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Posted on 10/25/2001 7:31:55 AM PDT by victim soul

Jennifer Lahl, executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), will never forget the woman in tears who came up to her after she spoke at an Evangelical Free Church in Vacaville, California.

“Four of my children are frozen,” the woman said. “I never thought they were children until I heard you speak.” The woman and her husband underwent in-vitro fertilization (IVF), which often produces “excess” embryos that are often frozen, killed, or donated for research -- if not implanted at a later date. “What do I do?” the woman asked Lahl. “My husband doesn’t want any more children.”

“How did this woman get to this point,” Lahl wonders, “when she reads her Bible regularly and goes to church every Sunday?” While no one is certain, some estimate there are more than 150,000 frozen embryos stored at IVF clinics in the U.S.

“The image of God has no business in the freezer,” Lahl says. “I believe the embryo is fully a human being made in the image of God,” she says. “That happens at conception.” Lahl was a pediatric nurse for 18 years until her husband went through a mid-life career change. They left California to attend seminary together at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. While he ended up becoming an Evangelical Free Church pastor in Oakland, she got a master’s degree in bioethics and founded the CBC as an outgrowth of her graduate project.

“The thrust of the organization is to educate the church,” Lahl says. “We have women in the church using their wombs for surrogate pregnancies, as well as couples freezing their children in fertility clinics,” she says. “Pastors don’t know it’s happening, and if they do know, they don’t know how to deal with it.”

She likes to quote Dr. Nigel Cameron, a member of the CBC Board. “He said, ‘The Sixties allowed us to have sex without babies because of birth control, and reproductive technologies have allowed us to have babies without sex.’” “As Christians we need to start saying no to these technologies,” Lahl says. “We have bought into the world,” she says.

Dr. P.J. Baggot, M.D., OB/GYN, is part of a pro-life medical practice in the city of Duarte, California. He also sees Christians traveling down the slippery slope of medical technology.

“There are a lot of really good Christians who unknowingly participate in these things,” Dr. Baggot says, “and for whatever reason they’re surprised by what they’ve gotten themselves into.” Dr. Baggot is acquainted with one woman who had triplets as a result of in-vitro fertilization.

“Then it dawned on her she had 24 more embryos in the freezer,” he says. “She thought, ‘I can’t have 24 more children!’ She eventually found couples willing to adopt her remaining embryos.

When IVF procedures are performed, doctors will examine the embryos under a microscope and grade each one for quality. The ones considered to be the best quality are implanted first.

“All the other 24 eventually miscarried,” Dr. Baggot says. “The people who miscarried said, ‘This is unfair -- You took the good ones and left us the crummy ones,’” he says. “Can you imagine talking about people like this? “You get into situations where there are no good exits.”

Still, Dr. Baggot can understand why Christians are confused about these issues. “This is not as obvious as abortion; this is somewhat more subtle,” he says. “If you take this egg and put it together with that sperm cell then you are personally determining the genetic makeup of this human being,” he says.

“It is supposed to be God reaching down from heaven and performing a miracle in the woman’s body -- it’s not supposed to be manufactured in a laboratory,” he adds. “It’s always God who decides if we get pregnant -- we must begin with submission to God.”

“There’s no morally relevant difference between an embryo and a fetus and a newborn and an adult,” says Dr. Scott Rae, Professor of Biblical Studies and Christian Ethics at Talbot Seminary in La Mirada, California. “They are just the same person at different stages of development,” he says, “ and at different locations and with different degrees of dependence.”

In some respects, the current stem cell controversy is an outgrowth of technologies used in IVF clinics. “The bulk of these stem cells have been harvested from left-over embryos from infertility clinics,” says Jennifer Lahl of the CBC. “They can only be in the freezer for five years,” she says. “The parents didn’t want them so they were developed into stem cell lines that could be used for research.”

