Joe Heschmeyer examines the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), its many violations of human dignity, and its horrifying implications.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. What is IVF, in vitro, fertilization all about? And why should everyone but particularly Christians and pro-lifers be against it, be even horrified by it? Now for context, recently the Southern Baptist Convention put out what appeared to be an anti IVF statement. More on that in a second. And I was asked over on Patreon, this is a subtle way of telling you, you should also join Patreon. That what do we need to know about this, right? And so originally I was asked for a book recommendation. I decided just to make this episode kind of exploring what is the deal with IVF because it’s something many pro-lifers are okay with or confused by. And so again, for context, there was what appeared to be an IVF statement or denunciation by the Southern Baptist Convention. Recently. In fact, Baptist Press, the official press of the Southern Baptist Convention put out an article saying, no, no, it’s not really against IVF.

And it said, media reports on the IVF resolution have led Southern Baptist to underscore that they did not condemn the procedure. So unless you think Southern Baptists are solidly on board the pro-life bandwagon, they want to let you know they’re not. Instead, they urged thoughtful, cautious use of it. So here you have the Southern Baptist Convention, very much the conservative wing of modern Protestantism announcing that it’s fine with IVF used appropriately. And in fact, if you read the IVF resolution that generated so many headlines, you’ll find that they reaffirm the unconditional value and write to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and they resolve to only use reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the IVF process. In other words, putting that in plain language, you can use IVF as long as you don’t make too many embryos in the factory, in the laboratory because if you make too many as we’re going to see you have to kill them or do something with them.

Now that is a very strange place to draw the moral line, but nevertheless, I wanted to highlight that this was there. I also wanted to point out the Baptist press again, the official publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, even put out something called our IVF journey, a first person account of a woman saying that she and her husband are pro-life and pro IVF and making an argument for why this is so. Those are the people allegedly anti IVF making one of the weakest kind of arguments in terms of where they’re ending up. Now, I would suggest that this points to a much broader problem. Plenty of pro-lifers are fine with IVF have even used IVF and are unaware of the moral problems that are generated by IVF, which are bigger than I hear anybody talking about. So for that reason, I would suggest unmasking is needed.

Now, unmasking might sound overdramatic, it might sound like, oh, come on, give me a break. But I would suggest that’s quite literally what needs to happen here, that there is language that’s intended to obscure reality and we need to pull back the mask as it were, so we can see plainly what’s going on. And then here I’m indebted to George Orwell in his famous essay politics and English language from 1946. He lamented even then that political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible that if you were to just say, here’s what I want to do, people would be horrified. Thus he says, we’ve largely got a political language that consists of euphemism question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. So think about something like abortion, something like IVF, and think about how much people refuse to speak clearly and plainly on the topic.

So you’ll have things like a women’s reproductive freedom. That’s literally as we’re going to see scientifically not what’s happening. The process of reproduction is done by the time abortion’s even a question or it’ll just be the word abortion itself, which just means that the pregnancy stops. That could be a miscarriage or it could be someone intentionally killing the unborn child. The language is intentionally imprecise because to say what you’re doing is that much worse, people wouldn’t support these things. In orwell’s language, defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out of the countryside, the cattle and machine gun, the hu set on fire with incendiary bullets and all of this gets called ification, right? We use these kind of words, this kind of language when we don’t want to speak plainly about the things being described because they’re not pretty to look at head on.

And so he warns that the inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism, and he puts it really beautifully. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuddle fish spurting out ink. Now that’s not to say long words are always bad or that Latin phrases or scientific ones are bad of themselves, but it does mean that we should watch out when they’re being used in a way that obscures rather than reveals what’s being described. Orwell lays out six rules or six points that he suggests that you follow to write clearly, and the fifth one is most relevant. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. So I’m going to try to follow that and lay out as clearly as I can what’s going on in IVF and why might this be a problem. So let’s start here. Part one, what happens in IVF? There’s several things happening scientifically here, so let’s go through one by one First. Fertility drugs are given to the woman to help her body to produce multiple mature eggs.

CLIP:

The first step is taking fertility medications in the form of shots to help your ovaries produce several mature eggs. The goal is to make 10 to 15 eggs. It takes about two weeks until your eggs are ready for retrieval,

Joe:

So make sure we got that. You’re intentionally producing 10 to 15 hopefully eggs that will then be retrieved. That then leads to step two egg retrieval. They’re removed from your body. Step three, they’re then fertilized in the lab. Now there’s an important detail here I want to make sure you don’t miss.

