IVF and the inconsistent ethic of life

Human beings are fickle creatures, more inclined to compromise than cling steadfastly to principles. Those in the latter camp are few in number, so few—and so impressive in their persistence that led to their avoidable deaths—that Catholics honor those who die for belief in Christ with a particular title: martyrs, witnesses to truth.

We know, however, from Pliny the Younger, Donatus, and Elizabethan England, to name only a few, that martyrs are the exception, not the rule. With livelihoods and lives on the line, many of those facing pressure will buckle—convenience and earthly desires triumph over principle. More of us are like the Duke of Norfolk than St. Thomas More. In A Man for All Seasons, Norfolk, trying to persuade the imprisoned More to sign the oath of allegiance to King Henry VIII, conveys a trans-generational astonishment at the choice of intransigence over compromise: “Can’t you do as I did and come along with us for fellowship?”

The principle of protecting innocent human life is no different. Throughout history, some life has been sacred—the lives of one’s own family or tribe, for instance. But woe to those in other families or other tribes: their lives be damned! Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan taught that “my neighbor” is every human being, a teaching later formalized, with the help of Genesis, into Church dogma: all human beings are created in God’s image, and therefore possess an inherent dignity. Yet, throughout history, more than a few Christians have inconsistently applied this notion of “all.” People and groups who are not “one of us” lose their status as innocent, and then they can be treated, or discarded, as any enemy or criminal.

Slavery, of course, is today’s most egregious example of an inconsistent ethic of life. Whether in the ancient world or early America, the slave was always a foreigner; he was never considered “one of us,” so he was deemed a “lesser” being lacking an inherent dignity. Any attempts by the few—Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, Bartolomé de las Casas in the sixteenth, the Quakers in the eighteenth—to abolish slavery were met with derision. Slavery was too deeply entrenched in society and too convenient for making money to be abolished. To justify its existence, and to assuage consciences, dehumanizing slaves as “other” had to continue through derogatory terms and gerrymandering Scripture, even as public consciousness of the inhumanity of the practice grew.

These days we scoff at the ignorance of so many who failed to see the slave as a person and believe ourselves so sophisticated for expunging this grotesque evil from civilized society. Twenty-first-century America, however, is as far from a consistent ethic of life as her seventeenth-century self. All life is still not sacred. There is a new group of human beings, without voices to speak for themselves, who are not “one of us,” whose existence must yield to the convenience and desire of those more powerful than they. These are the unborn, whose lives are at the mercy of those who ought to love them most: their parents.

Abortion advocates spent over half a century dehumanizing unborn children into a “clump of cells” before discovering they could better succeed by not mentioning the unwanted human life at all—better to clamor only about “women’s rights” in the abstract without reference to reality.

The abortion debate revolves around two claims: women’s rights and unborn children’s rights. Those in the former camp never acknowledge that their supposed right tramples the rights of others. The others are not human, so they have no rights.

The rights of unborn children are ignored in another new social arena. Reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) offer a tantalizing power: the ability to create human beings either in a lab, or with scientific instruments of varying sophistication. At last, human beings can overcome the gut-wrenching pain of infertility. But what happens with these technologies? Men sow their seed into cups, women allow their eggs to be harvested, third parties put these cells together to make tiny human beings—clumps of cells—and then advise parents on which nascent lives hold the most potential. The winners of the genetic and scientific lotteries are implanted; the losers are either discarded or frozen ad infinitum. Their survival hinges on the convenience and desires of their adult masters.

There are many pro-lifers who have fought valiantly against abortion yet see no problem with IVF. They even view IVF as the pro-life thing to do: helping couples achieve a pregnancy they could not have had naturally. Former President Donald Trump’s statement echoes this view: “The Republican Party should always be on the side of the Miracle of Life—and the side of Mothers, Fathers, and their Beautiful Babies. IVF is an important part of that.”

To oppose abortion and favor IVF is the most modern of inconsistencies when it comes to protecting human life. In a sense, IVF “humanizes”—it makes humans. Yet it does so in the most dehumanizing of ways. With IVF, the child is not a natural growth of marriage, but the expensively manipulated product of a scientific experiment. Laws prevent experimenting on human beings from the day of their birth without consent—doing so undermines their dignity. Before birth, by contrast, human dignity need not apply: the will of multiple adults determines children’s fate.

No, aborting children and creating them in a lab are not morally equivalent. But the mindset that paves the way for abortion is the same as for IVF—that the desire of the adult is paramount, that preborn children are mere cells to be manipulated in various way, that whether a child is desired—or not—justifies taking any action required in order to satisfy that desire.

Fighting abortion, pro-lifers often argue that the geography of a child, be he inside or outside the womb, should have no bearing on his right to life. With IVF, geography matters: Alabama’s House of Representative Minority leader, Anthony Daniels, filed a bill that makes a mother’s womb seem as arbitrary as the Missouri Compromise line: “any fertilized human egg or human embryo that exists outside of a human uterus is not considered an unborn child or human being for any purpose under state law.”

Daniels’s bill reads as if he is trying to funnel George Orwell’s newspeak into Aldous Huxley’s brave new world. We should not be astonished: human beings are capable of exceptional creativity when seeking to justify their desires. Personal accommodation defeats intellectual consistency more times than not, and the loss is always to the detriment of the trampled principle. And the opposition, able to see what the intellectual acrobat refuses, is quick to pounce on the inconsistency. Witness Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington:

It’s been incredible to watch Republicans now scramble over the weekend to suddenly support I.V.F. while many of these same Republicans are literally, right now, cosponsors of legislation that would enshrine fetal personhood. You cannot support I.V.F. and support fetal personhood laws. They are fundamentally incompatible. You are not fooling anyone.

Defenders of human life, take note: there are always battles to fight. But be careful what you wish for, because your wish may undermine the cause you are fighting for.