By Father David Nix|February 25th, 2024
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is defined by Yale Medicine as “a procedure that involves retrieving a woman’s eggs and a man’s sperm sample and combining the two in a laboratory dish.” Most Catholics in the pro-life movement are against IVF because “IVF replaces the marital act with a laboratory act and that an affront to the dignity of a child who is conceived.”
While that is true, the main reason we should be against IVF is not a violation of the 6th Commandment, but rather a violation of the 5th Commandment: IVF eradicates many embryos (new individuals) to yield only a few living children. A Catholic woman named Jenny Vaughn has a blog called Catholic Sistas in which she courageously shared her conversion story following the IVF procedures done by her and her husband. She wrote:
The doctor had retrieved 38 good eggs, of which 31 are fertilized. Over the next week, 16 of our embryonic children die and are discarded. Thirteen are cryogenically frozen, mostly two to a vial. Two fresh embryos are transferred to my uterus… In desperation, we graduated to the expensive and complex process of IVF, where my eggs and my husband’s sperm would be taken out of our bodies, joined in a petri dish, and the resulting embryos would be inserted into my uterus. Even before we started down the IVF road, there was a voice inside of us whispering that it was wrong… 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. During those brief, heartbreaking few hours, we held them, bathed them, dressed them, and baptized them, holding onto their tiny, fragile bodies as long as we could. For the next year, I floated numbly through life. I believed the twins’ death was God punishing me for my past sins. My husband remained silent. Through it all, my heart was torn about the route we’d taken, as well as the fact that we still had 13 frozen children whose lives were on hold… [Later] the contract also stated that, “It is rare for an embryo to not survive thawing.” 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 31 embryos created in a lab, only one survived to be raised by us.
It is due to that last sentence that I call this article, IVF Kills Thirty Children For Every One That Survives. I glorify God for the conversion of Jenny and her husband. She wrote this about her conversion and her children: “Being created in a lab and then frozen violates the dignity of these tiny human beings. Thawing and discarding is killing. Reducing women to incubators and men to sperm donors is also undignified.”
MSM news reported a few days ago that “three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed when a wandering Mobile hospital patient dropped the specimens can sue for wrongful death because the embryos were ‘children,’ the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in reversing a judge’s decision to throw out the case.” This was an excellent decision of the Alabama Supreme Court. However, Mr. Donald Trump then made an astonishingly obtuse statement: “Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the vast majority of… pro-life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby.. Today, I am calling on the Alabama Legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in America.”
Maybe Trump is thinking something as shallow as this: “Abortion kills babies. IVF makes babies. Therefore abortion bad, IVF good...” No, Mr. Trump—both abortion and IVF kill countless children as the first half of this article demonstrates. And no, the entire pro-life movement is not behind you in standing against the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent decision against IVF. In fact, I know of a consecrated woman in Louisiana who does all of her pro-life prayer and protesting in front of an IVF clinic, not an abortion center. She understands they are one and the same on the moral front.
IVF is always wrong because it kills a dozen unborn children via “embryo-reduction” and then freezes another dozen children in “cryopreservation” just for one or two born alive. That’s murder, not just “debasing the dignity of the child.”
