Much public outrage followed the decision in February by Alabama’s Supreme Court to recognize cryogenically frozen embryos as people. Hundreds of thousands of these embryos have been created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) since the 1970s. These embryos are stored for years — sometimes decades — while their parents go through the difficulties of trying to conceive a child. The reaction against this decision has been swift and, given our increasingly politically polarized society, surprisingly bipartisan. A widely cited recent survey by CBS News/YouGov shows that 86 percent of Americans believe IVF should be legal. Former President Donald Trump said he “strongly supports the availability of IVF.” And Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is Catholic and identifies as pro-life, said that he supports IVF because “we want to make it easier to have babies, not harder” and IVF is “a way of giving life to more babies.”
Infertility is a heavy burden for couples to bear, and any discussion of this subject ought to recognize that struggle. Not being able to have children can be devastating. But Governor Abbott is wrong about IVF being a way of giving life to more babies. Roughly half of IVF treatments fail, resulting in the deaths of the implanted embryos. Even when there is a success, it often comes at the price of several embryos being implanted at the same time, with the less promising prospects being either miscarried or aborted. And of course, most of the embryos are not implanted at all but frozen and eventually destroyed. IVF kills far more babies than it brings to term.
The Catholic Church has consistently condemned IVF as immoral, both because of the loss of life and because of the way in which it disconnects the creation of children from intimacy between a husband and wife. In the 1987 document Donum vitae, the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said, “From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way.” IVF fails at this because it “deprives human procreation of the dignity which is proper and connatural to it.” Speaking this past November about IVF and the twin issue of surrogacy, Pope Francis said, “We are living in a time of experimentation with life. But a bad experiment. Making children rather than accepting them as a gift, as I said. Playing with life. Be careful, because this is a sin against the Creator: against God the creator, who created things this way.”
Of course, many people, including many Christians, do not believe that the magisterium of the Catholic Church carries any special weight. Yet all people, and especially all who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, have a responsibility to the poor. And children created in a laboratory for IVF, especially those abandoned to the limbo of cryopreservation, are among the poorest of the poor.
There is a certain irony in this, considering that IVF is usually only available to the wealthy. A single IVF treatment can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000, a steep price to pay given the low success rate. If it were true that IVF is about promoting human life, then presumably self-proclaimed pro-life advocates of IVF like Governor Abbott would be working tirelessly to make the procedure available to poor families. As things stand, it seems that our society is only interested in seeing more babies born if their parents are rich.
The frozen embryos in facilities around the world today are usually the children of affluent people, yet they are the poorest of the poor because they have been denied not only the comforts of modern life but the basics of human dignity. Their growth has been artificially suspended, rendering them helpless and perpetually dependent. They are victims of a grave injustice.
Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue and said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:16-21). He said that this promise is fulfilled in him, and he calls us as his followers to be agents of that good news. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says in Matthew 25, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who is my family you did it to me,” and likewise “just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” These smallest and most helpless of children are part of the Lord’s family, and we will be judged on how we treat them.
The only way as Christians we can avoid our responsibility to these children is to proclaim that they are not children at all, that an embryo does not yet meet the threshold of personhood at which it would receive basic human rights. This is not a logic available to anyone claiming to be pro-life, however, as it is inseparable from the argument made in favor of abortion.
Ever since the Enlightenment, philosophers have been scrambling to find a way of securing the unique preciousness of human life without reference to God. There must be some reason why it is okay to kill a plant or an animal but not a human being, and so our society has at various moments pointed to our rationality, our consciousness, or our sentience as reasons why we might still need to protect human life even in a godless world. But while all of these things are markers of the special nature of humanity as a whole, they do not work as criteria for evaluating the value of an individual person. Things like addiction, dementia, or mental illness may impair our rationality but do not rob us of our humanity. We lose consciousness each night when we fall asleep, but it does not follow that it would be permissible to kill us during that time. And sentience is simply impossible to prove to anyone but yourself, as only you live in your head and know how much your actions are determined by instinct. Pope St. John Paul II labeled this the problem of a “society excessively concerned with efficiency.” Our humanity, and therefore our right to exist, is predicated upon our output, our ability to do something or contribute something, rather than upon anything intrinsic about us.
By stark contrast, the Bible tells us that our value as persons is not found in anything we do, but in who we are as beings made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not say blessed are the conscious, the rational, and the sentient, but blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and those who are persecuted (Matt. 5:1-12). He teaches us that holiness is not found in efficiency but in humility, not in what we do but in who we are. This is not only the starting point for Christian morality; it is the basis for any kind of notion of human rights. As soon as our value as persons is located in anything other than our being made in God’s image, we will find ways of dismissing one group of people or another from the human family. History is soaked in the blood of such reasoning.
It is impossible to recognize the dignity of human persons and subject them to the kind of cruel fate that is required to make IVF viable. What we face now is a choice. Will we stand with the poorest of the poor, or will we allow them to be exploited? The way we answer that question as Christians, in the face of enormous counter-pressure in our culture, will be a test of our fidelity to the gospel.
