Should Christian couples use IVF?

A quarter of the way into a new century, the challenges facing the world are myriad and multiplying swiftly – from artificial intelligence to new super weapons to cybercrime.

New technologies challenging the Christian view of the sanctity of human life are also proliferating rapidly, and as usual, the church is playing catch-up when it comes to establishing a relevant moral framework.

However, sometimes the challenge comes from the newer uses of older technologies, as in the case of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Feasible for the first time in 1978, IVF is used to artificially create fertilized embryos outside the womb. Then, one or more embryos are implanted inside the mother’s uterus, allowing otherwise infertile couples the opportunity to have children.

Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, has given lectures critical of IVF. After speaking, he said he is invariably asked by a parent or grandparent, “Do you think that children born by IVF are human beings?”

One can almost feel the nightmarish anxiety that drives someone to pose such a question. Asking a professor if he thinks someone’s child is human has a startling science-fiction feel to it.

Yet, as we consider the scientific advances that have been made regarding the processes of reproduction, it’s clear we have entered the world of science nonfiction – and it’s difficult to know what’s what.

Of course, the answer to the question posed to Trueman is a simple one. He said once a sperm has fertilized an egg, “a human person is the result.”

But that’s really where the consensus in the church ends. New scientific methods addressing the human condition seem to parade out of laboratories every day. How does the church come to an agreement on answers to the questions raised by these techniques?

For example, Christians must prepare themselves to wrestle with the morality of fertilizing a woman’s egg by genetic editing of female stem cells – cutting out the need for a male’s sperm altogether. What about technicians who will soon be able to create the sperm and the ovum using stem cells? What will the church say about the use of artificial wombs for gestation? Or children created from the use of DNA from several “parents” – so-called “three-parent embryos”?

A mounting death toll

Many Christians are taking a hard look at IVF and find the process extremely problematic, and the most common objection focuses on the loss of human life.

Typically, when an infertile couple wants to have a baby, multiple fertilized embryos are created. Once the woman gets pregnant, the couple may or may not want more children. If they don’t, what happens to the leftover embryos?

If life begins at conception, then destroying these unused embryos is no different than aborting an unborn child. Perhaps even worse, say critics, the IVF process is nothing less than a cold, calculated exchange of several human lives to gain the single life that gestates inside the mother – multiplying the offense.

This loss of life is not an insignificant number either, according to Emma Waters, a senior research assistant at the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation. She conservatively estimated that over four million embryos are created each year for the purpose of IVF.

“Some portion of these is implanted, some frozen, some never develop past a few days in the lab,” she said. “But many are also destroyed, and so it is hard to maintain a ‘pro-life’ position while also supporting IVF as currently practiced in the U.S.”

However, Christians who are open to IVF are also repulsed by such a catastrophic loss of life. They avoid producing more embryos than they plan to use and seek clinics that are pro-life in their approach to in vitro fertilization. These couples believe this is a God-honoring approach that respects the value and sanctity of the unborn child.

Objects of trafficking

Not so fast, say the IVF critics. The loss of life is not the only concern. For Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, in vitro fertilization is a process that is inherently corrupted by utilitarianism and greed, and there is no way to circumvent that reality. IVF “is literally a business model built on disposable children and treating children as commodities,” she told the New York Times.

Within the Christian community, the Roman Catholic Church takes perhaps the strictest position on matters like IVF. In early 2024, Pope Francis stated that “an unborn child must not be ‘turned into an object of trafficking.’”

These are strong words and raise legitimate questions. Obviously, there are many in society who treat fertilized embryos as products to be created, like bottles of soft drinks. Certainly, all Christians should agree that is abhorrent.

Yet IVF defenders in the church ask, “Why assume the very worst motives in every couple that is seeking help in overcoming infertility?”

Even Trueman admitted that in vitro fertilization bears witness “to the most natural and most glorious of human desires, that of a man and a woman wanting together to create the life of another person.”

It’s hard to imagine Christian couples using IVF to conceive a baby and considering it as nothing more important than adding a six-pack of cola to the cupboard. Instead, it might very well prove the opposite. These people believe that children are so precious that, if they can safely do so, they will battle through every obstacle to fulfill that God-given desire.

