In vitro fertilization gets complicated

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 27th of February, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up today: pro-life doctors and the frozen-embryos controversy.

The Alabama Supreme Court decision last week to extend the protection of law to frozen embryos has sent Alabama officeholders scurrying to protect in vitro fertilization.

And it’s sent shockwaves well beyond Alabama.

EICHER: The White House is talking about it, insisting that only a reimposition of Roe versus Wade will save the day. Former President Trump is saying he wants a legal carve-out for IVF, even pro-life governors like Greg Abbott in Texas are saying the same thing without getting into the details.

Republicans warned their Senate candidates to be on guard, saying the Alabama case is “fodder for Democrats hoping to manipulate the abortion issue for electoral gain.”

Top advice to GOP candidates, No. 1: “Express Support for IVF.”

BROWN: Many pro-life groups celebrate the legal ruling as a victory for human life at its earliest stage, but what do Christian IVF doctors say?

Here’s WORLD’s Lifebeat reporter Leah Savas.

LEAH SAVAS: Dr. John Gordon’s phone blew up with text messages from friends and family when the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision came down.

JOHN GORDON: They were sort of texting, you know, frozen embryos are now children and, you know, question mark, question mark.

The Alabama ruling doesn’t affect Gordon where he practices as the medical director at Rejoice Fertility in Knoxville, Tenn. But it brought up questions fundamental to his field. He’s a Presbyterian and recognizes that IVF doctors have glossed over important questions about the work they’re doing in their attempts to make a perfect product.

GORDON: That's the thing is, a child is not a product, right? A child is a gift.

His practice approaches IVF differently than the rest of the industry.

JEFFREY KEENAN: We don't genetically test embryos, because it destroys some of them.

That’s Gordon’s partner at Rejoice Fertility, Dr. Jeffrey Keenan.

KEENAN: We only—if you will—discard embryos, if they've died. And even those we don't discard in a usual fashion. We send them to a place called Sacred Heart Guardians, and they provide a service and a burial for these embryos.

Keenan is a Roman Catholic. He’s also the president of the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville. The center matches couples with embryos that parents didn’t want or could not implant so that they have a chance to be born.

Gordon and Keenan’s values are more in line with the Alabama ruling than most of the industry. But they still have reservations about it. Here’s Gordon.

GORDON: It's hard because we all agree, human embryos are something unique, right? They’re the only thing in the universe that turns into, has the potential to turn into it, a human being. So, when do they gain that ability? I know, many of them will not. And we don't know which ones will and which ones won't.

Medical researchers estimate that anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of naturally fertilized eggs either don’t implant or end in miscarriage. For example, fertilization errors can result in an empty gestational sac but no baby. And in complete molar pregnancies, noncancerous tumors grow from the incorrectly fertilized egg. Keenan points to other chromosomal abnormalities that lead to early miscarriages.

KEENAN: We have to say that life starts at conception, because for those of us that do make it through that, you know, embryonic stage, yeah, it started for us at conception. But how about for those embryos that don't make it through?

Unlike Gordon and Keenan, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling does affect Dr. Brett Davenport. He practices IVF in Huntsville, Alabama.

BRETT DAVENPORT: I'm pro-life when it comes to the abortion issue. But this is not that issue.

As a Protestant Christian, Davenport says he had to think through the question of when life begins when he started in the field. Learning more about IVF helped him feel more comfortable with it. And while he can’t say conclusively when life begins, he’s confident about when it does not begin.

DAVENPORT: All we have to be concerned about is do we think it's, it has begun by day five to seven of an embryo? Because that's all we're dealing with in IVF. And no, I do not personally believe that life has begun by day seven of an embryo’s growth, and  even more so when it is outside of a woman's uterus.

He plans to continue IVF mostly the same as before the ruling: genetically testing and freezing embryos. Davenport usually discards embryos and does not have an issue with it. But he’s pressing pause on that for now because of possible repercussions from the ruling, even though he disagrees with the state Supreme Court.

DAVENPORT: You have embryos that wouldn't have been created had we not used the tools that God has given us to create them. These are simply products of the tools that he's put in our hands, which are day five to seven embryos, and it's not at all a living child in utero.

But Christian ethicist and theologian Matthew Lee Anderson says the whole process of IVF puts doctors into a position they should never have to be in. He compares it to the cases of people who conceive naturally and then miscarry.

MATTHEW LEE ANDERSON: The difference is that we don't know in those cases, whether those were incomplete fertilizations, or whether those were persons made in the image of God. The fertility doctor has to make a judgment about that. They have to make a determination: is this an incomplete fertilization? Is this a complete embryo? And then what they’re going to do is they’re going to grade embryos, whether we think they are viable or not, how viable do we think they are.

Because of the position these doctors are in, Anderson says their struggle to see embryos as human persons makes sense.

ANDERSON: Because they have ripped these humans from the ordinary context where God had intended them to grow and develop and brought them into a very different context. What does it mean to be a human being frozen in ice in a laboratory?

Anderson hopes the ruling in Alabama will make Christian doctors in particular think twice about the implications of IVF, and, perhaps, abandon it altogether.

ANDERSON: The burdens of judgment that it places on reproductive doctors is just way too high.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leah Savas.

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