Embryo adoption

Tori and Sam Earle "adopted" an embryo frozen 20 years earlier by another couple. Matthew Eppinette and his wife chose to forgo IVF out of ethical concerns and have no children of their own.

All are guided by a strong Christian faith and believe life begins at or around conception.

And all have wrestled with the same weighty questions: How do you build a family in a way that conforms with your beliefs? Is IVF an ethical option, especially if it creates more embryos than a couple can use?

"We live in a world that tries to be black and white on the subject," Tori Earle said. "It's not a black-and-white issue."

Faith v. science

The dilemma reflects the age-old friction between faith and science at the heart of the recent IVF controversy in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos have the legal status of children.

The ruling — which decided a lawsuit about embryos that were accidentally destroyed — caused large clinics to pause IVF services, sparking a backlash.

State leaders devised a temporary solution that shielded clinics from liability but didn't address the legal status of embryos created in IVF labs. Concerns about IVF's future prompted U.S. senators from both parties to propose bills aiming to protect IVF nationwide.

Laurie Zoloth, a professor of religion and ethics at the University of Chicago, said arguments about this modern medical procedure touch on two ideas fundamental to the founding of American democracy: freedom of religion and who counts as a full person.

The religious question

"People have different ideas of what counts as a human being. Where to draw the line?" said Zoloth, who is Jewish. "And it's not a political question. It's really a religious question."

For many evangelicals and other Christians, IVF can be problematic, and some call for more regulation and education.

The process is "inherently unnatural," and there are significant concerns relating to "the dignity of human embryos," said Jason Thacker, a Christian ethicist who directs a research institute at the Southern Baptist Convention.

"I'm both pro-family and pro-life," he said. "But just because we can do something, it doesn't mean we should."

Kelly and Alex Pelsor of Indianapolis turned to a fertility specialist after trying to have children naturally for two years. Doctors said her best chance for a baby was through IVF, which accounts for around two percent of births in the U.S.

"I was honestly very scared," said Pelsor, who believes life begins as soon as growth starts after sperm and egg meet. "I didn't know which way to go."

Pelsor and her husband talked and prayed. She began attending a Christian infertility support group called Moms in the Making. She said she started to feel "this inexplicable peace about moving forward with IVF."

Pelsor, 37, underwent a retrieval procedure in March 2021 and got five eggs.

Three were able to be fertilised, and two embryos grew to the blastocyst stage and were able to be frozen. One was transferred to her womb in July 2021, and her daughter was born in March 2022.

"I truly believe she's a miracle from God," said Pelsor, who works for a nonprofit that includes a nondenominational church. "She would not be here without IVF."

Pelsor miscarried the other embryo after it was transferred last year. So she never had to personally face the moral quandary of what to do with extras.

The moral quandrary

Amanda Walker of Albuquerque, New Mexico, did.

She and her husband turned to IVF after trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant naturally for five years and then having a miscarriage.

She wound up with 10 embryos. She miscarried five. Three became her children: an 8-year-old daughter and twins that will turn 3 in July.

That left her with two more, which she agonized and prayed about.

She said she often wonders how many other women find themselves in the same position she did after the egg retrieval, "where they're just naive about the process in the beginning," fertilizing too many eggs and then not knowing what to do.

"We didn't want to destroy them," said Walker, 42. "We believe that they are children."

Considering the ethics of IVF

When Matthew Eppinette, a bioethicist, speaks about IVF, he hears many similar stories.

Couples tell him, "‘Well, we got way into the process, and we had these frozen embryos, and we just never realised that we were going to have to make decisions about this,'" said Eppinette.

He's the executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University, an evangelical school based in Illinois.

"There's a large educational component to this, both I think within the church, and maybe even within the medical community, to make sure that people are aware of what all is encompassed in IVF."

Dr. John Storment, a reproductive endocrinologist in Lafayette, Louisiana, said he talks with patients about such issues, and some with similar beliefs about when life begins take steps to minimize or eliminate the risk of extra embryos.

For example, doctors can limit the number of eggs they're likely to get by giving less ovary-stimulating medication. Or they can fertilize two or three eggs — hoping that one embryo grows — and freeze any other eggs.

