The Case Concerning IVF

A standalone treatise in the series On the Sanctity of Life, Abortifacient Contraception, and the Faithful Care of Christ’s Flock

This series is chiefly concerned with abortifacient contraception, but the same failure of conscience runs through the church’s largely unquestioned acceptance of in vitro fertilisation, and the same principle that governs the one governs the other. If the conceived child is a living human being under the protection of God (the ground established in the treatise on the biblical case), then that is true of the child conceived in a laboratory no less than the child conceived in a marriage bed. This treatise makes the case concerning IVF in full, and it does so with a particular care, because more than any other subject in this correspondence it touches directly upon a grief many faithful Christians carry. We ask to be read as writing tenderly, because we mean to.

1. Selection presupposes rejection

The moral difficulty with IVF is not incidental to the technique; it is built into how the technique works. Standard practice creates more embryos than the parents intend to carry, precisely so that the “best” may be selected for transfer and the remainder held in reserve. Those not selected are discarded, frozen indefinitely, donated to research, or eventually allowed to perish. This is not an unfortunate side effect that better practice might one day eliminate. Selection presupposes rejection: to choose among embryos for the ones most likely to succeed is, in the same act, to set aside the ones not chosen. And rejection here does not mean setting aside a sample of tissue. It means the destruction, freezing, or abandonment of living human beings, each of whom — by the argument this whole series rests upon — is a distinct human made in the image of God.

The embryos so set aside are valuable for one reason, and it is the same reason that grounds the value of every human life in this correspondence: not their size, their stage of development, their wantedness, or their usefulness, but that each is a distinct living human bearing God’s image. The very qualifications the world uses to discount them — they are small, they are early, they were not the ones chosen — are exactly the qualifications Scripture refuses to accept as grounds for withdrawing protection.

We should add, with care, that some Christian couples pursue IVF with the sincere resolve to create only as many embryos as they will carry, and to abandon none. That resolve is a real moral difference, and we honour it. Even there, the process carries risks to the embryos created that the couple should understand, and the clinics’ default practices press hard against such restraint. But our sharpest words in this treatise are for the industry’s ordinary practice and for the church’s incuriosity about it, not for the grieving couple seeking to act rightly within it.

2. The scale, from the official record

This is not a marginal or hypothetical concern. It operates at scale, and the scale is documented in the United Kingdom’s own official figures.

Fertility treatment in the UK is regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), and the volume of treatment is large and rising: around 77,000 IVF cycles were carried out in 2022, up from roughly 69,000 in 2019.[1] Behind those cycles lies a far larger number of embryos created. Official figures provided to Parliament during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill show that between 1991 and 2005 more than two million embryos (2,137,924) were created in the UK, of which some 1.2 million were never used.[2] Further HFEA-derived figures, given in a later parliamentary answer, indicate that by the end of 2012 more than 3.5 million embryos had been created since 1991, with only a small fraction resulting in a birth.[3]

We state these carefully. They are cumulative totals over long periods, drawn from official sources, and the true present-day figures are necessarily higher still, since treatment has only increased since. However one reckons them, the conclusion is unavoidable: in the United Kingdom alone, well over a million human embryos have been created and then discarded or left in indefinite storage under the HFEA’s regime — and, as things stand, no one will name them for what they are.

3. The practices the church has treated as respectable medicine

Beyond the fate of the surplus embryos, the church has been strangely incurious about how these clinics actually operate, and some of it will not bear the scrutiny.

IVF ordinarily requires the husband to produce a sample by masturbation, and clinics commonly keep rooms stocked with pornography on their own premises to assist him in doing so. A practice sold to Christian couples as the road to a longed-for child therefore routinely begins with a man committing, in his heart, the adultery of which our Lord spoke — “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28) — in a building that arranged it for him, and no one thinks to warn him. That the industry treats this as unremarkable does not make it so.

More serious still is the trade in donor sperm and eggs, which inserts a third party into what God joined to one man and one wife (Hebrews 13:4; Matthew 19:5–6). Donor conception deliberately manufactures children severed from a biological mother or father before they are ever conceived, and sells the gametes to do it as though they were stock. The child so conceived bears no guilt in this and is no less an image-bearer than any other — we say that plainly, lest anyone conceived by these means read a word of self-reproach into this page where none is intended. But the industry that arranged it should be named for what it is, rather than received as ordinary medicine simply because it wears a white coat and a longed-for outcome.

