IVF

A Grave Disparity

Robert G. Edwards, the 2010 Nobel Prize winner of Physiology/Medicine for his development of in vitro fertilization (IVF), died yesterday at the age of 87.

Gina Kolata of The New York Times wrote in a recent article recounting Edwards’ controversial career that, according to the International Committee Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technologies, the “technique [of IVF] has resulted in the births of five million babies…”

Not once in her article does Ms. Kolata attempt to tally the deaths that have resulted from Edwards’ awarded technique.

If we consider Edwards’ many failed attempts in the early 1970s to bring an IVF child to full health and vitality outside of the womb; all of the failed attempts at implantation made since then by the medical community at large; all of the children discarded and killed because of their sex, chromosomal abnormalities, perceived lack of vitality, or perceived genetic flaws; all of the children selectively terminated and sacrificed for the vitality of a perceived stronger brother or sister in the womb; and our current, dismal 29.4% success rate of implantation in IVF today, the exponential number of dead children to date is hard to even fathom.

Maybe that is why Ms. Kolata, the infertility industry, the CDC, and so much of the rest of the world choose to simply ignore them.

When will we as a culture start acknowledging the death that results from IVF? Do these children who have died not also deserve our attention and respect?

Mama Bear

I know you’re afraid. I am, too.

We’re going against natural instinct, you and me. We know we’re not supposed to step in between a mama bear and her cub, but that’s exactly what we’re doing when we speak out against infertility medicine which breaks commandments of the LORD. We are stepping in between a mother and the children to which she feels entitled.

And a mama bear’s roar is terrifying.

Yet, we step in, nonetheless, because all children are loved and wanted by God, not just by mama bears. Every child’s value is best seen and understood at the foot of the cross on which Christ’s bloody sacrifice was laid out for them. We love these children, because God loves them; and we don’t want any of them to be valued solely for what they provide for the mama bear or the research technician or any other self-serving individual. We want to protect these precious children from being recklessly created outside of the one-flesh union where they can be graded, tested, abandoned, and destroyed.

Things could be different. We could be proactive in applying theology to infertility medicine rather than reactive. We could intentionally teach and counsel couples to live life under the cross of barrenness rather than encourage them to try every possible means to overcome it. We could speak the truth in love that children are not a commodity to which we are entitled in this life but a gift which God in His wisdom gives and doesn’t give. We could be honest in the Church and admit that God has not promised in His Word to give the gift of children to everyone.

Maybe, just maybe, this kind of honesty spoken in love would help the barren mama bears cope a little better. I know it helps me.

Close to Home

Question Submitted: I found your article in The Lutheran Witness, “Why Am I Barren?” very thought provoking. There was one statement in it that I did not understand or catch what you meant or intended. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, a gift from Him, and that good gift is received, NOT MADE MANUFACTURED OR MADE.” [caps added by submitter]

What are you saying with the last phrase? Are you implying that in vitro fertilization brings forth a “manufactured or made” child? And therefore in vitro fertilization is not God pleasing and contrary to His will?

We have grandchildren who are precious gifts from the Lord via in vitro fertilization. Their mother is an OB-GYN doctor who has delivered over 1,000 gifts from God to their parents.

I believe that the Lord answered our daughter’s barrenness with a son and a daughter by the same modern, medical technology that grants His healing and extends lives by kidney dialysis, heart transplants, and chemotherapy which are all “manufactured and made” answers to prayer by the talents and abilities that God grants to people.

I really appreciate that you shared with me the details of your family’s experiences. Praise be to God for the precious gifts He has given you in your grandchildren!

I think we would agree that, as Christians, we interpret all of life in this world in light of Scripture. Therefore, we can know with certainty that all children are exactly what God tells us they are in His Word: a heritage from Him. Whatever controversies surround in vitro fertilization (IVF), the children that are conceived and born to us through such procedures are still a heritage from the Lord. God’s love is what makes any and every child valuable in this life, not the means of parentage. Your grandchildren, without a doubt, are precious treasures who are wanted and cherished by our Lord, so much so that Christ died for them.

