The news last week that Robert Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on the in vitro fertilization of human eggs may have seemed a little surprising to some observers: IVF has become so mainstream that we hardly see it as an innovative technology anymore.
It has also stayed largely out of the headlines, with little of the moral controversy that surrounds other reproductive issues, such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Since its introduction, IVF has been widely embraced across the religious and political spectrum. This is particularly notable in the evangelical movement, whose leaders have kept abortion and stem cells on the political front burner, but have staked out a variety of compromise positions that allow them to accept this scientific form of family-building.
Behind IVF and embryonic stem cell research, however, lie the same sort of technology, the kind Edwards and his late colleague Dr. Patrick Steptoe developed. Both depend on embryos created in a lab by fertilizing an egg extracted from a woman. And both practices generally result in the destruction of embryos--in the case of stem cells, for research; in the case of IVF, as a common side effect of creating more embryos than a woman ultimately chooses to implant.
Should evangelical Christians accept IVF so easily? No, says Jennifer Lahl. The director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network in San Francisco, Lahl has become a lone voice for a message that many of her fellow evangelicals are uncomfortable hearing: If embryos are human lives, she argues, then it is time for Christians to be consistent about their moral objections and unite against IVF.
For Lahl, the regular destruction or freezing of human embryos that occurs during the course of most IVF cycles amounts to ending human lives. And she suggests that the whole process is undermining human dignity. The minute the egg comes out of body, it is graded, the sperm is graded, then the embryo is graded, she says. In addition to determining which sperm and which eggs are most likely to produce a viable embryo, doctors often use a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to sort out which embryos may have defects. I see the whole enterprise as being highly eugenic, says Lahl.
To make her case, Lahl travels the country, testifying in favor of legislation that would restrict IVF, or at least regulate it more heavily. She speaks to religious groups and secular ones. And now she has put a part of her message on film. This week, Eggsploitation, a movie that Lahl produced to describe the medical dangers of egg donation, will be shown at Harvard Law School and Tufts University.
In her campaign against IVF, Lahl has found herself with little company among evangelicals. Despite her efforts, most of her coreligionists view IVF as acceptable for couples in need of a doctors help to start a family, even as they may fight to stop abortion or embryonic stem cell research. But beneath that broad consensus lies a wide range of often conflicting positions on how science should and shouldnt be allowed to affect conception.
Where evangelicals stand on IVF, and how much Lahl can influence them, matters not only because evangelicals possess plenty of political power when they do agree, but also because it shows how difficult it can be for a religious community to reach consensus on such complex bioethical issues at all.
It was 32 years ago that the first infertile couple conceived a baby with an egg and sperm in a test tube. Lesley Brown had tried for years to have a baby with her husband, John. Edwards and Steptoe, pioneers at the time in the emerging field of infertility medicine, found her fallopian tubes were blocked. In other words, while she could make eggs, her husbands sperm could not get to them. The doctors took eggs from Lesleys ovaries and fertilized them in a dish with Johns sperm; today their baby, Louise, is healthy and married and has had a child of her own. (The first American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Carr, today works for Boston.com and also recently had a baby of her own.)
The technology brought immediate worries: Scientists were concerned about severe birth defects; others were concerned that IVF children would have to live with a social stigma. Neither came to pass, and by scientific and social standards, the technology has grown into a smashing success. As of 2006, 3 million babies had been born worldwide using this technology.
Continued here:
What about IVF?
