In Glass, Part II

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.

Last time, we introduced you to D’Lynn Herting. She became a Christian while in a Michigan prison on drug charges. But she began to grow in her faith.

HERTING: I think every single day, I was just in the Bible. Every single day, all day.  I wouldn't take it back for anything.

After 18 months, she got out of jail. Got married in 2019. Then she and her husband tried to start a family. She desperately wanted someone to love and nurture—a child to train up to know and love Christ. But they struggled to conceive.

HERTING: I just remember being sad, just because I wanted to be a mom so bad.

So she decided to try in vitro fertilization. Her doctors extracted 17 of her eggs and successfully fertilized 10. Three of the tiny humans died. Doctors inserted two of the remaining seven into her uterus.

But there were still no guarantees. Miscarriages happen often at this point. So when we left D’Lynn last episode, she had cleaned the local Walmart out of pregnancy tests. She was trying to see if the embryos had implanted into her uterus. It was 2020.

HERTING: I spent about $200 a day on pregnancy tests, peeing on the stick every time I had to go…. 

And that’s where we left it. This story is from WORLD reporter Leah Savas. She’ll pick it up again right here.

LEAH SAVAS: After about a week of taking test after test, D’Lynn finally saw a faint line appear on the wand.

HERTING: I didn't believe it. So I took about 10 more after.

All positive. She put the test sticks in a box as keepsakes.

Her first ultrasound was at seven weeks. She remembers the dim, chilly room with classical music playing, an exam bed in the middle with a screen facing it. The ultrasound tech guiding her through what she was seeing on the screen. Her baby. Henry.

HERTING: So like I had an app that traces like what they look like. So he looks literally like a skin tag. And she was like, you see the flickering?

And then she turned on the volume.

HERTING: And you heard his little fast heartbeat. First he doesn't even have a head. He doesn't even have feet. He doesn't even have arms. He literally is big as half of my pinky nail. And there is a heart beating in him. It was the most, I just—that, I cried because I was like, Oh my gosh, that's my baby.

She showed me a video she took of the ultrasound screen. Henry looks like a little gray blob. But you can see the flicker of his heartbeat.

HERTING: This is so cool.

There was a problem. The clinic had implanted two embryos, but there was only one heartbeat. One of the babies hadn’t made it. But she was so thrilled to be pregnant that what had happened didn’t quite sink in.

HERTING: So at that point, you don't think about the baby not taking and then that possibly thinking that of as a miscarriage. Right? I was just happy that I was pregnant with Henry.

In her mind, IVF had been a success. It was a dream come true. About seven months later, she heard Henry’s first cry in the delivery room.

HERTING: Like you, when you have your child, it's going to be a love, you'll never experience but if you don't have that child, you're never going to know what that means. Finally, when I heard Henry's first cry before I even saw him, I understood what that meant. Because as soon as I heard his cry, I was like, I'd give my life for you. Like, I would do anything.

At that moment, everything she had been through was worth it. Why would she want to take any of that back? By that time, she knew there was some controversy about IVF. Some ethical issues. But that wasn’t on her mind when Henry arrived. She had just brought life into the world.

MATTHEW LEE ANDERSON: I also had lots of questions about what it meant that we would handle human beings in the earliest stages of their existence.

Matthew Lee Anderson is a research professor of theology and ethics at Baylor University.

ANDERSON: And if you think about the deep desire to have a child, it's really important. It's really, it's something that we value a lot. And in vitro fertilization just seems like medicine’s way of helping people achieve that desire. And who wants to say no to that, right?

How can you hear a story like D’Lynn’s and say, no, the process that produced Henry is morally wrong. How can you face a couple struggling with infertility and say

ANDERSON: … that actually you shouldn't do that.

But that’s what he thinks. He agrees that children produced by IVF are a blessing. A good thing.

ANDERSON: … we just would have loved them to come into the world through means that were different than in vitro fertilization.

The Catholic Church has been the strongest voice against IVF, and for the longest time. For decades. Anderson is one of a growing number of Protestants who agree.