I also agree that healing medicine in and of itself is part of the daily bread God provides for us. It is part of how He richly and daily provides us with all that we need to support this body and life. Seeking medical attention where there is infirmity is natural and right. It is appropriate to try to make the body whole as long as it does not break one of our Lord’s Ten Commandments.

Knowing that, we must be consistent and interpret all of life in this world – even IVF – through the light of Scripture, and it is the genetic testing, grading, discarding, and freezing of embryos as well as the selective termination of the multiple fetuses implanted in the procedure of IVF that set it apart from other healing medicines (such as the kidney dialysis, heart transplants, and chemotherapy you listed in your question). We break the Fifth Commandment of our Lord (“You shall not murder”) when we employ any procedure that hurts or harms our neighbor in his body and fails to help and support him in every physical need. This commandment includes children in our wombs and unwanted, discarded embryos.

Consequently, in answer to your question: I feel confident in writing that any procedure which breaks commandments of our Lord is, indeed, contrary to His will, and I do not see how IVF, a procedure which serves the needs of self over the needs of the neighbor, can be pleasing to God. Thankfully, God is pleased with us because of Christ and forgives us of our sin, and He promises to work all things, even infertility medicine, for good for those who love Him and keep His commandments.

If you are interested, I write further about this issue in the posts Is IVF Healing Medicine? and The Bypass Surgery Analogy.

Also, here are a couple resources I recommend from the LCMS website that can better and more fully articulate the controversies surrounding IVF:

What Are We to Do with the Embryos? by Richard Eyer

A Review of Reproductive Technologies by Richard Eyer

I am thankful for the candor in your question, and I do not mean to make light of all that you must feel as a grandfather regarding this topic. Yet, my brother in Christ, we must interpret all of life through Scripture. Know that Christ has died for all sin, and, please, as you read these posts and documents, go talk with your pastor. He is God’s man there for you.

Hagar

Yesterday, many of you sent me a link to a CNN story by Elizabeth Cohen:

“Surrogate Offered $10,000 to Abort Baby”

Here we see The Sarah Syndrome gone wild.

1 genetic father + 1 wife + 1 anonymous egg donor + 2 IVF embryos + 1 surrogate birthmother + 2 adoptive parents = 1 child alive, 1 child dead, and 1 social and legal mess

I am afraid of the fact that cases such as these are getting court time. The more court rulings that are made on sperm donor, IVF, and surrogacy cases, the more…I don’t know, I guess the more we formally and publicly despise, defile, and – God help us! – abandon the one-flesh union and adoption as the means of parentage in our country. And so may times the children involved in these cases are treated as property with no individual rights of their own.

We are different from the world, Baptized Christians. Always have been, always will be. Remember that.

Infertility Medicine: An Unregulated Industry

They’ve gone rogue.

The infertility industry not only allows for unreported, anonymous sperm donations and child-freezing but also for the killing of children at the whim of adults (parents, judges, doctors, technicians, etc.).

What about the children’s rights? They basically have none, at least not any that an adult would feel bound to respect, and the children involved have the disadvantage of not being the paying customer in the industry. There are no checks and balances set in place, legal or social, to protect the rights of the children created, handled, and destroyed by the infertility industry.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute explains it this way in an interview with Todd Wilken on Issues, Etc. (November 22, 2011):

“A lot of our social systems have built-in, self-correction mechanisms…[T]he free market where we let people do what they want has built into it a system of property rights protection and a system of competition to keep people from getting too far out of hand. There’s nothing built in to in vitro fertilization and the industry around it that stops people from going too far. Absolutely nothing.”

