By Julie Grimstad
Listening to the vice-presidential debate last night, the promise to fund in vitro fertilization with federal funds greatly disturbed me.
Question: Who could oppose this means of helping couples to have children when they are unable to conceive naturally?
Answer: HALO, as well as numerous other pro-life and pro-family organizations, churches, medical professionals, and individuals.
Why Do We Oppose IVF?
There are several imperative reasons to oppose IVF. To name just one, IVF entails the wholesale destruction of embryonic children. Those not treasured are trashed.
Each year, 1 to 2 percent of children born in the United States are conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Women’s ovaries are stimulated with powerful, dangerous drugs to produce multiple eggs. Then, in IVF laboratories semen and eggs are combined to produce tiny human beings in petri dishes. These embryonic children are examined for defects. Defective embryos are killed. Some of the healthy embryos are transferred to a woman’s womb (not necessarily their own mother’s womb). Excess embryos are killed or frozen. Frozen embryonic children will either be saved for future attempts to achieve a pregnancy or used for research wherein they are treated as objects – laboratory material – to be manipulated and then discarded.
In short, IVF is dehumanizing. Human beings are produced in a petri dish and the “leftovers” are tossed in the trash or sold for research.
The following quotations further illustrate the evil nature of IVF and its ramifications for future children conceived with disabling conditions:
Between 12-15 embryos are produced per woman per IVF treatment, resulting usually in no more than one viable pregnancy. Using the conservative of 12, if we multiply it by 238,000 women, and then subtract 97,000 from it (the number of children fortunate enough to be born alive), we get more than two and a half million human beings (who weren’t so fortunate). These were either killed or frozen in a single year in our country to fuel this sordid industry. [What Every Catholic Needs to Know About IVF and Moral Cooperation With Evil – EWTN Global Catholic Television Network]
One of the inventors of the procedure, Nobel Prize winner Robert G. Edwards, was an active member of Britain’s Eugenics Society. He once wrote, “Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.” [As the dark side of IVF slowly comes into focus, even more transparency is needed (statnews.com)]
For more information and to learn how to protect the vulnerable, visit the Healthcare Advocacy and Leadership Organization at halovoice.org.