To Anderson, the whole concept of IVF is problematic, whether or not a tiny human dies in the process.

ANDERSON: As the pro-life movement has said over and over and over embryos are the most vulnerable among us.

Human life shouldn’t be handled in a lab, he said.

ANDERSON: It seems like there's ways in which it actually, by instrumentalizing human life, by forming human beings in labs, actually demeans it or diminishes it in certain respects.

What’s more, IVF seems to subvert the picture of God knitting life together in a mother’s womb.

ANDERSON: I think in vitro fertilization reduces children in some deep sense, to persons who are made by us. Procreation, natural procreation, where a couple tries to conceive a child, is a sign that the world has been given to us by God, and that they cannot make this child.

On the other hand, theologian Wayne Grudem believes that Christians can in good conscience use IVF. Just as long as they treat the unborn children as persons worthy of protection. And only use sperm and eggs from the husband and wife, not from a third-party donor.

WAYNE GRUDEM: Modern medicine is, in general, morally good, it can be used for wrong or evil purposes. But in general, we should be thankful for the progress of modern medicine in vitro fertilization in general, it is a means of overcoming some infertility problems … I think that's morally acceptable.

For Kathryn Carnahan, one of the hardest parts about the years of infertility she and her husband faced after their marriage was knowing that fact, that children are a blessing from the Lord.

CARNAHAN: It's also really challenging, you know, as a Christian, to pray for something or ask for something, and to know that it's a good thing. And that what you're—what you want is, is good. And to not know if you're gonna get it.

Carnahan is now an OBGYN in Wisconsin. She was in residency at the same time she and her husband started trying to get pregnant. But even while she was dealing with the sorrow of childlessness, she wasn’t resentful of the other pregnant women she saw. A lot can happen in a pregnancy.

CARNAHAN: I took care of women who had really healthy normal pregnancies, and were going to have an abortion. I took care of women who had desperately wanted pregnancy and lost their pregnancy, you know, in at 20 weeks, you know, or at full term. There's just so many ways that pregnancy can go well, there's so many ways that can go poorly.

She and her husband decided to try IVF. Sometimes Carnahan wondered if all of the ultrasounds and the painful daily shots she was enduring were even worth it. She knew there were no guarantees. She couldn’t control the results. Nor could her fertility specialist. She says she laughs when she hears objections like Anderson’s—that humans are assuming God’s role in IVF.

CARNAHAN: And I mean, just every part of the process, like whether your eggs are good quality or not, like which egg meets which sperm, which embryo survives, which embryo implants, I mean, you have no control over whether it works or not. You don't, you don't have control over if you get pregnant, you don't have control over what child you get, right, you know that—l mean, that child is still 100% a gift from God.

Kathryn and her husband now have two sons through IVF. The youngest was born last year. She said they will implant their four remaining embryos and are open to however many children come through the process. Theoretically, each of the embryos could form identical twins.

But Carnahan also acknowledged that she’s getting older. No one knows what the future holds for her and her husband, or their embryos. And that’s another issue Anderson has with the process.

ANDERSON: You know, you can imagine people who create, say, four or five embryos, who genuinely intend or plan to use all of them, say, …

But then they get pregnant naturally, or circumstances change. Suddenly the desire for children seems less urgent. Will they still implant them all?

ANDERSON: So within even that process, there's a kind of hubris about knowing what the future is going to hold, such that we would create these human lives on the prospect or with the intention that we would use them all. A lot of our intentions about the future just cannot come to pass that way.

According to a study published last year, around 20 percent of women who used IVF or similar fertility treatments for their first baby actually do end up getting pregnant naturally later. And the unpredictability of disease and even death could get in the way of good intentions.

D’Lynn learned this the hard way. Her trouble began when she was 36 weeks pregnant with Henry. D’Lynn started getting migraines that just never seemed to go away.

HERTING: It didn't matter how much Tylenol I took, nothing. I kept going to urgent care. So they checked my blood pressure. My blood pressure was through the roof. 

She went to her OB the next day and it was still sky-high. She had preeclampsia, a severe condition that can develop during pregnancy. It’s marked by high blood pressure that can damage your organs. IVF pregnancies increase the risk of developing preeclampsia.