If there are no checks and balances set in place in the infertility industry, what exactly is powering the frantic steam roller that is infertility medicine? Dr. Morse explains:

“[W]e have sort of drifted into the system that we have now. [N]obody ever sat down and said to themselves, ‘You know, I think it would be a great idea if anyone with money could do anything they want as far as bringing a child into being, whether they have to have a relationship with their child’s other parent or not. We’re going to give legal parenting rights to whoever intends to be a parent, never mind if there’s any biological relationship or anything like that.’ Nobody sat down and thought through and said, ‘Hey, this is a great idea. Let’s do it.’ We just kind of drifted into this position, and the in vitro fertilization industry is pretty much unregulated. People say it’s like the Wild West. Well, that’s actually kind of a smirch on the Wild West, because the Wild West did have some sense of order and some internal sense of right and wrong. And in this particular case, people seem to think that as long as the adults get what they want, they don’t really have to think through what they’re doing to the individual child. And they certainly don’t have to think through what they’re doing to the whole system that everybody is operating within…I think it is really quite appalling that what we’ve got is a system that is being driven by two things…One, it’s being driven by the passions of the infertile woman, and, two, it’s being driven by the greed of the infertility industry.”

(Dr. Morse’s full interview can be heard here.)

In a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air (January 17, 2013), science editor Judith Shulevitz shines the light on the fact that we can’t even be sure of the longterm medical consequences to both the mother and children affected by infertility treatments:

“[W]e just don’t know what we’re doing. There just isn’t a lot of data, particularly in America. The good stuff is coming out of other countries where they actually have the information collated in a national health registry. In this country, the fertility industry only reports pregnancy rates to the CDC – the Centers for Disease Control – and we don’t do follow up studies.”

Ms. Shulevitz continues to explain that it is not just a lack of required data which should cause us concern but also the cavalier, consumer-driven mentality which steam-powers an already unregulated industry:

“[W]e’re not studying [fertility] enough. We don’t regulate it enough.[W]e celebrate triumphantly each breakthrough as if it was an absolute good, and we don’t go cautiously enough and I think that’s a problem, and as the age of first birth creeps up more, and more women are going to be availing themselves of these technologies, and I think that we really ought to go carefully.”

(Ms. Shulevitz’s full interview can be heard here. PLEASE NOTE: I neither agree with nor endorse Ms. Shulevitz’s personal views on feminism, birth control, or family planning.)

More than That

So many people say to us, “How dare you speak out against IVF! I have two children/grandchildren today thanks to IVF.”

The difficult truth is that, actually, you probably have many more than that.

We just don’t see these children. We don’t hear of them, speak of them, or even know about them. They are either currently frozen in liquid nitrogen at -321 degrees Fahrenheit, or they have already died from the thawing process, from failed implantation, or from being rejected and discarded for their perceived lack of viability or their perceived genetic “flaws.”

Did you know that there are currently an estimated 600,000 of these children frozen in time? And these children have no legal rights. Well, they have the legal right to be made but not the legal right to keep living.

Lord, have mercy and forgive us.

What’s Wrong?

I enjoyed your “Best Weapon against Temptation” post. It’s as if you read my mind, as usual. My husband and I ask ourselves those same questions among others each time we go to some doctor or specialist. We even left a wonderful doctor who was very knowledgeable about PCOS as her main goal was to “get me pregnant as quick as possible.” Granted, I think IVF was even against her particular beliefs, but pregnancy still wasn’t my only goal. My husband and I have always sought a general well-being of my whole body instead of narrowly focusing on just my reproductive health.

Even with keeping that in mind, I find myself tempted to wonder why the doctors haven’t been able to find out what’s wrong, yet. Why can’t they tell me why I’m tired all the time, etc.? Then I realize that even with good intentions it’s easy for me to focus on healing coming from the doctors themselves or to be driven by a desire to figure out all the answers. It leads to nothing but frustration when one looks to doctors alone for healing and answers. As Rev. Petersen alludes to in his sermon, faith built on such “things” instead of God’s Word won’t last. Certainly there’s no comfort in putting one’s trust in things that will pass away. I’m so thankful that we have God’s Word to turn to in such times. The devil sure does know our weaknesses, and I’m even more thankful to have a Savior who has overcome such temptations for me, as I fail pretty miserably on my own!

L. Meyer

Amen, sister. Amen.

The Best Weapon against Temptation

There are reasons for seeking medical attention for infertility that can lead to sin. Answer these questions:

Do you wish to “make a baby” at the risk of hurting, even killing, your neighbor?
Do you think that having a baby is the only thing in life that can make you happy?
Do you put your identity in motherhood rather than in your Baptism?
Will your faith in God’s goodness to you in Christ Jesus be upset if you do not conceive?