“They have to take the stem cells out of the embryo, and in doing that, they destroy the embryo,” she adds. In other words, well-meaning Christian parents unwittingly allow their own babies to be aborted, perhaps blinded to the culture of death by medical professionals using scientific terminology that masks the true nature of their procedures. Further, their consciences are swayed by hopeful assurances their embryos will be used for scientific research. There is no doubt in Lahl’s mind that killing embryos for their stem cells is wrong. “It is heinous; it is murder,” she says.

“Discarding embryos is the moral equivalent of abortion,” Dr. Rae at Talbot Seminary says. “I tell couples going down that road to be careful,” he says. “Every embryo that’s created in the lab gets a shot at developing in the womb. Don’t selectively abort pregnancies because you get too many.”

She opposes another procedure many expectant parents take for granted today -- prenatal genetic testing. “A woman told me recently, ‘It’s my right to test because I want to be really prepared.’” If a condition such as Down’s syndrome is revealed by such tests, the parents will often face pressure to abort the baby, according to Lahl. “There is no treatment for any of the testing,” Lahl says. “The only treatment is abortion,” she says. “Why should we open that door when the insurance companies will push us toward abortion?”

“The insurance industry will start to deny health care to people that have genetically imperfect children,” Lahl predicts. “They will say, ‘Fine, have that baby, but we’re not going to pay for it. We’ll pay for your abortion, but not for that.’ ”

“We don’t see the value in life,” Lahl says. “We see the value in perfect life,” she says. “Are we willing to see His glory displayed in less-than-perfect children?” she asks.

Lahl sees clear scriptural lines drawn with respect to surrogacy. “I’m always against using sperm donors and egg donors,” she says, citing the problems Abraham and Hagar encountered in their union. “You defile the marriage bed.”

“We need to come alongside infertile couples and not make them feel less than human,” she says, referring to insensitive remarks she’s heard some make, such as ‘Whose fault is it?’ “Sometimes God is calling a couple to a life of childlessness; his plan may be for them to serve as a couple, and not as a family. What’s wrong with adoption?” she asks. “We have a Biblical model for that.”

Dr. Rae at Talbot Seminary is willing to accept in-vitro fertilization with certain guidelines. “God isn’t biting his nails because we have learned to do in-vitro fertilization,” he says. He sees infertility as a result of the fall of man and sin entering the world. “Medical technology that helps reverse the effects of the entrance of sin into the world is a part of God’s common grace. Infertility is an effect of the entrance of sin.”

Lahl says she has never heard a good argument favoring in-vitro fertilization, and she opposes freezing the embryos resulting from such procedures. “When they do freeze,” she says, “it’s all for pragmatic reasons -- because the technology is so expensive,” she says. “They say, ‘We might as well harvest 10 or 12 because the failure rate is so high.’ ”

Dr. Rae takes a different view on freezing embryos. “All you’re doing is slowing down molecular interactions and putting development temporarily on hold,” he says. “However, if you freeze them past the time they can be successfully thawed -- that’s different.”

“The conventional wisdom is that it’s tougher to thaw them out successfully after five years, but that’s not absolute,” he adds. Dr. Rae is aware of one embryo successfully implanted after being frozen for seven years. A further problem with infertility clinics is that they are unregulated. “We don’t really know what’s going on,” Lahl says. “Should people be spending $30,000 to $70,000 on something with a 98% failure rate?” she asks.

The direction of medical technology also troubles Lahl. “In our generation we will see a cloned human being,” she predicts. The scientific imagination of human beings seems to know no limits.

“There will be a burgeoning field of growing organs and tissues in dishes,” Dr. Baggot says. “Some people have even proposed that we grow an embryo in a dish and then cut the head off, so you have an organ source,” he says. “You would have a little human being growing in a dish without a head or a brain, but it would have everything else. So if you need a heart or a kidney or a liver -- it’s there.”

“The church needs to turn off the TV and wake up,” says Jennifer Lahl. “We wouldn’t have a culture of death if the church in America understood this issue and responded.”

Mark Ellis is a Senior Correspondent for ASSIST News Service. He is also the Assistant Pastor at Calvary Evangelical Free Church of Laguna Beach, CA. He grew up in Southern California and worked for 18 years in the commercial real estate industry before entering Christian ministry.

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