By
Jerry Okwuosa
With the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February 2024 affirming that embryos are unborn babies— bringing an abrupt end to IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) procedures in the state — all hell was let loose because of people’s lack of understanding of what the IVF procedure portends. IVF is a procedure that involves retrieving a woman’s eggs and a man’s sperm sample and combining the two in a test-tube in a laboratory to create an embryo. For every IVF procedure, the fertilization of the ova with sperm is followed by eugenic screening of the embryos and the destruction of disabled ones, then implanting three embryos in the uterus and freezing the leftover embryos, many of whom will die during thawing for a repeat exercise.
When couples or individuals choose to create children using IVF, many more eggs are fertilized than necessary as an insurance policy in case first attempts at successful pregnancies fail. Stored embryos deemed to be no longer necessary for the parents’ pursuit of a family — often numbering a dozen or more — are discarded as medical waste. Truth be told: the IVF industry cannot survive without the killing of embryos. Actually, the IVF industry cannot survive without the killing of 93% of children the process creates.
The figure 93% is not farfetched: It only means that five trials were made implanting 3 embryos each time (15 embryos) and only one live birth was achieved (14 embryos died); resulting in 93.3% embryo wastage OR in terms of number of trials, it was 1 in 5 success rate (20%). Nature itself allows only 25% chance of achieving conception for every sexual intercourse. So compared with Nature, 20% success is great. Don’t mind IVF establishments in Nigeria who claim much higher figures of success. They lie.
What one Jenny Vaughn and her husband experienced in 2008 in the USis typical of IVF procedures: “The doctor had retrieved 38 good eggs, of which 32 are fertilized. Over the next week, 16 of our embryonic children die and are discarded. 13 are cryogenically frozen, mostly two to a vial. The 3 remaining fresh embryos are transferred to my uterus. After the first transfer in July 2008, we were thrilled to discover we were pregnant with twins, due the next April. But at 21 weeks gestation, our twins – Madi and Isaiah – were born prematurely and only lived for one hour each. For the next year, I floated numbly through life assured that we still had 13 frozen children whose lives were on hold. Although the contract also stated that, ‘It is rare for an embryo to not survive thawing’, yet half of our babies didn’t survive thawing. And, ‘occasionally, an embryo is not found in the vial due to the nature of embryos to stick to the vial or pipette.’ What incredible dangers we’d exposed our children to! Only one phrase in the entire contract spoke to the humanity of our children by calling them babies. Of 32 embryos created in a lab, only one survived to be raised by us.”In short,96.87% of the embryos (babies)generated by this IVF clinic was wasted/killed.
IVF is always wrong because, for example, it kills a dozen unborn children via ’embryo-reduction’ and then freezes another dozen children in ‘cryopreservation’ just for one or two to be born alive. That’s murder, not just ‘debasing the dignity of the child.’
Unfortunately, however, even some pro-life people, are standing against the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent decision against IVF. The uninformed among them reason thus: abortion kills unborn babies, so abortion is bad, IVF makes babies, therefore IVF is good. No, my friends –both abortion and IVF kill countless unborn babies as Jenny Vaughn’s typical case above amply demonstrates and so has every case before and after her.
We’ve read such touching comments as:“I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby.”.“IVF is extremely important for helping countless families experience the joy of parenthood.”.“I oppose restrictions and support their quest for babies, for the ‘ULTIMATE JOY IN LIFE!’“etc. We wish however to remind us that a child is not an entitlement for married couples but is always a gift from God. These sympathizers are actually placing the desire of adults to have children over the right to life of the 93% of all embryos created through IVF who are destroyed. In the end, IVF makes a child an Act of the Will of a man/woman rather than a Gift from God.
Did you know that IVF inventor Professor Sir Robert Edwards actually played God? IVF pioneer Prof. Edwards never shrunk from confronting his critics in The Telegraph. The creation of a human embryo in the laboratory, he explained later, was “about more than fertility. I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory.” He had no doubt about the answer: “It was us. The Pope looked totally stupid. Now there are as many Roman Catholics coming for treatment as Protestants.”
And here is Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC)’s reply to Edwards: “SPUC has often claimed that IVF is not primarily about helping couples with fertility problems but is driven by a desire of some scientists to ‘play God’ with human life. Edwards’s implied claim that the invention of IVF disproves God’s dominion over life was totally stupid, not the Pope. God works through His creatures to bring about new life: this is what is meant by ‘procreation’. This God’s given power of human beings can be used in an ethical context (marriage) or an unethical context (IVF in the laboratory, fornication, adultery, incest, rape). The invention of IVF no more disproves God’s dominion over nature than the invention of electric lighting disproves the power of the Sun.