CLIP:

Now comes the part everyone’s most familiar with, combining sperm with your best eggs.

Joe:

So the phrase I want to focus on there is your best eggs, and there’s two things you should notice there. Number one, what makes a particular egg best? One obvious answer is that it’s more likely to survive, but there are other considerations as we’re going to see related to what genetic qualities you want your child to have, which invite all sorts of eugenic playground sort of questions. Oh look, this egg has the genes for such and such a trait. This one doesn’t. But also you’ll notice it says your best eggs plural. That’s because typically you are not producing simply one child but through fertilization. Now, we’ll get into why I’m using the language of child here in a moment, but notice that you’re not just producing one embryo, you are producing multiple ones and you’re deciding which eggs to turn into embryos on the basis of some factor by which you consider them the best ones.

Now, there’s several other questions that aren’t explored here but are going to be really relevant as well. Number one, like whose sperm and whose egg this are going to be? Maybe it seems obvious to you. Well, obviously it’s the husband and wife. Well, frequently, it’s actually not frequently, and we’re going to get into all of the issues involved here. You have donors, you have sperm donors, you have egg donors, and you also have surrogates. We’ll get into surrogates in the next step. In fact, as we play around with these things, the guardian announced a little over a year ago that the first UK baby with DNA from three people was born after a new IVF procedure that if you’re going to be combining sperm and egg, then maybe you can play around with the genetics a little more.

One question we should also be asking right here, and this is remember step three, the embryo is not yet in the womb of the mother or the gestational host as they sometimes refer to IVF surrogates. And the question we should have is the embryo at this point, a living human being. Now I’ve already laid my cards on the table by referring to it as a child earlier. So what do we make of this? And I word this question fairly precisely because it makes it very easy to answer because a human being a distinct concept. You have human cells, you have skin cells for instance, and then you have a human organism, a being and an organism is different than the cells that make up the organism. Now, some organisms are very small, they’re called for instance, single cell organisms, but a cell in an organism aren’t the same thing.

An organism is the unit of life, so to speak. What I mean by that is a single celled organism is a living being, whereas the cells of a living organism that has a lot of cells, those are not living beings. Your skin cells aren’t separate beings that are just hanging onto you because we’re buds. No, they’re part of your body. They might survive for a while outside as living tissue, but they’re not living organisms. I hope that distinction is really clear. It might be very basic to some of you, but it’s really important for questions like abortion and the morality of how we treat the embryos produced in laboratories and IVF. So here I would turn to the biology of reproduction, a science book by Giuseppe Fusco and Alessandra Minnelli, and you can turn to any number of other biology and reproduction books that talk about the same thing, but they put it fairly clearly.

They say sexual reproduction and they’re looking not only at humans, but humans and any creatures that reproduce sexually is a form of reproduction that generates new individuals with the genetic makeup resulting from the association and or the reassortment of genetic material of different origins. Like I said, fairly clearly. All that means is you are genetically not your mom or your dad. In the case of asexual reproduction where you’ve got a cell that breaks off and it multiplies itself and then it breaks in half, all of it is genetically of one thing. So you have a hard time saying if a single celled organism splits in two, well who’s the parent and who’s the child there? It’s tricky to answer that question. In the case of sexual reproduction, it’s not tricky to answer that question. You can look at the genes and say, okay, this is the child and these are the two parents.

Or in the weird case of that British child, here are the three parents anyway, and minelli go on to say in the most canonical form of sexual reproduction, there are weird cases like with plants and things. The new genome is formed by the union of partial copies of the genomes of two parents through fertilization in plainer language, sperm and egg from mom and dad, dad and mom, I guess keep that parallel come together usually in the womb of the mother here in a laboratory and form a new human organism. So I want to suggest this should put the abortion debate completely to rest. Now you might say, what does this have to do with abortion? We’re going to see it has a lot to do with abortion later on, but what should be really clear is there’s a living human organism here that is growing in the laboratory and is clearly not mom and clearly not dad, but like you and me is genetically descended from both of them.