4. The same movement, the same mind

It is worth seeing that IVF did not arrive from nowhere. It is the technological flower of the same root examined elsewhere in this series: a view of procreation as a process to be managed, optimised, and controlled by human choice rather than received as the gift of God. The birth-control movement taught the twentieth century to sever the marriage act from the giving of children; the fertility industry now completes the severance from the other side, manufacturing children apart from the marriage act altogether, and grading them for quality before deciding which may live. Both rest on the same assumption — that the coming of a child is ours to command — and both, followed far enough, arrive at the same place: the small and the unchosen are discarded. A church that never examined the first was never going to examine the second.

5. A tender word to those walking the long road of infertility

We are acutely conscious of who feels these paragraphs most keenly. They are felt most by couples who have wanted a child for years, who have wept and prayed and hoped, and who have been told — often by kind and well-meaning people — that IVF is the compassionate option, while the fate of the surplus children is passed over in silence. To them we want to speak not one word of reproach but a great deal of tenderness.

Scripture treats the ache of childlessness as a real and serious grief, never a small thing (consider Hannah, 1 Samuel 1:5–8, and see the treatise on Marriage, Children, and the Calling of Parents). It is God alone who opens and closes the womb (1 Samuel 1:5–6; Genesis 30:2), and He is not deaf to the cry of His people; “the righteous cry for help, and the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles” (Psalm 34:17). Sometimes He grants the longed-for child. Sometimes, in His wisdom, He withholds one — and even then His grace is declared sufficient, His power “made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The couple who never conceive have lost something genuinely precious, and they have lost nothing of their standing before God or of the fullness of their marriage.

Our plea, then, is not that grieving members simply resign themselves. It is that the church not send them into an industry that profits from their sorrow while hiding its cost, but rather back to the God who alone gives life, and to one another for support. And let the church press adoption upon its members not as a second-best consolation but as a positive obedience and a gospel-shaped joy — for we ourselves were taken in by adoption, “predestined for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:5), and pure religion is in part “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). To receive a child who already exists and needs a home is not a lesser way of building a family. It is one of the most Christ-shaped ways there is.

6. The conclusion the series cannot avoid

The logic is finally very simple, and it is the logic of the whole series turned toward one more room. If we will speak against the killing of the pre-born child in the abortion clinic, we cannot in consistency stay silent about the destruction and abandonment of the pre-born child in the fertility clinic. The God who commands us to defend those who cannot speak for themselves (Proverbs 31:8–9) makes no exception for those conceived in a laboratory. The location of a child’s conception changes nothing about the child.

We raise this not to heap one more burden on the church, and least of all on those already bearing the burden of infertility, but because a case that pleaded for the conceived child while averting its eyes from this would not be honest. The conceived child in the fertility clinic is the same conceived child the rest of this series is about. Consistency, and compassion for the smallest, require that he be named too.

References

1. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, key facts and statistics: around 77,000 IVF cycles in 2022 (up from ~69,000 in 2019). https://www.hfea.gov.uk/about-us/media-centre/key-facts-and-statistics/
2. Official figures cited in Parliament during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill 2007–08: between 1991 and 2005, 2,137,924 embryos created in the UK, of which approximately 1.2 million were not used. Reported via Progress Educational Trust (a fertility-sector charity), https://www.progress.org.uk/uk-parliament-alarmed-by-1-2-million-leftover-ivf-embryos/
3. HFEA-derived figures given in a parliamentary answer (Lord Howe), indicating more than 3.5 million embryos created in the UK since August 1991 through the end of 2012, with only a small proportion resulting in a birth. Reported figures summarised at the Center for Genetics and Society, https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/17-million-human-embryos-created-ivf-thrown-away

A note on sources. The embryo figures above are cumulative totals over stated periods (1991–2005 and 1991–2012), drawn from official statistics presented to Parliament and to the HFEA; the present-day totals are higher, and any reader quoting these numbers should cite the period they cover and, where possible, check the HFEA’s latest published data. We have deliberately given the figures conservatively and with their date ranges attached, rather than reaching for a single dramatic total, because the case does not need exaggeration and would be weakened by it. For those wishing to read further from a pro-life perspective, Abolitionists Rising (https://abolitionistsrising.com/ivf/) and the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK (https://www.cbruk.org/ivf) treat the subject at length; we note that these are advocacy organisations and cite them as further reading rather than as neutral authorities.