WHAT'S WRONG WITH IVF?

In my teens and early twenties, I often hitch-hiked. Sometimes, I hitch-hiked with a friend also named Mark.

Most people who pick up hitch-hikers like to talk. Several times, while hitching with Mark, drivers made statements with which I knew Mark disagreed. Nonetheless, and to my dismay, Mark enthusiastically affirmed these drivers.

When we got out of one such car, I said, “Dude, how can you act like you agree with something that’s 180 degrees from what you believe.”

Mark replied, “Look, this guy was doing us a favor. I’m not going to make him regret what he did.”

That Mark is not like this Mark.

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I’m going off-topic this week because, over the course of several decades, I’ve read and thought extensively about a subject that has only recently gained public attention. What I say below will alienate some readers.

So be it. Those who know me know that I don’t see life as a popularity contest. The truth matters more than does having people like me. This value structure has ended some friendships over the past four years. Life goes on.

If you comment, please suspend emotion and focus on facts.

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Last week, following an Alabama Supreme Court decision, and 46 years after the birth of the first “test tube baby,” in vitro fertilization ("IVF") uncharacteristically reached the news.

In reaction, the vast majority of Americans, including Trump and Biden, expressed strong support for IVF. But neither of these two politicians is a serious thinker. Nor does either have a moral compass. Both are utilitarians who have led corrupt personal lives. Both strongly supported the mRNA shots. Neither has apologized for doing so. Their perspectives should be discounted accordingly.

As the Corona overreaction has shown, government officials and the majority of the population are often wrong.

Forty-two percent of Americans have either used fertility treatments or know someone who has. People feel entitled to use reprotech. Many consider it a great medical advance because it gives people what they want.

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Yet, IVF’s popularity doesn’t justify its use. To the contrary, its widespread use makes it more problematic.

IVF has always presented multiple, serious social and moral issues. Yet, as Princeton Professor Robert George has observed, these problems were never seriously discussed, either when IVF became available, or since. Exalting individual choice and profit, society jumped with two feet into the reprotech water without considering the broader consequences of doing so.

First, assisted conception commodifies human life and separates life creation from sexuality. Instead of being the organic manifestation of a human union, the culture now sees children as something that they can acquire, and not as a gift from God or nature. The notion that people are entitled to children if they want them makes procreation a consumer/merchant transaction and desacralizes human life.

Second, assisted conception is a high-tech fix for the social problems of sexual promiscuity and postponed commitment. STD or abortion scarring and delayed attempts at conception drive most IVF demand. The incidence of chlamydia and other tube-scarring STIs has soared over the past three decades. Most remaining infertile couples have waited until after their prime childbearing years to attempt conception.

Instead of addressing the social/behavioral causes of infertility: pursuing serial sexual partners, prioritizing career and adventure over family, and being hyper-selective about mates, people ask technicians to bail them out, just as they do—with similarly dubious results—regarding other personal choices and social problems. Instead of being a natural process, conception has been medicalized. As with Covid, where people were told to disregard health-building practices and natural immunity and to rely, instead, on technicians, Pharma products and jabs, reprotech is also intensively interventionist. IVF technicians hyperstimulate ovulation via hormone injections. They use trans-vaginal needles to retrieve eggs. Embryos are transferred via pipettes and catheters.

IVF’s availability has, itself, increased the “need” for IVF. The latter-day notion that women can bear children into their forties, via IVF, has encouraged women and men to postpone childbearing, because they think they can bypass the biological clock that formerly influenced male/female pairing.

Third, IVF entails the mass production--and mass destruction— of life. On the demand side, IVF engenders an ownership/technological orientation to life. People see lab-mediated procreation as a right and will pay a service provider to enable them to conceive.

On the supply side, because it’s economically efficient to do so, IVF technicians routinely manufacture ten or more embryos, freeze them and use as many as their owners want. Overall, millions of frozen, unused embryos are suspended in freezers, often for years, until they are thawed and thrown away.

IVF often fails. Hence, clinics often implant multiple embryos to increase their success rates, and thus, grow their clienteles and profits. Thereafter, they "selectively reduce" the extra, unwanted fetuses that implant in the womb by injecting potassium chloride into the hearts of unwanted twins, triplets or quadruplets.

Fourth, IVF enables high-tech eugenics. IVF embryos are routinely genetically screened for defects and sex. Only those embryos considered suitable are implanted. This quality control process intensifies continuously as genomic knowledge accelerates; the more that is known about genotype and phenotype, the more traits can be screened for. In a high-tech version of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, genetic profiling enables parents to prenatally purge the defective, or just an embryo of the “wrong” sex.

In addition to culling the undesired, IVF also enables affirmative human design. IVF clinics routinely screen embryos for size, which connotes vigor. Consequently, those born of IVF typically grow to be, as adults, taller than those who were naturally conceived. Further, infertile adults buy eggs or sperm from young men and women with “good genes,” i.e., those who are fit, conventionally attractive and have high SAT scores. Thereby, they engage in what the commentator Andrew Kimbrell calls “technological adultery.” Ads seeking such high echelon gametes appear in prestigious colleges’ newspapers.

IVF is also used to facilitate the womb rental of surrogacy, thus enabling male couples to produce genetic semi-replicas who have no mothers. The sperm of some sellers is used dozens of times, creating many unknowing half-brothers and half-sisters.

IVF clinics also facilitate human cloning and human genetic engineering, both morally and technologically. If such human-controlled reprotech as IVF is accepted, on what moral basis could society oppose other forms of reproductive choice, such as selecting a child's sex, genetically designing the unborn or cloning? Much of the same the equipment, techniques and research developed for IVF are used for cloning efforts. Scientists are attempting to develop artificial wombs.

DNA alteration via CRISPR/Cas 9 is a decade-plus old technology. As its techniques are refined, embryonic DNA will be altered to create designer offspring with traits that parents desire. Such scholars as Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben have observed that genetically-modifying embryos will further stratify human societies and create in those so designed unprecedented self-identity challenges.

In the meanwhile, despite its eugenic dimensions and applications, those conceived via IVF are more likely to have birth defects and childhood cancers. Further, the multiple births and advanced age pregnancies common in IVF scenarios also complicate pregnancies, child health and development and child-rearing.

Finally, IVF is expensive. Each round costs from $15,000-$30,000 and, given that multiple cycles are common and that complications that often arise in IVF pregnancies, it often costs over $100,000 per couple. IVF-driven costs are, in the most populous states, paid by mandated insurance premiums that add over $800 each year to the cost of an insurance policy, put coverage for basic care out of the reach of tens of millions of people and displace billions of dollars that might be spent on meeting basic human needs of those already born.

On the surface, IVF might produce healthy looking offspring that please parents and their family and friends. But then, wouldn't those who built their dream houses on Normandy Beach or in Yosemite Valley enjoy the view?

IVF can produce babies. But is a world where life is a commodity a good place in which for children to grow up?