Alternatives

Doctors Thinking Badly, An IVF Case Study

“Can you think of some other way you could do that?” If you parent like we do, it’s a question you often find yourself asking your children. We don’t like to solve all life’s little obstacles for them, so, when it comes to a particularly recalcitrant jigsaw puzzle or a box that just won’t open no matter how hard you hammer on it, rather than solve the problem for them, we try to encourage them to think of an alternative path to the solution. I find this approach to be quite successful, but then again, I am dealing with children, not prestigious doctors.  

Long time readers may recall I am often mystified by the motives of my peers. As I put it in this piece on Oscar Wilde’s Ozempic habit, “One of the enduring questions in modern medicine is whether our leading minds are pig-ignorant or outright evil.” The latest issue of JAMA (the prestigious flagship journal of the American Medical Association – I read it so you don’t have to) may help shed some light. It seems entirely possible that some very intelligent doctors don’t think at all.

This month finds the JAMA team in full panic at the thought that any restrictions might be placed on embryo-destroying IVF techniques. The journal features not one but two impassioned opinion pieces making the case that babies aren’t people until the defrosting check clears. For a more thoughtful, compassionate look at the moral issues inherent in today’s IVF practices, this recent essay by the brave Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a good place to start (Dr. Kheriaty was a professor of medicine at the University of California and the head of their medical school’s ethics program, famously fired for questioning the ethics of covid vaccine mandates; here’s a great talk he gave about the Kafkaesque experience of being expected to teach students the concept of informed consent while simultaneously forcing unnecessary experimental treatments upon them). For a more openly Christian perspective, and for fellow Allie Beth Stuckey fans, she has had several recent podcasts on the issue that are worth listening to, such as this one. Katy Faust is another invaluable voice on the topic, with countless interviews to choose from, such as this one at The Federalist.

Yet my purpose here isn’t to get into the IVF debate, not exactly. I’m trying, instead, to highlight for the non-medical reader just how creepily incurious mainstream medical thought is these days. And I can do no better than the following paragraph, taken straight from JAMA’s defense of IVF, written by big shot NYU doctors (the authors include an OB and an ethicist), with emphasis added by me:

To perform [genetic testing], embryos are biopsied and then frozen while patients await the results of genetic testing. When results return, healthy embryos are thawed one at a time for transfer. Embryo cryopreservation is therefore a necessary step for performing genetic testing on embryos, whether to test for a specific disease or to screen for aneuploidy. If embryo cryopreservation becomes infeasible due to legal restrictions, genetic testing of embryos will no longer be available. Ironically, the alternative to testing embryos prior to transfer is to perform genetic testing on the pregnancy, once it has become established, and to pursue an abortion if the fetus carries a genetic disorder. This means that less embryonic testing may lead to more abortions. Without either of these options, patients will not be able to prevent their children from having serious and sometimes lethal heritable conditions.

Did you catch that? If you don’t let us kill undesired babies outside the womb, the only alternative is to kill undesired babies in the womb. No other alternative comes to mind!

This, folks, is what I mean when I talk about there being no neutral. Much more on that, featuring another creepy JAMA article, here:

The great myth of modern life that I was talking about? It’s that that the public square is neutral. Decisions, we are told, are made based on science and objective studies, and the religious among us should leave our faith at home, not “impose” it on the public. Yet there is no such thing as neutrality. There are only competing worldviews; some we are aware of, others we’re not. JAMA might think it’s ideologically neutral, objectively scientific – but so did the Spartans! Both share unexamined assumptions about life unworthy of life, and it is anything but neutral to sit back and let those preconceptions lead to children’s bodies piling up.

The concept that killing babies might be, er, problematic, doesn’t even compute with these people. Not killing the baby isn’t even an option! It’s simply a question of which method of killing the baby proves most palatable.  

In closing, whatever you think about IVF, I invite you to ponder one more line from the JAMA article:

If embryos outside the body are given the same value as human children and can never be wasted or destroyed, IVF becomes inefficient, impractical, and inaccessible.

They said it, not me. But there you have it, straight from the pro-IVF medical experts’ mouths: destroying embryos is, in their view, an essential part of the IVF process. Funny, if someone like me were to write that in a publication like The Federalist, it would probably be banned as misinformation. Yet here it is, in JAMA, in black and white. Don’t let them gaslight you with any PR campaigns; this is how they speak about IVF when they think they’re among friends.

One final word. This should go without saying, but regardless of what one thinks about IVF methods, nobody should ever treat an IVF-conceived baby as somehow inferior to any other child. Indeed, the fact that these IVF babies are made in the image of God, same as any child anywhere, and should be treated as such, is my whole point! It is precisely because I do not view them as somehow subhuman, or second-class citizens, that I pray they do not get ‘wasted or destroyed.’ The alternative – an alternative I do not want to imagine even as we are barreling toward it full speed – is the stuff of nightmares.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!  

(p.s. Looking for an alternative worth pondering? Donate to your local pregnancy center, if you’re feeling generous. Here’s a great one to support.)