The Pandora’s box of IVF

The Guardian recently reported about a U.S. startup company that is “offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology.” Controversial indeed. The company in question, Heliospect Geonomics, was exposed via undercover video footage selling the genetic selection service for $50,000 a pop. The company alleges that their service could predict a six-point IQ increase in the embryos selected. The story raises moral questions not only about the emerging genetic selection industry but also about the procedure of in-vitro fertilization more broadly, which has become a flash point in our current cultural and political moment.

The development obviously raises the moral specter of eugenics, with its dark past and its even darker potential future. The notion that humanity can be engineered in this way to reduce disease and other “bad” traits is an alluring prospect for those on the cutting edge of this technology. But its proponents assure us that this time is different because the procedures do not involve state-sanctioned attempts at modifying the population but a “liberal eugenics” that is freely chosen by parents. But the origin of the decision matters not to the vulnerable human beings in question. In fact, it represents a more dangerous prospect, in which eugenics becomes not the exclusive preserve of a nefarious government (which is in some ways easier to spot and oppose) but a widely available (if expensive, for now) possibility for all. That the prospect is more a Huxleyan and Postmanian (Amusing Ourselves to Death) venture, rather than a more Orwellian possibility, is cold comfort for those who wish to defend the dignity of all human life and most especially for the human organisms left on the chopping block, that is, the cryogenic freezer or the medical waste bin.

This technology and others that will surely be advanced in its wake are all contained in the Pandora’s box of IVF itself. The reaction to an Alabama Supreme Court case, which afforded human embryos produced via IVF a right to life under Alabama’s wrongful death statute, has been politically and morally telling. Opposition to IVF is a political loser in the current climate, which sent some Republican lawmakers and candidates into overdrive as they sought to assuage voters that the reproductive technology will not be opposed and may even be financially underwritten by GOP administrations. Republicans have stalled an attempt to enshrine a nationwide right to IVF into federal law, but President-elect Donald Trump has declared himself the “father of IVF” and the GOP as “the party for IVF.” The whole ordeal has created a moment of soul-searching for those who have been stalwart in their public opposition to abortion. The question is not merely political but biological and ethical. If life begins at conception, not at some other moment in human development (whether implantation or viability or “breath“), then even the tiniest human organisms deserve protection and dignity.

IVF technology is controversial even among pro-life Christians because we all likely know someone who has either conceived or been conceived using this technology. Nothing that we might say in opposition to IVF should be misconstrued as diminishing such persons’ full humanity and dignity. Nothing should be said that gainsays the urgent desire of a married couple to have a child. But upon the pains of a theologically and philosophically unsustainable utilitarianism, we cannot simply argue that the ends justify the means. Christians have good reason to call all IVF into question, not only because of the downstream possibilities of genetic selection and engineering but because the procedure itself undermines the integrity and dignity of human reproduction.

Some Christian ethicists have suggested that there is a morally permissible way to practice IVF. If the couple in question seeks to produce only those embryos that they intend to provide the possibility of implantation, then the technology is viewed as an extension (even if more radically interventionist) of other reproductive aids, such as fertility pills or artificial insemination (a practice that raises its own moral questions). In other words, if no embryos are discarded or kept in perpetual suspension via cryopreservation, then IVF would not be life-destroying. Sure, some of the injected embryos might not arrive at implantation or survive gestation, but miscarriages are common in any event (studies suggest around 20% of all natural pregnancies end in miscarriage). But if IVF doesn’t intend the destruction of any embryos, perhaps it is morally allowable.

A defensible case can be made for such a position, and I do not wish to speak too dogmatically in such a sensitive and nuanced dilemma. But I think a good case can be made that Christians should be suspicious of all reproductive technologies that seek to sever reproduction from its natural habitat in the marital union. Intentional destruction of human life is not the only moral bar to clear, as it were. The question that Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan posed years ago still looms large: Are we begotten or made? Is life the fruit of human love, or is it the product of human ingenuity? Do we find our origin in our parents’ natural union or a laboratory scientist? How we answer that fundamental question has everything to do with what we will make of these developments in genetic selection. For now, it seems, the human engineering horse is out of the IVF barn. We would be better served by reconsidering the whole issue from the ground up.