The procedure can kill many embryos before implantation is successful. Therein lies the ethical problem, killing life to make life.
Less than 50% of all embryos are viable. That means they are not souls; that means they will NEVER even grow to becoming a second trimester baby. Whether they are frozen in labs or created in a woman’s tubes. They won’t be humans, even unborn humans.
That is a FACT that needs to be understood. I think bean seeds have a higher % of viability than human embryos.
While some women do have inhospitable uteri*, by FAR the biggest reason for infertility is egg quality. One useful definition of egg quality is that the egg will (once fertilized) be able to grow into at LEAST a second trimester unborn baby. So almost every infertile woman undergoing IVF, if she is using her own eggs, is working mostly with embryos that just are not potential human babies and thus can’t be killed.
* Maybe 5-10% of people undergoing IVF have a uterus problem and thus would be technically “killing” a potential baby. Once this is discovered, the doctor will not push IVF on this woman but will either try to solve her uterus problem or recommend using another woman’s uterus. Please note that a MUCH HIGHER RATE OF KILLING EMBRYOS happens with completely normal, homemade pregnancies. Many women do not produce enough progesterone to help hold the pregnancy in. These women will miscarry early on. Most miscarriages are not from this; most are due to a bad egg. But there are indeed SOME women who just don’t know enough to take extra progesterone in the first weeks of pregnancy and can suffer a loss. This could have happened to your wife. And technically “she” killed a healthy baby. They just didn’t know. Nor should she feel guilty. Some don’t even know they were pregnant at the time! It is one simple thing a reproductive endocrinologist will do to save a pregnancy.
Note this isn't just posted to you but to "all" as well.
Is it tolerable to leave even one viable embryo in the frozen wasteland of a liquid nitrogen freezer, potentially indefinitely?
What about just letting one viable out of 99 unviable die in a Petri dish?
Someone said upthread its best to tread lightly on this subject and it's easy to avoid hard questions as above if we talk in mere statistical concepts.
This isn't a value judgment about anyone's baby who was the product of IVF. Someone claimed, by implication, the Church's position was that IVF babies are somehow less "valid" than babies conceived naturally. This is not the case, just as babies conceived in rape are no less "valid" than any other. It's not about the worth of the baby who survives the procedure. At all. Such a child is just as "valid" as any other. It's about the way s/he was conceived.
Before I say or ask anything more that may offend, I will only ask one final question: how can anyone believe just one life is expendable, for any reason? Or more precisely, how can anyone believe it is within our preview to create and subsequently destroy, even just one, human life?
Thanks for clarifying what so many people misunderstand.
Quite often, fertilized embryos fail to implant, even in a healthy womb, and even without IVF. Nobody is killing them. They are simply not viable.