If a few eggs need to be thawed and fertilised later, he estimated that would cost around $5,000 on top of the usual $15,000 to $25,000 for a round of IVF.

Another option is to transfer one or two embryos to the womb immediately without freezing any embryos or eggs. But if that doesn't work, a patient could face another costly egg retrieval.

Thacker said that sort of "fresh" transfer is more ethically permissible than freezing embryos for an uncertain fate, "but I still don't think it's advisable."

Religious scholars say the IVF issue is largely under-explored among evangelical Protestants, who lack the clear position against the procedure taken by the Catholic Church (even if individual Catholics vary in whether they adhere to the church's teachings on reproductive ethics).

Still, Eppinette said most evangelical leaders would advise couples to create only as many embryos as they're going to use and not leave any cryogenically frozen indefinitely.

In his own life, Eppinette goes further, saying "my personal conviction is against IVF."

That's why he and his wife weren't willing to try it when they faced infertility in the 1990s and her one pregnancy ended in miscarriage.

Adopting the embryos created by IVF

Some couples and religious leaders find an answer in embryo adoption, a process that treats embryos like children in need of a home. Read more

• Laura Ungar is overs medicine and science on the AP's global health and science team. She has been a health journalist for more than two decades.
• Tiffinay Stanley is a reporter and editor on The Associated Press' global religion team.

Such embryos cannot (yet) develop into full-grown human beings. Even if transplanted into a uterus, the specimen could never attach to the uterine wall.

Yet, what we have here is still a (disabled) human embryo. Without parents.

Are you disgusted? We believe that if you have a well-formed conscience, this is a good and proper reaction to this development.

We cannot always and everywhere trust a reaction of repugnance; at times, such a reaction is simply the result of ingrained biases and stereotypes.

But there is often a certain wisdom in our repulsion. Repugnance can assert itself as a moral alarm and response to real moral distress.

This is such a time.

The creation of a human embryo without sperm and egg shares some important similarities with other artificial reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilisation and certain surrogacy practices that involve the creation of human embryos outside the human body.

Perhaps most strikingly, the procedure overlaps the process of modifying genes using novel techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9. In both cases, a manufactured human embryo is the result of direct human intervention.

Tellingly, CRISPR-Cas9 has been known to be used only once on human embryos.

The scientist who performed the procedure, He Jiankui, was roundly and firmly criticised by the medical and ethics community and served a prison sentence for his work.

Meanwhile, leading scientists — including Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the creators of the technique — have called for a moratorium on its use on human embryos.

The creation of a human embryo without sperm or egg also goes beyond what we have seen in previous artificial reproductive technology and genetic engineering techniques.

In vitro fertilisation and even CRISPR-Cas9 involve direct human intervention in the reproductive process. Yet, all of them work by modifying or intervening with existing human embryos or gametes.

The manufacture of a human embryo without sperm or egg, by contrast, aims to build a human embryo from scratch.

The process is less a tweak to human reproduction or bending it to our own will than replacing it with something different altogether.

Heretofore we have aimed to eliminate variability, inconvenience or inefficiency from human reproduction. With this new development, the aim is different: to swap human reproduction for a different process entirely.

The charge of playing God comes to mind.

The charge is over-attributed and sometimes reveals more about our biases than something morally real, but in this case it is apt.

There are at least two kinds of playing God: An overstepping by humans into spheres of action that should be reserved for the divine, and a hubristic attempt to meddle with the world in ways that our all-too-human intellects simply do not understand.

In creating human embryos from scratch, we risk playing God in both senses.

One of us is a philosopher and the other a theologian.

We are both convinced that a Catholic understanding of reproduction could be a cultural antidote to the toxic understanding of reproduction that has led to the development of an eggless, spermless embryo.

Our position is not aligned with some kind of revisionist attempt to "take us back to the 1950s" (or some such dismissive phrase), but is rather at the heart of the perspective that Pope Francis and the Vatican reaffirmed just a few months ago.

As Christianity yields to a consumerist reproductive throwaway culture, the logic of the marketplace takes over.

Instead of seeing the creation of new human beings as pro-creation with God (our ultimate creator), who offers them as an unmerited gift, we now think of it as yet another transaction between individuals.

