Reclaiming Personhood in the Public Debate over IVF

Donald Trump’s nakedly political decision to back taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization (IVF) is the latest installment in an open debate over what has long been a matter of quiet controversy. This decision, along with the Republican Party’s pledge to “advance . . . IVF (fertility treatments),” has trivialized and politicized an issue that merits far more public discussion.

Whatever one believes about the morality or legality of IVF, our society ought to acknowledge that the issue is ethically complex and deserves debate and reflection rather than a perfunctory seal of approval motivated by political considerations. It would be a mistake to rush headlong into this brave new world without seriously considering what’s at stake.

To be sure, IVF has been taking place on a wide scale in the US for quite some time. There are at least 1.5 million embryos cryopreserved across the country as a result of IVF procedures conducted up to this point. The controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling notwithstanding, there is little chance that any significant political effort will emerge to ban or even closely regulate IVF.

But pro-lifers would be mistaken to treat IVF as a settled issue and should instead seek to redirect cultural and political debate toward the fundamental questions at play. To do so most effectively, we must consider the unexamined beliefs that shape our politics and culture in ways that aren’t easy to identify. The present embrace of IVF is the fruit of having gotten our first principles wrong when it comes to sex, marriage, family, children—indeed, of losing sight of the reality of what it means to be human.

Public discussions of IVF tend to focus on political considerations: Should IVF procedures remain legal? How should IVF be regulated, if at all? Should politicians or parties take a stance on IVF? Should the government fund IVF procedures? Should corporations subsidize employees’ use of IVF as part of a supposedly pro-family, pro-woman benefits policy?

But undergirding these is a series of far deeper questions about our premises: what are children for? Does anyone have a right to a child? Do children have a right to be conceived and raised in any particular way? What does “family planning” mean, and are all forms of “family planning” acceptable? Does a good end justify any means?

Society’s embrace of IVF as acceptable—and, indeed, as worthy of being protected and even funded by the government and taxpayers—presumes a certain answer to each of these questions. But rather than directly considering these premises and developing solid conclusions, we seem to have moved immediately to the political questions, almost as though our premises are already settled.

This is because, in a considerable sense, they have been. Political candidates’ present, flippant cheerleading for IVF is possible only because much of our society has imbibed and assented to a particular set of answers to these deep questions, almost without realizing it. We have a certain set of instincts, so to speak, about what we believe is acceptable or laudable in the realm of sex and procreation. Rather than being shaped by Christian ethics or the natural law as we might once have been, today we are shaped to a considerable extent by hyperindividualism and the philosophy and anthropology of the sexual revolution.

Many who support IVF do so for noble reasons, most often out of a sense that children are valuable and that there is something good about wanting to be a parent. But to move from this instinct to the belief that IVF is therefore morally acceptable requires assenting to a number of intermediary positions, including that any adult who wants a child has a right to one and that if we can find a way to accomplish that end, it is justified to do so even without exploring whether those means are morally acceptable.

The clarion call of the sexual revolution, “it’s just sex,” has reigned now for decades. Given that this is what we’ve come to believe, it was only a matter of time before we witnessed a widespread shift in favor of IVF. If we can have sex without any connection to children, why not bear children without any connection to sex?

The same logic that justified detaching sex from marriage and childbearing has ended up justifying the commodification of children in service of accommodating adult desires. The ultimate purpose of life, we’ve decided, is individual fulfillment and self-actualization, and almost anything is considered morally acceptable if we believe it will further this end. Whether or not we realize it, this philosophical assumption has undergirded our willingness to normalize and legalize everything from no-fault divorce to contraception, from abortion to IVF. Thanks to advancing biotechnologies that offer the illusion of total control, the stuff of life now seems to belong to us. The human body itself is ours to remake in whatever image we’d like; human offspring are ours to dismiss or conjure at will.

The forward march of technology has allowed us to continue pushing these flawed first principles to ever-greater extremes. We must be made masters of our own destiny. If we believe we will be fulfilled by sexual relationships that don’t result in children, technology and law must enable and empower us to do so. Thus the logic of the sexual revolution found its first foothold with contraception, which gives the illusion of severing sex from procreation. With modern abortion methods, we gained the power to do away with the unborn children who result from sex should contraceptives fail us.

But if the opposite should be the case, if we should want a child and find ourselves unable to have one by natural means, then IVF, egg-freezing, sperm donation, and surrogacy give us the impression that the children we desire can be purchased for the right price. Already, parents can choose among their children as they reside in a petri dish, selecting for gender and optimal genetic health. Doubtless, we will take this power to ever more depraved lengths as technology enables it, using advanced genetics to select for preferred traits such as eye color, height, and the like.

This entire project is predicated on a host of assumptions about what sex is for, what constitutes a right that we ought to recognize and protect, what children are, and what human beings are. For decades we have treated sex and its power to create new life as a wish-fulfillment factory. Whether we are using our technological prowess to avoid children or to bring them into being, at bottom what we’ve done is turn vulnerable human beings into objects.

As we consider the future of our debate over IVF, then, we must go deeper than the political questions facing us and ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we view one another. Are other human beings persons, ends unto themselves, or are they objects, to be used as I see fit? Is a child a mystery and a blessing, or is he a commodity, a possession to which I am entitled? As a society, we appear to have settled these questions without fully realizing it. We have determined that whatever technology allows us to manipulate can rightfully be controlled, that if discarding unwanted children furthers our desires it ought to be permitted, and that if obtaining children would satisfy us, we can do so without little consideration for the morality of how we go about doing so.

This returns us to the questions we face in the context of public discourse. How did we end up in a situation where both major political parties have chosen to embrace and promote IVF, seemingly with no reservations? Considering our flawed first principles, it is little wonder that we’ve seen our way clear to removing the creation of new life from its natural setting and turning it into a highly expensive—and highly lucrative—made-to-order process, backed by political will on both sides of the aisle.

That the national Republican Party is now marching with the Left on the path toward total acceptance of IVF is another reminder that both parties share a misguided view of government as provider of rights and facilitator (and guarantor) of desires. It fulfills a prediction made by Alexis de Tocqueville that an expansive notion of individual rights guaranteed by the government will eventually require the assistance—and continual enlargement—of the Leviathan.

Even so, pro-life Americans must continue to stand in favor of personhood contra objectification, even if it requires taking an unpopular stance against something that appears, on the surface, as innocuous as helping couples conceive wanted children. Though we may be the last voices doing so, we must resist the increasing cultural acceptance of a twisted moral principle: that anything goes if it enables the end we want and allows us greater control over crafting the life we think will suit us best. We must not allow ourselves to forget, as many around us have, that human life is, ultimately, out of our control—a reality we each must eventually contend with at the deathbed. We owe it to our fellow citizens to continue repeating the truth that a child—indeed, every human being—is a gift, not a right, an object, or a possession owed to anybody.

Image by mehmet and licensed via Adobe Stock.