After all, the Bible presents in poignant fashion the sorrow of women who were “barren” or unable to have children. In such ancient cultures, it was a source of agony and shame to have a “closed womb.” Women such as Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, and others in Scripture wrestled with that sorrow.

Wayne Grudem, research professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix Seminary in Phoenix, Arizona, took this truth and flipped it, noting that when God opened a womb, He was showing favor to the suffering.

“These narrative examples portray overcoming infertility as something that pleases God,” Grudem said, “and it is often a manifestation of His special blessing on a couple.”

Just isn't natural

Still, for many Christians, a “test-tube baby” just isn’t natural, and therefore, it must be immoral.

Frankly, when the technology of IVF is explained, it does seem quite like a soda factory. Matthew Lee Anderson, an assistant professor in Baylor University’s Honors College, said in First Things, a journal of religion and public life, that in vitro fertilization “is a scientific process conducted by third parties who have no personal interest in the results, to say nothing of parental obligations. The lab technicians’ work … is ordered to the efficient generation of embryos and children. … To the degree possible, every element of a child’s conception is scientifically controlled.”

Yet, this argument might very well prove too much. Virtually everything about the full gamut of medical procedures used in advanced countries can seem cold, sterile, and unnatural.

But Grudem insisted that calling IVF “unnatural” assumes “a definition of ‘natural’ that arbitrarily excludes modern medical means from what we consider part of nature.”

Sickness, infirmity, systemic breakdowns in the body – like infertility – and even death are obviously “natural” in the strictest sense of the word. These things occur while living in a fallen world –  i.e., in nature.

However, that doesn’t mean the science used to mitigate these afflictions is unnatural. Human beings use this world and the things in it to create, build, shape, and alter nature all the time. From a biblical perspective, humans were commissioned in Genesis 1 to intervene in and leave their imprint on Creation. If intervening in a couple’s infertility is unnatural, so is building an apartment complex instead of sleeping on the ground.

Grudem said that if Christians take adequate precautions against the deaths of human embryos, IVF is no more unnatural than many other things people do to conceive.

“Consider a woman who uses a modern thermometer to take her body temperature each day in order to determine the best time to have intercourse so that she’ll be able to conceive,” he said. “Is this an ‘unnatural’ process because she uses a modern medical thermometer in order to know when she’s ovulating? Surely not. The thermometer is made from part of the natural world that God created.”

Yet, one of the strongest arguments raised by IVF critics is that God ordained sex as the means by which a child should be conceived.

“If we are to live according to the [image of God], we ought to refrain from seizing the power to make human life outside the means God has given us,” Anderson insisted. “An unwanted pregnancy is not a problem to be ‘solved’ [through abortion]. And childlessness is not a disease to be overcome.”

Grudem rejected the framing of the issue in this manner.

“IVF did not separate sex from conception because, for this couple, there was no connection between sex and conception,” he said. “They were unable to conceive. It was the infertility that separated sex from conception – and IVF is overcoming that infertility. For many infertile couples, they have perfectly normal and happy sex lives, but due to some medical reason, they’ve been unable to have children.”

Thus, when Anderson insisted that we should avoid “seizing the power to make human life outside the means God has given us,” what if in vitro fertilization is a God-given means for conceiving when sex fails to do so?

Conclusion

One thing is clear about IVF: The explosion in reproductive technology is already mind-boggling, and the future of such research might very well “break people’s brains.”

Yes, society’s coldhearted disregard for a life formed at conception is infuriating; yes, society’s nonchalant discarding of these lives into a filthy dumpster is heartbreaking. It is also absolutely sinful.

However, beyond this, the waters become murkier and more turbulent for many Christians as they wrestle internally over IVF – and wrangle publicly with one another.

In a sense, this is always the challenge of scientific advancement. In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, human beings are hunted by hungry dinosaurs that had been recreated using a technology developed by park scientists. One character, Ian Malcolm, said to the man responsible for the entire scientific endeavor: “Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could [develop the technology] that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

In other words, once the dinosaurs begin to roam and wreak havoc, it’s difficult and maybe impossible to put the T. rex back into the test tube.

Christians are going to have to allow each other time to sift through the debris left in the wake of in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies. IVF is here to stay. Whether or not the church should participate is far from clear.