I have resources (money, insurance) and you have skills and facilities (medical training and fertility labs)? Well, then who is anyone to come between autonomous actors pursuing their self-interests?

Our post-Christian culture is already well advanced down this pathway, as couples, individuals and even "throuples" demand control over the embryos and future children they purchase in the marketplace.

We've had decades, actually, of privileged people demanding the ability to purchase ova and sperm based on the donor's IQ, attractiveness, participation in varsity athletics, and more.

Sex selection is par for the course in many contexts.

And of course our throwaway culture simply discards the prenatal human beings who don't fit the market-based criteria.

But here again we have something that is genuinely new.

Instead of modifying or intervening (albeit dramatically!) into the process God created for procreation, this new technology has the potential to obliterate it.

Catholics, other Christians and all people of good will must make our voices heard on this and work to make creation of such embryos illegal.

It may seem, and we may be told, that we can trust the process to stay where it is — that no actual reproduction would ever take place using this new technology.

But the history outlined above shows that is a very, very bad bet.

In a culture that becomes more and more dominated by the logic of the marketplace and by a commitment to a kind of relativism that welcomes virtually any vision of the good, who are we to impose our view onto others who think differently?

They should be able to make their transaction and we should butt out.

It will do us no good to pretend that this is a retreat to a kind of moral neutrality. The marketplace has its own logic and its own goods. It rewards the privileged while exploiting the marginalised.

There is no view from nowhere on this question. No neutral place to hide.

We can and must explicitly and firmly take a stand with a particular vision of the good. And the Catholic vision stands ready to provide precisely what is necessary in this context.

Unfortunately, there are forces even within the Church itself that are apparently trying to undermine the Church's teaching in this regard — precisely where it is so obviously and importantly true and needed the most.

Those of us who agree with Francis's vision of resisting a consumerist, throwaway culture with the logic of gift and openness to life must redouble our efforts to make our voices heard on this new and repugnant biotechnological development.

• Joe Vukov is an associate professor of philosophy and associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the author, most recently, of The Perils of Perfection.
• First published in Religion News Service. Republished with permission.

'And that means the 'proper place' for children to be conceived is in a loving marriage between a mother and father.

Kleinsman says Catholic belief is that technology to assist in conception undermines "the dignity that is owed to us as persons when it takes conception out of the personal and quintessentially human paradigm characterised by a self-giving unconditional love".

A lengthy article in the Herald on Sunday says that as lifestyles and relationships change, and new and advancing fertility technologies are discovered, so too does the make-up of the modern family.

The traditional family is still the most represented according to Statistics New Zealand (couples with children rose from 447,894 in 2006 to 469,290 in 2013) but alternatives are on the increase.

Single-parent families, for example, jumped from 193,635 to 201,804 and numbers of extended families living together has gone from 82,692 to 100,605 over the seven-year period.

It means a generation of children will be growing up with a new "normal" when it comes to the concept of family.

The article refers to claims by a University of Cambridge professor that, based on 35 years of international research, children brought up in "new family forms", such as same-sex families, and children born from IVF do as well as children from traditional families.

It also asserts that a lack of mother or father figures in the home didn't adversely affect children, as long as they had stable and supportive parental role models.

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: cnshospital.com

These were among the warnings sounded before the United Kingdom's House of Commons passed a new law permitting their creation.

The new regulations enable genetic processes to fight the transmission of mitochondrial diseases, such as muscular dystrophy.

The UK is the first country in the world to legalise the new techniques.

Two procedures were covered by the regulations.

The maternal spindle transfer technique involves the extraction of the genetic material from a mother's egg, which is then inserted into a donor egg in which the maternal spindle has been removed and discarded.

The reconstituted egg is then fertilised by the father's sperm before implantation in the mother.

The procedure is known as "three-parent IVF".

The second technique, pronuclear transfer, involves up to four parents.

Dr Trevor Stammers, programme director in Bioethics and Medical Law at St Mary's University, said babies produced by such methods will have to be monitored all their lives, as will their children.

Dr Paul Knoepfler, associate professor at the University of California, Davis, also warned that babies could be born with defects.

