By Judie Brown
More than 30 years ago when American Life League created the iconic sign with the tagline “Face It. Abortion Kills a Person,” we could not fathom the enormity of the growing threat within the fertility industry.
Doctors Steptoe and Edwards had been researching and manipulating human embryos in an effort to discover a medical treatment to transform a sterile female into an expectant mother. Their masterpiece—the practice of in vitro fertilization—sent shockwaves through the nation.
Many thought that using a laboratory to create embryos in a petri dish and then transplanting some of them into the womb of a sterile woman was a miracle. Others, like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, called the practice a “violation of the child’s rights” because taking a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm and combining them in a glass dish defies God’s design for human procreation. As the Church teaches, “Respect for the unity of marriage and for conjugal fidelity demands that the child be conceived in marriage; the bond existing between husband and wife accords the spouses, in an objective and inalienable manner, the exclusive right to become father and mother solely through each other.”
The practice of in vitro fertilization treats the human embryo like a grocery store item that people can accept or reject based on whim. In other words, the preborn child becomes a commodity, not a living, growing human being whose right to life is sacred.
Quite literally, the practice of in vitro fertilization has opened a Pandora’s box of problems stemming from disposing of or freezing the unwanted to creating a “perfect” baby for people who are not even their biological parents.
Furthermore, most IVF treatments create more embryos than are implanted and born, which results in millions of dead babies. An EWTN article explains, “The CDC estimates that more than 238,000 patients attempted IVF in 2021. If clinics created between seven and eight embryos for every patient, that would yield about 1.6 million to 1.9 million over a year. Despite these high numbers, fewer than 100,000 embryos were brought to term, which suggests that somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million embryos created through IVF were never born.”
To read the remainder of this article, visit the Celebrate Life Magazine site at clmagazine.org/post/pro-life-basics-the-dangers-of-in-vitro-fertilization.
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