Posted on 01/25/2016 9:26:45 AM PST by wagglebee
For this reason, "anti-abortion" people are not just in favor of "more babies by any and all means." Not at all.
If that were the case, we'd be in favor of rape, artificial insemination, human cloning, polygamy, harems, child-brides and bride-capture, IVF, surrogacy, teen promiscuity, prostitution, human breeding farms as pioneered by the Nazis, etc. These are all ways to "get babies." But they are not at all ways to restore deep human dignity where we recognize in each other "the image and likeness of God".
We are for respect for Divine and Natural Law, and the Sanctity of Life and of Marriage and of Family Life, which are the substance of what is actually sacred to us in this world.
You are entitled to your opinion.
My wife and I spent many years and about $100,000 trying to conceive.
We are finally pregnant. We agreed that if this one miscarries we will just give up and accept the latest failure as God’s will, and never try again.
The issue of discarded embryos does appear to be an insurmountable issue with IVF, even for those who do not accept Roman Catholic teaching. I can see no possible way to argue that destroying a fertilized embryo is anything different from aborting a baby shortly before the end of the first trimester, or at any other point before the baby would be viable outside the womb.
For those of us who believe abortion is murder even if the baby cannot yet survive outside the womb, IVF is at best extremely problematic because of the fertilized embryo issue, even if the biological parents are married and even if every one of the fertilized embryos is eventually implanted.
At best, it creates a major temptation to say "enough" rather than implanting the remaining five or ten "extra embryos."
At worst, it leads to selective reduction of what would otherwise be triplet, quadruplet or quintuplet pregnancies, or to genetic testing for sex selection or avoidance of genetic abnormalities. Just how many parents will willingly and deliberately implant an embryo known to have a life-altering genetic defect?
Even if a hypothetical married couple is willing to implant all 20 embryos, perhaps two-by-two to maximize the chance of a successful pregnancy if both embryos successfully implant, and even implant an embryo which has been tested and known in advance will be a Down's Syndrome baby, there's still the problem that their money is being used to support a business which regularly destroys not just dozens or hundreds but quite literally THOUSANDS of embryos, and is engaged in the creation of large numbers of babies with fathers not married to their mothers.
I don't want to be the one to tell a childless couple seeking IVF that their only chance of having a child is totally unacceptable under all circumstances -- but the whole IVF business seems to be inherently filled with temptations to murder even for parents with the best of motives.
I'm not sure IVF is a crystal-clear, black-and-white, absolute choice between good and evil. Maybe if there were an IVF clinic which refused to serve any non-married couples, and refused to destroy any embryos, it might be less problematic.
But with the way IVF clinics work now, it's basically buying the ability to have a baby from a clinic which routinely kills more embryos than most abortion clinics.
That sure is getting way too close to the edge of the pit for me to be comfortable with it.
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