By Ellen Painter Dollar
A research team headed by an Australian veterinarian is predicting that, within a decade, human in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates will near 100 percent, and that couples will choose IVF as their preferred method of reproducing, rendering sex a purely recreational activity. The predictions are based on assisted reproduction in cattle, which has achieved a nearly 100 percent success rate in producing viable embryos. Do these predictions about near-universal IVF usage, near-perfect IVF success rates, and the demise of natural conception (which the researchers deem highly inefficient) have merit?
A fertility expert quoted in the articles linked above is skeptical that human IVF could become efficient enough to replace natural conception. One hallmark of fertility medicine—despite the millions of dollars invested in procedures and the increasing numbers of patients accessing them—is how much of the IVF process remains a mystery even to experts. What leads to IVF success? Why do some eggs fertilize and some embryos implant, while others don’t? Such questions are far from having clear answers.
Besides the limits of fertility science, some experts argue that the grueling nature of IVF will prevent its widespread use. Last year, Mark Henderson, a science writer for the Times of London, named this reason, among others, in an article arguing that fears about becoming a culture in which parents can order up “designer babies” are overblown. In a response to Henderson’s article on my Choices That Matter blog, I argued that there are plenty of grueling, expensive endeavors that people willingly pursue because they perceive the desired outcome as worth short-term hardship. I don’t believe that the demanding nature of IVF is a strong enough deterrent to prevent its widespread use—especially when the intended result is a much-desired child.
It’s worth noting that many dystopian novels take place in societies where the connection between sex and procreation has been completely severed. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for example, sex is encouraged, even for the young, as a social activity, and children are manufactured in a process designed for efficiency (there’s that word again) and the propagation of traits that support a consumer society. Lois Lowry’s young adult novel The Giver portrays a culture in which women possessing certain qualities (namely, a robust body and relatively low intelligence) are housed separately from everyone else and given the job of bearing children. The children are then matched with parents and raised in what appear to be traditional nuclear families—except that parents have no biological ties to the children they raise, and infants who do not meet cultural standards are euthanized (even for problems as basic as difficulty sleeping through the night). These are fictional worlds, but the power of art lies in artists’ ability to uncover truths that are obscured by the daily minutiae of human life.
The foundation of Roman Catholic opposition to contraception and assisted reproduction is the belief that God designed sex and procreation to go together. Even if you believe (as I do) that God intended sex to be about more than making babies, the fact that sex can make babies, and that until recently, sex has been the only way to make babies, hints at God’s intentions for parents, children and communities.
As Protestant bioethicist Gilbert Meilaender wrote in his classic Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, “That the sexual union of a man and a woman is naturally ordered toward the birth of children is, in itself, simple biological fact, but we may see in that fact a lesson to be learned…A child who is thus begotten, not made, embodies the union of his father and mother. They have not simply reproduced themselves, nor are they merely a cause of which the child is an effect. Rather, the power of their mutual love has given rise to another…Their love-giving has been life-giving; it is truly procreation.” Of assisted reproduction, which separates the process of uniting sperm and egg from the act of love, Meilaender asserts that, “In our world there are countless ways to ‘have’ a child, but the fact that the end ‘product’ is the same does not mean that we have done the same thing.”
I’m skeptical of the prediction that we’ll all be using IVF to conceive babies in 10 years’ time. But I think the question of whether such a development would be a benefit or a disaster for humankind is worth pondering—now, before technology makes it possible. Reproductive technology has been progressing faster than our ability or willingness to consider the moral questions it raises. When faced with provocative predictions about where fertility medicine might take us, let’s take the opportunity for our ethical reflection to catch up with technological developments.
Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.