Widespread endorsement of IVF emboldens an industry that prioritizes profit over people, adults’ selfish desires over children’s natural rights, quick fixes over long-term women’s health solutions, desirable traits above all, motherless and fatherless children, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, and making human existence transactional.
Renowned British-American columnist Andrew Sullivan made waves this weekend when he debuted an article grappling with the moral and ethical implications of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In his essay titled “My Problem With IVF — And Ours,” Sullivan declared that he simply can’t stomach the popular practice that is responsible for manufacturing the estimated million embryos frozen in time in cryogenic tanks.
“[T]he conscious choice to create a human life, and to keep it alive in perpetuity, but never allow it to breathe a single breath, disturbs me,” Sullivan writes.
Sullivan is no social conservative with a cohesive pro-life philosophy. In the article, he explicitly expresses support for “maximal sexual freedom for consenting adults,” “widespread use of contraception,” and “any and all methods to help couples facing fertility issues.” And even though he confesses he “personally cannot accept the morality of consciously ending a human life, especially one so vulnerable in the womb,” he remains a proponent of “legal abortion rights for all women.”
He also spends at least one paragraph lamenting “many on the theocon right” and their grievances with the surrogacy industry, ignoring its direct link to IVF and the inevitable consequences renting a womb has on children’s rights and women.
Yet, Sullivan ultimately reaches a conclusion about IVF that few in his shoes have been willing to say aloud: Creating human lives in a lab “only to destroy them as waste” is wrong.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. IVF cycles yield big batches of embryos every year. Yet, only an estimated 7 percent of these test tube babies survive the treacherous journey from petri dish to freezer to womb. These embryos, Sullivan accurately notes, are “quite simply a means to an end, violating a basic norm of inviolable human dignity.”
Sullivan goes far beyond “balking” at the serial creation and destruction of embryos exploited to “beat the odds.” He calls out the eugenics undertones often promoted by the fertility industry via embryo selection and wonders how “sacrificing many sons and daughters to create one” is anything but “evil.”