The dark side to Donald Trump’s ‘precious babies’ and IVF successes

A few years ago, I sat on a BBC Breakfast sofa and debated human embryo experimentation with a lady who was the Chief Scientific Officer for a group of IVF laboratories. We argued about whether experimentation on “spare” human embryos could be morally justified and whether the law should abolish the 14-day rule restricting such experiments to the first two weeks of life.

After we had made our respective points and with the cameras off, we chatted in the Green Room. She told me that she was conflicted about my position that the early embryo possessed the same kind of moral worth as older human beings, but that she had to admit that she often had to deal with IVF parents who wanted to bury their embryonic children: such requests, she explained, put great emotional strain on her and on her staff.

Louise Brown, born in England in 1978, was the first child conceived by in vitro fertilisation (IVF). It is easy to forget that the idea of IVF once caused deep unease to many: the kind which moral philosophers once upon a time thought worthy of examination rather than of dismissal. Yet hesitation and scepticism quickly gave way to widespread celebration and satisfaction, boosted by the endorsement of scientists and bioethicists eager to sweep aside any cautionary voices seeking to maintain some continuity with prior moral consensus.

This year, nearly half a century on from that famous birth, IVF is again in the news. Recently, an Israeli missile took out a Gazan fertility clinic along with the 4,000 embryos in it. In the US, Donald Trump, who as president laid the groundwork for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, announced that he fully supported the generous provision of IVF for couples trying to have a “precious baby” and praised the state of Alabama for ensuring that clinics would not be hampered in their operations.

Trump’s statement followed a court ruling in Alabama on a case which saw three families undergoing IVF sue a fertility clinic which had failed to prevent a patient handling and dropping a container of frozen embryos, destroying them all. The families whose embryos were in the container made a civil claim under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. That Act concerns itself with events which cause the death of unborn children inside their pregnant mothers. The Alabama court decided that the mere location of embryos should not exclude them from the protections of the Act and that therefore IVF parents should have the same kind of protections as parents who conceive naturally.

As Yuval Levin and Carter Snead wrote in the Atlantic, “the state supreme court acted not to undermine the practice of IVF in Alabama but to protect the interests of IVF parents. And it did so as the result of a law that has long been on the books, not because of any connection to abortion or to the federal Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.”

That realistic assessment got lost as President Biden immediately asserted: “The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable…Make no mistake: this is a direct result of the overturning of Roe v Wade.” In the meantime, John Oliver – that most tiresome of British exports, the unfunny comic – warned his US viewers darkly that, “this ruling is a natural outgrowth of the concept of fetal personhood.”

In response to the perceived errant ways of the Alabama court, the Alabama legislature quickly drew up new legislation, immediately signed into law by the governor: in the words of Yuval and Snead, “a bill that created blanket civil and criminal immunity for any person or entity who causes ‘damage to or death’ of an embryonic human being when ‘providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilisation’.”

Thus IVF parents who dared to want some protection for their embryos were betrayed, amid general horror among media pundits that even such minimal protection of early humans might impact on the power – now seen as a basic right – to destroy life in the womb.

Those who cry “my body, my choice” cannot use that slogan to justify IVF negligence, let alone IVF choices to destroy humans outside the womb, for such embryos are unimplanted though alive and whole and human.

And yet the fear of pro-choice advocates is not entirely irrational. For once we start to recognise that the early human embryo is a self-organising whole with an interest in his or her future development, an entire set of uncomfortable moral realities must be acknowledged: this embryo is someone’s son or daughter and its value is intrinsic to its rational human nature, not held on account of how useful it is or how desired by other human beings. Nor does its moral worth change according to whether it is located in a freezer or its mother’s womb.

Once we grasp that this human being is what we all once were – and that we never became a different kind of being – further questions arise. For with the advent of IVF, we started to produce new human beings in a way in which they had never been produced before. With the one exception of artificial insemination – which, however, took place at least within the woman’s body – this was the first time we had treated human beings in the way we treat the sub-human, namely as the outcome of a production process.

To generate a human being via IVF is to engage in a production process involving sperm and ovum. Necessarily, the relation between product and maker is one of radical inequality. “Producing” a child places the parent in a position of domination over that child. Regardless of the motives of the parents of an IVF embryo, to choose to put oneself in this position is to choose an initial relationship with a child contrary to the idea of a family as a communion of persons possessing equal dignity.

The Catholic Church realised this early on when it issued the document Donum Vitae and has reiterated that teaching ever since. To the question “how can you harm someone who doesn’t yet exist?”, one need only reply that any notion of “harm” that cannot capture the wrongness of such demeaning treatment is inadequate. Clearly there are ways of wronging people which a restricted definition of “wrongful harm” fails to capture.

And so it came to pass that a procedure which treated new human beings as though they were products – not least in the experiments leading up to Louise Brown’s birth – led to an industry that routinely treated them as products, subject to “quality control”, destruction and experimentation. At the same time, we all got used to referring to some human beings as “spare” or “surplus” and therefore disposable. For every baby born through IVF, very many are discarded after days in a lab dish or years in frozen storage. 

The parents who use IVF will often recognise that the embryo is more than such practices suggest, especially when they already have a “wanted” and subsequently born IVF-facilitated child – a living illustration of what their other embryos could be. Yet IVF typically condemns to death numerous “spare” and “unwanted” embryos, including those who could have been “used” after freezing but in the event, were not. And the process itself is incompatible with the dignity of the embryo: manufacture – the putting together of something from parts – is no more appropriate to human beings than purchase.

That ancient way of conceiving, the conjugal union, in contrast respects the dignity of the child: it treats him or her in a fully human way. The act of bodily self-giving and celebration of marriage is the one that is fitted to receiving the child as a gift – not a product or “right” over whom parents have an excessive, God-like responsibility. And it is in loving reception of that gift, supervening their own gift of themselves to each other, that parents come to understand that it is they who are there for the child and not the child that is there for them.

We have become so inured to embryos being stored in freezers that there was little outcry at the scale of embryo loss caused by that missile from Israel. Shocking as it is, when we think that these are human lives, the number of 4,000 pales in comparison with the vast number of embryos destroyed by IVF clinics in the course of business down the years.

It is true that many IVF embryos have also been born as babies: an undeniable good for them and their parents. For that matter, even the lives of embryos left in freezers are objectively a good thing. A human presence is always something good – but a good end does not justify a bad means. Not the production, not the quality control, not the abandonment or destruction.

In fact, the very nature of that good demands that it not be treated in such a demeaning manner. And one way of demeaning that value is to claim that the good of the born IVF baby somehow “outweighs” the “necessary evil” of the frozen or discarded embryos. To think in this manner is to fail to see that human dignity is not something to be treated in a merely quantitative way, whereby we calculate “overall good results” in such a way that happily violates the rights and interests of those human beings we demean, including in the very way in which we bring about those few embryos lucky enough to be brought to a womb.

When embryos are denied their rightful home in a mother’s womb, we are liable to forget their value, not least since that value was never given its due from their very conception. Yet the hundreds of thousands languishing in freezers around the world – not to mention those already destroyed or discarded – are just as precious as the babies that former President Trump speaks of, while endorsing the seemingly workaday practice of the clinics that create them as he seeks election again.

Photo: Embryos being placed onto a CryoLeaf ready for instant freezing using a vitrification process for IVF. (File photo dated 11 August 2008.)

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