These reasons for seeking medical intervention for infertility are temptations from the devil. These reasons entice us to serve our own desires and wishes, even when it means trusting the words of our doctors over the words of our Creator. We should be wary of these emotional snares that would bind our faith to things temporal rather than to things eternal.

What is our best weapon against such temptations and snares?

Rev. David H. Petersen gives us the answer in his sermon for the First Sunday in Lent – Invocabit (Genesis 3:1-21; 2 Corinthians 6:1-10; St. Matthew 4:1-11) as it appears in Thy Kingdom Come from Emmanuel Press:

All the temptations [of Jesus in the wilderness] show us something of the character of sin and the character of the God who overcomes sin. But the Lord’s response also shows us the best weapon we have against temptation and the only weapon we need. He says, again and again, “It is written.”

The strategy of the devil against our first parents, and then against our Savior, was to plant doubt. He wants us to place ourselves into the role of judge. We will decide what is good for food, pleasing to the eye, and capable of making us wise. We will decide if He is worthy of being our God. This is what we do when we declare, “My God would’t do this or say that.” But, in fact, we don’t get to decide who God is or what He should do. He tells us who He is and what He does in His Word. Faith built on emotions and feelings or our own reason and goodness is like seed sown on rocky ground. It has no root. In time of temptation, it withers and dies.

The answer to doubt is God’s Word. It is written. It is not fleeting, corruptible, or changing. It is solid, lasting, eternal. All things pass away, but the Word of God does not pass away. It is written, in the first place, on the page, not in our hearts. Even the Lord Himself, in the desert, submits to the written Word. It is the written, objective, unchanging Word. (Petersen, 29-30)

Embryonic Adoption

Question Submitted: What do you think of embryonic adoption?

Rebecca and I have spent hours on the phone, on the road, and over our dinner plates talking about this, and here is what we think:

Before we engage in a conversation about embryonic adoption in the Church, we first need to come to an agreement in the Church that embryos should cease being produced and frozen through the procedure of IVF.

In an effort to get that conversation on IVF rolling, we are engaging various LCMS pastors across the Midwest in a series of roundtable discussions on the topic. We’ll check in with you later about embryonic adoption once we’ve listened to what our pastors have to say.

In the meantime, let’s continue to pray for our littlest neighbors frozen in time. Lord, have mercy.

Train Up a Child

I have childhood memories of helping my parents set up chairs for the annual life rally at a local school. That was back in the day when public schools still encouraged nonprofit organizations to use their facilities to educate youth on such topics as (Gasp!) respecting each others’ bodies and valuing life at all stages.

I was only in third or fourth grade at the time, but my parents encouraged me to tag along for this day-long event of speakers, food, and fellowship for teenagers. My parents were members of our local Lutherans For Life chapter which supported the event, and together we set up the display of fetal models for viewing, hung signs to direct students to various rooms for breakaway sessions, and decorated the cafeteria with helium balloons. At the time, I was more interested in the balloons than the speakers, but over the years I was exposed to such life issues as human sexuality, caregiving, unplanned pregnancies, abortion, and adoption.

An accident? I think it was intentional parenting. Not only were my dad and mom modeling for me the act of service to my community, but they were also exposing me to the likes of Molly Kelly and Jim Lamb. Formative influences, for sure.

My parents did not stop there. In junior high, they brought me to life chains, conferences, prayer vigils, and pro-life fundraisers such as banquets and community breakfasts. In high school, my mom took me to two national life marches in D.C., and she encouraged me to start a local Teens For Life group at my school. Over the years, my parents showed me how to give of my time, talents, and resources to support local crisis pregnancy centers and other pro-life organizations. They taught me early on my responsibility to my littlest neighbors and showed me ways to advocate for their right to life.

No doubt, my parents’ example lit a fire under me in my childhood that continues to burn into my adult years. P1050860

How can we expect our youth today to defend the right to life if we do not teach them what that means? How can we expect them to advocate for the least in the world if we do not show them how?

My parents did that for me. God help us to do that for the next generation.

He Remembers the Barren

God remembers you in Jesus

IVF