HERTING: So she was like, oh, we need to—at this point, I was like 37 weeks. You need to go ahead and go and we're going to induce you. Yeah. And so I got induced, was in the hard labor for 38 hours.

When her labor stalled, they performed a C-Section. She said she could feel the whole thing because her epidural wore off. Even after Henry was born and she left the hospital, her condition was still worrying.

HERTING: I got home and I was convulsing. 

She went back to the hospital where they put her on a magnesium drip.

HERTING: And then got me on medication. At that point. I had kidney, kidney issues where I had to see a kidney doctor, my liver was taking a hit so I had to see a liver doctor.  And then my cardiologist. So all of that occurred and then I had to take my gallbladder out because that messed it up too. So it was you know, it was a hay ride.

She said the experience traumatized her. Her relationship with her husband was starting to deteriorate. And she was starting to feel convicted about even pursuing IVF in the first place. A Christian friend had raised objections to IVF that left questions in D’Lynn’s mind: Watching Henry grow from a little gray blob made her see her embryos as babies. But she’d started their lives in a petri dish and then froze them. What kind of risks did that involve? What would she do with her other five babies, still on ice? D’Lynn couldn’t leave them there.

HERTING: I was like, I'm gonna get to 125 pounds. I'm gonna wait the one year that they ask, and I'm going back in and doing it.

She checked with her specialists: kidney, liver, cardiologist, and gynecologist. They all said

HERTING: I was good to go. MFM doctor told me the risks, what this would look like, said that they are not too worried about it. So, went ahead and did it.

The clinic unthawed and implanted two more of her embryos. But the traumatic end to her pregnancy with Henry didn’t leave her mind.

HERTING: Oh, I didn't stop. Every single day I was scared, and every single day, I prayed to God not to take my life. It was the worst feeling in the world.

This time, both of the embryos implanted. D’Lynn was pregnant with twins. But this pregnancy was even more complicated than the last one. This time, she had placenta previa. That’s when the placenta covers the cervix. It’s dangerous and can lead to uncontrollable, life-threatening bleeding during labor. D’Lynn was supposed to be on bed rest. At five months, she was passing massive blood clots. Again, she developed preeclampsia.

HERTING: From 31 to almost 33 weeks, I was in the hospital because of my blood pressure and, like, the signs of preeclampsia happening. So I had a whole team following me. And then I went home for a day. And then it just shot up. So I went back in and they did a C-section.

It was summer 2022. When Ruth and Esther arrived, D’Lynn was pretty out of it because of her pain relievers. Because she had tested positive for COVID, she didn’t get to hold the twins. She got only a glimpse from a distance before hospital staff took them away to the NICU. For the first ten days after their birth, she was only allowed to see her girls via FaceTime. But in the end she and her husband had two daughters.

Except that, it wasn’t “she and her husband” for much longer. Complications in D’Lynn’s relationship with her husband came to a head soon after the twins were born. D’Lynn felt that her husband wasn’t the Christian she thought he was. In one moment of anger when she was around five months pregnant, she said, he told her to just get rid of the twins. He wasn’t there when they were born and never visited them in the NICU. He and D’Lynn separated when they were about six months old, after D’Lynn told him she wanted a divorce. She said he’s never seen his kids since.

She can see now how her choices affected him.

HERTING: It's almost like, did he resent me because I'm making him go through this. Or I didn't ever ask how he felt. Right. It was just all about me. And so therefore, there was repercussions, I believe. He just went along with it, right. But he was never part of the process. He just produced the sperm.

D’Lynn still wanted to implant her three remaining embryos. But she knew she could face more complications in another pregnancy. Worst case: she could leave her children motherless.

HERTING: So basically, you have all these embryos, and if you're really not willing to risk your life, because you already have these couple of kids to have the rest, then you have three choices.

You can unthaw them.

HERTING: So basically kill them. You can donate them to science, so basically kill them. Or you can adopt them and give them life, right, or God gives life so you can adopt them so that they there's an opportunity, right?

