The Right to a Child vs The Right to Kill: IVF & Abortion Ethics
Recently, there were some figures released that compared the number of babies born in the UK from IVF procedures from the year 2000, to today. At the Millenium there were around 8000 children born that year who were conceived in this way, and today there were 21,000. These numbers are striking in the wider context of reproduction because they show, to my mind, a number of truths about how we view conception, reproduction, unborn children, medical care and technology. Together, these truths make up our society, and what a nation does with the issue of abortion in general, so goes all these categories.
The iPaper headlines their piece as an “IVF Baby Boom” as one child in every school class is now an IVF baby. Theirs and other outlets like Yahoo News go on to say that taboos around the subject are disappearing, detailing the more specific statistics breaking down baby births by race, ages of mothers alongside various funding categories and other stats. It’s not surprising that intersectionality is a key concern for those involved. The bulk of the article in Yahoo is concerned with the problems of access, egg donations, interrupted “treatments” and dissolving companies taking money from people and disappearing.
A spokesperson from the fertility charity Fertility Network UK makes some observations about the trends and dips in the “UK Fertility Sector” before further comments about how the IVF is “an essential treatment for growing families…helping more and more people realise their dream of becoming parents.”
Describing this area of human activity as a “sector” is the first clue. Sector is an industrial term, utilitarian and associated with profit and loss. These are terms that describe what people do and never what they are. The trouble is, now that we are viewing the production of babies in this way, and we are, the whole process is framed in a way where money is changing hands and babies are produced unnaturally, and many babies who are conceived are destroyed as part of the process in a cruel numbers game.
Many people have dreams of becoming parents, it’s natural. There is a quid pro quo though, I think, about our approach to achieving our dreams that shouldn’t be applied to this dream. We want things on our own terms and in our own time, and if we’re working for it, all the more. Whether we’re aiming at things like nicer cars and exciting holidays, or dreams of new shoes or a meal out we want them and in general, we must work and pay for them. Children, being human, are altogether a different category. Yes, parents generally need to work to pay for what they and their children need and want, but never should children be bought and paid for, with siblings discarded in favour of stronger, or more viable embryos.
These children that did not make the selection are aborted. It may not be from a mother’s womb, but they are aborted nonetheless. the cold and sterile laboratory environment where they do or do not grow in the way the customer is expecting often decides their fate. This is so utterly detached from love and reduces all of them to consumables. No arguments heard in the lab for “my body my choice!”. There is only the child’s body, in a lab, being selected. Where have we seen such dehumanisation before, I wonder?
A child has the right to life and to be born, it also has the right to be conceived in love. I know people who will never conceive a child because their “family”, being two women, can never conceive a child. The child they do have is the result of IVF and a random sperm donation. So much for being conceived in love. This is conception by desire to be a mother completely on her terms. In one fell swoop the role of fatherhood has been reduced to a sperm donation, and that often by a stranger with no interest in his own progeny. Add to this the method by which the donation occurs, in a small room with abhorrent stimulation, and that is how so many children are conceived. Not out of the love of husband and a wife for each other with the hope for the life they may produce but the heartless transactions of bodily fluid, completely devoid of any aspects of love, even physical touch.
So many times, in abortion conversations the action of the father is condemned by abortion supporters. Maybe he wasn’t there, maybe he was coercive, maybe the mother wasn’t sure he’d be a good father. How do those issues relate to a stranger (as the case may be) providing the same results by equally detached methods? Is that what is giving you the right to decide which embryos can die? If the child is conceived between a couple who are not strangers, does the father have equal rights in relation to the embryos at this point? The woman’s body is not yet involved. There are so many issues with this practice, and that’s before we get on to things like surrogacy and embryonic testing etc.
There are two fundamental truths that work hand in hand, and we must acknowledge them. The first is that nobody has the right to have a child. The second is that nobody has the right to kill a child. Society and our dreams do not owe us a child. If we have a child, society and our dreams may not kill it. Of course, we want happy families who grow and produce children as this is the bedrock of civilisation, but we cannot build this artificially. This commodifies babies and their bodies with all the horrors that entails (check out what happens to so many aborted babies at Planned Parenthood in America) and reduces the role of parent to that of a customer. We all have the right to be conceived in love, for love, and by love.
Daniel
March for Life UK
Content Creator