The fact that some people resort to IVF simply highlights the urgent need for increased enlightenment about sexual ethics and increased promotion of the highly successful alternatives to IVF (e.g. the Billings Ovulation Method (BOM), other Fertility Awareness Methods (FAMs) of Family Planning and Natural Procreation Technology (NaProTech.)).
IVF pioneer Edwards also claimed that “Worldwide about ten percent of couples are infertile and, until IVF was invented, doctors could do little to help” This is simply a lie –as Billings Ovulation Method was helping couples with fertility problems from 1968 -ten years before IVF was invented in 1978.
A definition of infertility is always necessary in these discussions because, from current knowledge, much of so called ‘infertility’ is in fact simply a temporary difficulty of conceiving because of lack of knowledge about the woman’s cycle. A high proportion of women who undergo IVF could have conceived instead with the help of BOM, other FAMs or NaProTech., which would have provided that close knowledge of their cycles.
Here are other important but salient points to note about IVF: IVF remains a cash cow for the fertility industry; it’s murder for a majority of children. IVF babies, not surprisingly, inherit the infertility and so forth of their parents. Those who support IVF are dead wrong. IVF is evil.It victimizes the most innocent, vulnerable children.Without thinking, perhaps without caring, they deny the humanity of these unborn children. That’s probably because dehumanizing unborn children is critical to both the abortion industry and the fertility industry.
For anyone who is also asserting that “adoption for IVF embryos is the pro-life answer”, this is naïve and unethical. There is no right way of doing something that is wrong. IVF replaces the marital act with a laboratory act (a fallopian tube with a test-tube) and that is an affront to the dignity of the child conceived. It is not just a violation of the 6th commandment against adultery/fornication(when a woman’s egg is fertilized by the sperm of a man who is not her husband), but always against the 5th commandment because unborn babies are killed in large numbers. IVF and abortion are the same on the moral front because abortion kills and IVF kills.
IVF beneficiaries may argue thus: “If it was wrong, God wouldn’t have given Prof. Edwards the ability to invent IVF…”. God has given human beings the ability to do great evil, through the ability to invent things capable of great evil e.g. weapons of mass destruction, extermination camps, instruments of torture etc. Edwards abused the abilities and the free will which God had given him.
The wrongness of creating and destroying (and we should add freezing) human embryos in and through the process of IVF. But even if IVF was chosen only by married couples, and those couples intended to create only as many embryos as they implant, and they rejected the eugenic screening and destruction of disabled embryos, IVF still would be gravely wrong. This confuses many people. How can it be wrong to bring a child into the world, a child whom a couple intends to love and cherish and perhaps even raise as a good Christian? The answer gets at the heart of the teachings on both the dignity of human life and of marriage. For example, “Donum Vitae”(1987), Section II, B, 4, and “Dignitas Personae”(2008), No. 12. on bioethical issues set forth three basic arguments, or sets of reasons, to explain why children are licitly conceived only through the marital act, defined in Canon law as a “conjugal act which is per se suitable for the generation of children to which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become one flesh”. The three arguments are the “unity-procreation”, the “language of the body” and the “begotten-not-made” arguments. Taking just one of the three, the “unity-procreation” argument holds that the meaning of the marital act derives from the meaning of marriage itself. Marriage by definition is a procreative and unitive type of relationship. The marital act therefore has an intrinsic meaning which includes these two goods: unity and procreation. It follows that procreation should not be intentionally excluded from sexual intercourse (as taught in “Humanae Vitae”), nor should procreation take place outside of sexual intercourse, as takes place in IVF. (Some theologians even deny that creating a baby through IVF should be called procreation, but rather reproduction.)
Further to the immorality of IVF, the little-published truth is that the sperm used to fertilize the eggs in IVF is almost always obtained by masturbation, assisted by the provision of pornography. Masturbation instrumentalises and thus debases the sexual faculty, which is proper to the marital union, not laboratory experiments. The sexual organs are structured for depositing sperm into the vagina, not into a jar. A masturbator – even one motivated by a desire to fertilize eggs, even his wife’s – is “making love” to his hand,which is unnatural and a form of self-abuse.
Masturbation for any purpose – including providing sperm samples for medical purposes – is intrinsically unethical. The truth remains however, that the “beautiful babies” created through IVF will have many of their siblings disposed of as unnecessary medical byproducts of the IVF process.Of the 5 million IVF babies generatedby 2013, over 66 million siblings were killed.
When the history of this era is written, people will look back and marvel at how crazy we have become, how filled with hubris we are, how stubbornly self-indulgent we are. And those historians of the future will realize: Only the people of faith had the sense to see that IVF was wrong — and the courage to stand against it.
Jerry Okwuosa, (jerryokwuosa@yahoo.co) is the Director-General, Project for Human Development (PHD), a Lagos-based NGO