D’Lynn decided to place her three final embryos up for adoption.

SAVAS: Was that hard?

D’LYNN: It was. It's almost like you're giving your babies away. Yeah. It was, I cried. Okay. It does look like adoption initially, verbally. It is, right. I had to sign a property agreement. It was property, the babies were property that they were adopting, right. It's kind of sickening. But that was, that was the whole legal aspect of it.

The adoption agency had her create a profile of her family. Then she specified what she wanted the adoptive family to be like: race, education, religion, family history of divorce. The agency would send her profiles of couples interested in adopting her embryos.

HERTING: It's a huge PowerPoint. And if I wanted to deny it, I could deny it. And you just pick like that.

She picked a couple in California—Christians. Active in their church. The mom would stay at home. The dad would work to take care of the family.

The couple unthawed and implanted two of the three embryos. One of them survived, and the baby was born in October 2023. D’Lynn got to see a photo of him and his parents not long before I visited her at her apartment. She was at work and got an email from the adoption agency.

HERTING: And I was like, oh, so I got some tears in my eyes, like I was so happy, right. I zoomed in on his face look like Henry, had Ruth’s color hair. But I was just more like, my heart aches a little bit. I just wish I had him. Right. He would have been mine.

But she also senses a strange disconnect.

HERTING: But because I didn't give birth to him, and I don't know if this is the Lord, I don't know what this is. But psychologically, there's not a connection. So it's not how I felt when I heard Henry's first cry. I was like, Oh, my goodness, it's a love you can never—like, I can't even imagine how the Lord feels about us, versus how I feel about my children after you know, hearing their first cry.

Looking back, D’Lynn regrets pursuing IVF. She loves her kids and says her biggest desire is to see them love the Lord. But she can see how sin played a big role in her choices. She sees in herself the same longing in her heart that Genesis describes in Jacob’s wife Rachel, who also struggled to get pregnant.

HERTING: And like I said, I could totally relate to her when being barren that she was so desperate, right? But if she didn't conceive, she would die—like, she would just—that's coveting, right? I was coveting for a child. That’s sin in itself.

D’Lynn also recognizes her lack of concern for her own offspring at their tiniest stages. Now, she feels responsible for the embryos that didn’t survive.

HERTING: What if the other were correctly conceived, right? Or normal conception, produced and developed in a normal body and an environment? Would they have lived? I was so consumed with chasing what I wanted and what my heart wanted, and what I felt I needed, that I didn't take any of that into consideration. And then so now there's lives lost.

She told me that she even feels like a murderer.

And then there’s her husband. From D’Lynn’s perspective, his lack of connection to their children is partly due to how disconnected he was from the whole IVF process.

HERTING: He wants nothing to do with them. So I do believe that that's a consequence to my sin and now they have to suffer that. And I don’t think that—I don't know if I would have been able to see forward, I wouldn't have went through with it.

She believes God would have used her infertility to strengthen her relationship with him and mature her spiritually. She wonders if she would have ended up fostering or adopting other children. Maybe God would have given her other opportunities to serve him. She also wonders if she would still be married if she hadn’t done IVF.

HERTING: I definitely have a stress of a single mom, which God never intended. I always worry about. There's always a heaviness or a fear of not being able to support my kids. Bills get harder, you know. But all you can do is just rest in God. There's nothing, there's nothing else I have. But him. But it's, it is hard. It's mentally draining. And I don’t wish it for anybody, you know?

Matthew Lee Anderson pointed to Abraham’s story as an example of the sin that can result from the good desire for children. At the suggestion of his wife Sarah, Abraham slept with her maidservant, Hagar.

ANDERSON: I think the example of Abraham and Hagar really does underscore what people are willing to do when they feel the weight and burden of having, as you said, an heir. It's very tempting to reach for means of creating life when you don't have a future generation who would come behind you.

God also used each story of barrenness to show his power. He blessed couples with children in his own way and in his own time. And these families were key figures in the preparations for the coming Messiah. But even if God hadn’t done that, Scripture also offers another clear message about children: as nice as they are, children are not our hope or our future.