That is abundantly clear. Scientists do not have the ability to create life from non-living matter. They can take living cells and in this case gametes, which are like haplos, which they’ve got half of a chromosome and they can combine that, but they can’t just take a non-living thing and turn it into a living thing. So the obvious question of when does human life begin, we have an answer right here in the laboratory because otherwise it raises all sorts of other questions. So remember I mentioned that, and we’re going to look at this more directly later. You have things like IVF surrogacy, so you might put Mr and Mrs. Smith’s sperm and egg together, but because Mrs. Smith may past childbearing years in terms of carrying a child in pregnancy, they hire a younger woman to carry the baby in her womb. Well, when this baby is growing in her womb, whose baby is it?

Well, biologically Mr. And Mrs. Smith’s, it’s quite clearly, but from the abortion standpoint for decades, they made the argument that the unborn child in the womb was just part of the mother’s body. Now that is obviously not true when you’re looking at the embryo growing in a lab, and that’s obviously not true when an embryo that is not biologically your child is growing in your womb as an IVF surrogate, but nevertheless, that lie persists and people still believe it. So I just call it out to say we can unmask more than just the horrors of IVF, but also the lies about abortion here because quite clearly undeniably unambiguously you have a living organism here in the lab and this organism is a being meaning it’s not just gametes, it’s not just cells, it’s actually growing on its own and it’s a human being. It’s not an animal, it’s not a plant. There’s no question what kind of being that it is. So is there a living human being in the lab? Well, quite clearly the answer to that is yes. Let’s go back to this video to talk more about the growth of this because you’ll find that to be even clearer as we go.

CLIP:

The fertilized egg then divides cells until it reaches the blast assist stage five to six days after fertilization.

Joe:

So as we just heard, it’s growing and it’s becoming a blais. Now you’re going to get to step four implantation.

CLIP:

Multiple embryos are then transferred back into your uterus in the hopes that at least one will implant itself and to begin to develop

Joe:

Two things. One, this raises of course is that step four that we have the question of who’s womb because this is where it actually becomes relevant because you already have the creation of a living human being before. Now this living human being may end up in someone else’s body, so that’s going to be one of the ethical questions we have to explore. But two, you might notice again that use of the plural that they’re intentionally implanting multiple fertilized embryos. In other words, they’re implanting multiple unborn human beings into your womb hoping that at least one will take, which leads to part two. What happens now, let’s say it works. In fact, let’s say it works so much that you have multiple children who survive implantation and they don’t die as the doctors are trying to implant them, and as IVF technology gets better and better, this becomes more and more likely.

What do you do now? Well, this is the first of many of the ethical questions that this raises with what’s called selective reduction. Now, selective reduction like ification is a very euphemistic way of saying we’re going to kill some people. In this case, it’s choosing which of your children you want to kill, and then the reasons why create something called eugenic abortions. So this is a loaded kind of question, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists committee on ethics describe it like this. They say selective reduction is somewhat different than multi-feed pregnancy reduction in multi-feed pregnancy reduction. The fetuses to be reduced are chosen based on technical considerations such as which is most accessible to intervention In selective reduction, fetuses are chosen based on health status. So in other words, do you just choose the child that it’s easiest to get to or do you target one or more of them on the basis of health?

Now, what they’re describing is not actually true. Those are not the only two reasons that they might choose to kill some of the unborn children and not others as they go on to say in the same document. For some women, a multi fatal pregnancy reduction to a single 10, meaning you don’t want to have a bunch of kids, you just want to have one maybe appropriate or desired option for medical reasons or non-medical reasons such as financial, social, or emotional concerns, you just, it’s a lot of money to raise kids. I know I’ve got three, it’d be a lot cheaper if I just killed two of them. I’m not going to do that. Don’t worry kids if you’re watching this, I promise. But the point is that’s the argument being made. Hey, look, you’ve got three living children because biologically you do. Wouldn’t it be cheaper if you just had one?

They then point out, this is again the ethics committee that is governing this sort of thing. They say the use of sex alone is a consideration in determining which fetus to reduce poses, ethical challenges that are beyond the scope of this committee opinion and are discussed by others elsewhere. That is literally your job. You’re the committee on ethics. The question of whether you can just abort children because they’re girls rather than boys is a moral question and an ethical one that absolutely has to be asked. Particularly when you look at cultures that put a very high premium on having a son and look down on having a daughter. This notion of what’s sometimes called gender side, right? You’re going to die because you are a baby girl. That is not a health reason. That is not the accessibility. You just happen to be closer. So if you decide to do this, this raises the obvious question, how do you decide which of your children to kill Harvard Medical School may?

