What’s Really Driving the IVF Discussion?
In 1989 Doubleday published “After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s,” by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. This became a virtual textbook for the use of propaganda to get Americans to accept gay and lesbian sex as expressions of alternative lifestyles rather than deviant and immoral behaviors. While it wasn’t the beginning of the movement to normalize homosexual desire and practices, it contributed significantly to the change in popular opinion.
It is largely taken for granted today that homosexuality and lesbianism are normal, healthy ways for human beings to relate to one another romantically. This movement reached an important milestone in the 2015 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States declaring that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution protected the right of same-sex couples of marry. For nearly a decade, now, we have watched as men marry other men and women marry other women, at least in the eyes of the United States government.1
What happens when a man and woman get married? Typically, they will conceive and bear children as the product of their sexual union. It does not take a degree in human anatomy to understand that men can not procreate with men, and neither can women with women. Same-sex unions can not produce offspring, yet the desire to have children remains strong, even among those who have chosen to rebel against biblical marriage and sexuality. In order to accomplish what cannot be done naturally, these couples are increasingly turning to assisted reproductive technologies, especially IVF, which often involves surrogacy.
Same-sex unions cannot produce offspring, yet the desire to have children remains strong.
The Ethics of Gestational Surrogacy
Gestational surrogacy is the process in which a woman carries and delivers a child for someone else. She is typically impregnated by means of IVF, and a legal contract is signed by both the intended parents and the woman who will carry the baby. Obviously, this is the only way that two men in a same-sex union can have children,2 but surrogates are increasingly being used by others who either cannot safely endure pregnancy and childbirth or who simply do not wish to do so. No matter the reason, surrogacy presents several important ethical concerns that Christians cannot afford to overlook.
Is it ethical for a woman to risk her life and health for the sake of someone else? Certainly, if it involves risking her life to save another person, we can justify the choice, but gestational surrogacy is not saving a life. At best it is an act of selfless generosity on behalf of a woman who is unable to conceive or carry a child in her own womb – hardly a life-saving effort. But at its worst it turns the surrogate into a baby factory. Not only does this dehumanize the woman who is carrying the baby, but degrades the children as well, by turning them into a commodity of exchange.
Making the Making of Persons Impersonal
Recently, pop singer JoJo Siwa spoke about her plans to have children by surrogacy: “Because I’m gay as s— and I have to plan a pregnancy much different than a straight person, I actually want to take three eggs, fertilize three eggs, and have three surrogates, so technically, they’ll all be the same batch, but they would all be born separately. I’m gonna have my surrogates, my babies, then maybe their birthdays will land on different days, and they can be like triplets, but like, not.”3
“They’ll all be the same batch,” she says, as if discussing baking cupcakes in different tins. But these wouldn’t be cupcakes, they would be human persons created in the image of God. And the three surrogates that she says she’ll “have”? These aren’t appliances for purchase, they are women who are likewise image-bearers of God, and who, in Siwa’s scheme, will risk their lives to carry children for her. Does she know who these women are? Does it matter? She speaks of them as so much property to be used for her convenience.
Dr. Megan Best discusses the affect of IVF and surrogacy on the child born. She points out that “children born through surrogacy may have to contend with, potentially, up to five parents (egg donor, sperm donor, surrogate and two social parents), what will these children say when they are old enough to speak for themselves?”4 With all the talk about consent today, it is instructive to note that children never have the opportunity to consent to the circumstances of their births, much less to the kinds of gestastional experiments that are being done today. There is a great potential for harm to these children when they learn from where they came.
Money Matters
Is it more ethical if she pays them a surrogacy fee of upwards of $200,000? Not at all. In fact, the exchange of money only clouds the ethical issues by introducing a profit motive that tempts vulnerable women to take a risk they would otherwise refuse, just to get a payday. This is precisely what is happening today in developing countries where commercial surrogacy provides opportunities for poor women to achieve some measure of upward mobility. It is difficult to see how this is fundamentally different from sex work or indentured slavery, and it is uncomfortably close to selling babies, which would be considered human trafficking under any other circumstance.
Even altruistic surrogacy may be at risk of these same kinds of ethical problems. In a not-for-profit surrogacy arrangement prospective parents may cover medical and other reasonable expenses for the surrogate mother, but, as Dr. Megan Best explains, “the line between what is a ‘reasonable expense’…and what is only ‘compensation’ is difficult to define, and there is no bar to gift giving.”5 This makes it very difficult to tell the altruistic form from commercial surrogacy.
It is uncomfortably close to selling babies, which would be considered human trafficking under any other circumstance.
What about the bond that forms between the surrogate mother and the infant in her womb? Obviously, it is unnatural for a woman to carry a child for nine months, give birth to him, and then hand him off to another woman to nurture and raise as her own (much less two men!) What if she decides to keep the baby, after she has signed a contract with the prospective parents? What if one party demands an abortion against the others’ wishes? Or what if the social parents refuse to adopt the commissioned baby? These are just a few of the ethical questions and potential concerns with surrogacy in any form.
The Bottom Line on IVF
It turns out that things get more complicated the further we are removed from the natural means of procreation, which is the sexual union of a man and a woman. With the rise and broad acceptance of so-called “gay marriage,” these difficulties become even more acute. Should we oppose assisted reproductive technologies of all kinds, then, including IVF? I do not think we can go quite that far. There do seem to be some circumstances in which IVF can be used ethically within the bounds of a biblically sanctioned marriage. There are limits, however.
Christians should oppose the way IVF is being used to manufacture children for same-sex couples and any attempt to subvert God’s design for marriage and the family. We must recognize that having children is a blessing from God, not a fundamental right to be achieved by any means, technological or otherwise. And we must stand against any use of technology that dehumanizes women and children, as is so often the case in IVF and surrogacy. It is not just a question of life and death, but of respect for our Creator, whose image we bear, and for all who share in that image.
1At EBC we affirm the biblical teaching that marriage is a holy institution designed by God whereby a man and a woman come together in such a way that the two become one flesh. This excludes any and all other arrangements by definition, so that what our government calls “same-sex marriage” cannot properly be said to be a marriage at all.
2A child created in this way can only be biologically related to one of the parents in this situation. Even if the sperm of both men are mixed in the insemination process, only one sperm can fertilize the egg, so the child will only carry one parent’s DNA.
3https://people.com/jojo-siwa-reveals-new-details-surrogacy-plans-8680912
4Megan Best, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Kingsford NSW: Matthias Media, 2012), 371
5Ibid., 366.