Psalm 17 describes, quote, “men of the world whose portion is in this life.” God may “fill their womb with treasure.” But, says the Psalmist, “As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.” Anderson says the Psalm hints about

ANDERSON: Having a legacy that doesn't have to do with progeny.

Within the Church, childless couples do have specific roles, he says. They’re not easy, but necessary.

ANDERSON: But it seems to me that what childless couples remind the church of is that babies come directly from God. And that's a hard position to be in. Because it means that childless couples do not receive something that they love and care for very deeply. So they have a heavy cross to carry. But it's a cross that I think is necessary for chastening the church from identifying its own future with its children. Because that's not where its future lies, its future lies in God and in the action of God. We pin our hopes on the advent of the kingdom of God, becoming of Christ, the resurrection of the body. That's the future to which we're headed. And it's a future ironically, in which there will be no marrying nor being given in marriage. And with that, no death, and presumably no procreation, right.

On a Thursday night a few months after I visited D’Lynn at her apartment, we hopped on a Zoom call.

Since we last talked, she’s moved into a house and bought a puppy. She’s in a room upstairs, wearing a Liberty U sweatshirt, her hair in a messy bun. Three-year-old son Henry is barefoot and shirtless on the carpeted floor, dancing around with a purple toy pig that makes little noises every now and then. She pulls him up onto her lap.

D’LYNN: This is Hen-ben. Say hi, Henry!
HENRY: Hi! [Laughter.]

He’s got dark hair and a big smile… and currently, he’s having a lot of fun sticking his tongue out underneath his baby teeth.

HERTING: Do you want to tell her what you learned? What did Jesus die for? Did Jesus die for your sin, Henry?

Henry nods. D’Lynn kisses him on the head.

This is her life now. It is her dream come true, in a way, being able to tell her own little ones about the Lord. And even though she wishes she could take back her choices, she still recognizes God’s mercy in giving her three kids to her as a gift.

One time Henry saw her crying while they were in the car together. He asked her what was wrong.

HERTING: I was like, I'm just thanking God, Henry, I'm just thanking God, I'm just talking to God. I said, and you promise me, if you're mad, you go to God, if you're sad, you go to God, if you're happy, you'll go to God, and you pray some and he was like, okay. There's nothing better, there's nothing better and so even you know, I think of what the enemy used against me. Whether it was like a deceit or whatever my own way was, God will use for His glory. I will do everything I can that my kids know that.

SILLARS: So, Leah herself was pregnant during most of the time she reported and wrote this story. Her baby was born last summer.

SILLARS: And did you put yourself in their shoes and kind of say to yourself, you know, that must have been really tough?

SAVAS: I had heard enough about how hard it can be in some cases, and just how heart wrenching it is that I was worried. Like, sometimes I almost put myself in that same situation. So seeing friends and family go through losing that dream, I guess, it was hard.

SILLARS: We also talked about the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling in February, 2024, that involved IVF. The court ruled that frozen embryos, who had been killed in an accident at a fertility clinic, were “persons” under the state’s “Wrongful Death of a Minor” law. The US Supreme Court declined last October to hear the clinic’s appeal of that ruling.

SAVAS: So a lot of people, I think, took that to mean, that if doctors destroyed an embryo, they could be charged criminally like with with a homicide charge. But that was not the case. It was limited to this particular civil law. It didn't delve into the question of whether or not it could be considered homicide to discard a frozen embryo. It did raise a lot of those questions in the minds of people across the country. You know, like, well, if they are children under this law, what does that mean? Should we be freezing children? Should we should we be discarding children? Performing genetic testing on children? So I think it brought some really important questions to the forefront.

Music: “Newborn Child” by Blue Water Highway

SILLARS: Leah Savas wrote and reported both episodes about IVF. I’m Les Sillars, and I produced it. And, one more note: After Leah and I had that last closing conversation, Mike and Sarah Rosecky discovered that they’re expecting. A girl. But they’re still open to adoption.

And just a quick reminder: don’t forget to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app.

Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you next time.

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