"Aberrations could lead to developmental defects in babies or also manifest in later life as increased rates of ageing of cancer," he said.

Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, said the new procedures disrupted the "evolutionary compatibility" between the nucleus and the mitochondria of the cell.

"It is going to lead to children with conditions which, in some cases, will probably be worse than the conditions they are trying to avoid," he said.

A technique similar to that approved in Britain has been banned in China.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has decided such techniques are not safe enough to be approved.

The UK's House of Lords will consider the legislation on February 23.

If it passes, the first human trials could take place from October and the first babies born by late 2016.

The Catholic bishops of England and Wales expressed concerns over the ethics of the new procedures.

Sources

• The Telegraph
• The Tablet
• Catholic Herald
• Image: Monash University

Stuart says the way the news was delivered added to the blow. His doctor walked into the room and bluntly declared: "You've got big troubles. You basically have one good sperm." Stuart says this "made me feel about an inch tall".

Like most illnesses, infertility does not discriminate. But somehow it makes people feel they are part of a brutal natural selection process that prevents the weakest from reproducing their inferior genes. It also has a cruel way of making well-matched couples feel they may not be truly compatible. Says Rachel, "I often think, in a way, that, as hard as it has been, I'm glad it was both of us that had problems because if it was just me, I would have felt as though Stu should go and find someone else."

The Maloneys borrowed most of the $30,000 they have spent on IVF to become pregnant with Nate. While they don't regret a cent of it and believe they have received good care, they still wonder why the often repetitive procedures cost so much. "The thing that always pulls me up is the embryo transfer," Rachel says. "It costs about $3000 and it's a bit like a pap smear. They basically pop a speculum in and use a catheter to squirt the embryo in with some sterile water. It takes about 15 minutes. The doctor is there, so we're obviously paying for his time, but the embryo has already been created and we pay storage fees of about $160 every six months to keep them frozen. A scientist obviously has to prepare the embryos, but $3000 for a 15-minute procedure? That really gets me." Continue reading

Sources

• The Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: The Guardian

The letter says parents shirk their responsibility if they agree to the freezing of their children, and the future of embryos in the frozen orphanages is "very bleak".

The freezing or disposal of surplus embryos shows that IVF methods, "which at first glance seem to be at the service of life, are in fact actually a threat to human life", the bishops say.

Continue reading

Sensational news reports surrounding the $180,000 price tag for Ukrainian black-market babies shocked the determinedly secular segments of society, and few remain unmoved by the story of the FBI's round-up of "baby-brokers." Beyond the initial horror of children clinically conceived and sold as a commodity, investigators discovered that these babies have dozens of full and half siblings that were sold elsewhere. This opens the possibility that, in 25 years, a young man might unknowingly marry his sister.

Added to the fate of the children is the dismal lot of the destitute women (often living in third-world countries) who offer their bodies as surrogate wombs. In India, 500 clinics service the nation's "fertility tourism," estimated to be a $450-million-per-year industry — and growing. Ads for medical tourism in Thailand boast, "We've got the affordable IVF procedures you heard about, great IVF vacations, and low-cost IVF gender selection."

As fertility technologies increase, so do the ethical quandaries. Scanning the comments on these news articles, one is immediately struck by the revulsion many people have to these accounts of black-market infants. On the other hand, the dozens of websites soliciting surrogate mothers indicate that surrogacy is — for many of these same people — just another legitimate business arrangement.

The subject is complicated, even polarizing, because many couples (including Catholics) conceived their own children via IVF. For these parents, IVF is applauded as a means of family-building, not abuse of babies. The temptation of couples who have difficulty conceiving deserves our compassion and prayers. The echo of Hannah is heard down the centuries: "And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord and wept in anguish" (1 Sam 1:10-11).

Yet the lurid news accounts of black-market babies provide an opening to share the wisdom of the Church's prohibition against IVF and teaching on the inviolate sacredness of human life. The challenge for Catholics is to effectively engage the secular argument, which is best achieved from the perspective of the common good for all of society without recourse to religious references. Wisdom need not be presented as religious or scriptural teaching, but rather as the practical consequence that proceeds from violating a basic ethic: Humans cannot be owned.

Read More: Crisis Magazine

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