So I guess two months ago now, released three months ago now almost a thing on what’s called polygenic screening. Polygenic meaning it’s looking at several different genes. So polygenic screening is what’s used to determine what are the likely traits of your child going to be because if you’re going to kill them, don’t at least want to know, well, what are they going to be like? You can choose a favorite and let the other ones die. I realize this is horrific, I’m just describing, but when polled, three quarters of Americans actually support the use of this screening for looking at things like diabetes, heart disease, and depression before an embryo is implanted. Now, there’s going to be two reasons this is relevant. One is you’ve got the child fertilized in a Petri dish somewhere and you want to know, should I take the trouble of implanting the baby in my womb so that they can be born?

Or do we just leave them in this very limited state of human development? Well, what are they going to be like? What’s their future earning potential? What is their health risk going to be? Those are the kind of questions you can look at and ask based on the genes, and so for things like health reasons, three quarters of Americans were comfortable with it for other reasons such as intelligence heights and skin color, they were far less likely to support it. Let’s break down the numbers a little bit in terms of what people were okay with using polygenic screening. For instance, 77% were fine with using polygenic screening to look for certain physical health conditions and 72% for certain psychiatric conditions. We can break that down even more in terms of people who strongly approved or approved using polygenic screening, things like cancer and heart disease, very popular, but you also find a majority of people who approve or strongly approve of screening for things as simple as A DHD, autism, bipolarity diabetes, OCD, high blood pressure and obesity.

Now, the obesity one’s going to be kind of funny and I’ll explain why because it’s far less popular to screen for behavioral traits or physical traits. So you can screen for risk of obesity, but you can’t screen for BMI body mass index. Now, if you know anything about what obesity is, it’s A BMI of 30 or above. So if you say we’re going to screen to find out if your child is going to be fat, people are like, oh, that’s horrible. But if you say, we’re going to screen to find out if your child is at risk of obesity, people are like, oh, good. This is medical. My point is there’s no clearly principled reason why people are okay with using some of these and not others. What’s really striking is people are very uncomfortable, although it still comes out to closer to a 50 50 split than you might imagine with screening for things like intelligence, can you choose to let some children die and others live because some of the children are smarter than others or just because some of them have higher blood pressure than others or lower blood pressure probably.

But things, I mean, the fact is right now polygenic screening is trying to create a situation in which you can determine which children to bring to birth based on their intelligence, neuroticism, body mass index, life satisfaction, conscientiousness, height, educational attainment, agreeableness, baldness, openness to experience extroversion and skin color. Now, I will say there are enormous questions about how likely it is that these predictions actually work, how well these genetic screens are actually screening for the things they claim to be, how well you can actually design the sort of designer baby of the future. But the point is that they’re trying and a lot of people are okay with it. In fact, where people were not okay with it, it was in no small part because they were worried that they were overselling things. 92% of people expressed a concern about it leading to false expectations for the child.

We prepackaged the genius package and your child should be an amazing virtuo, whatever they do, and then the kid’s just a normal kid. That’s going to lead to a lot of disappointed parents and a lot of pressure on a lot of poor children. Additionally, about half were very or extremely concerned about negative outcomes for individuals or society. Thank you, because whether people realize it or not is a nightmare scenario. So first, as I say, Sasha Gusev, who I believe is a geneticist, has warned that we’re still more at the realm of science fiction than science fact that there’s not a lot to go on to suggest they can actually deliver on these promises, but second, it does create a sort of genetic arms race and we’ll get into that. So when people were worried about this, one of the things they were most worried about was the false expectations, but the second thing they were worried about was eugenics, and rightly so, and we’ll talk about this because some people I know don’t think eugenics is something we need to be worried about.

In fact, you can see that in the numbers, a sizable minority of Americans are comfortable with eugenics or at least don’t seem to be worried about it. 82% said they would be at least slightly interested in using polygenic embryonic screening if they were already undergoing IVF, and here’s the crazy thing, 30% said they would consider undergoing IVF to gain access to polygenic embryo screening. Here&#... Read more on Catholic.com