A World Economic Forum participant, convinced human taste for beef is stoking an “existential” climate crisis, recently asked whether we should alter human genes to “turn off” the “I like and can digest steak” signal. What is a “defect”? Whatever elite opinion says it is?

Former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit (a physician before becoming a priest) noted that, all good intentions aside, artificial means of reproduction inevitably and ineluctably lead to a child ceasing to be a “gift” and becoming a “parental project.” These techniques are prerequisites to “designer babies,” amputated from their biology. Another consequence is that “age” is rendered a “state of mind.”