If Pro-Life Laws Threaten Your IVF Practice, You’re Doing It Wrong

Bioethics

A recent BBC article questioned what last year’s Dobbs decision could mean for in vitro fertilization. The owner of a self-described “boutique fertility clinic” in Austin, Texas, told reporters that she’s worried abortion restrictions will be bad for business: “If you say life begins at fertili[z]ation, then how can I grow an embryo in a lab, or biopsy it for genetic testing, or freeze it or thaw it, or implant it in somebody, or leave it frozen?” 

These questions should have been asked before IVF became big business. In most fertility clinics today, human lives are put in real danger, especially those embryos designated “extra.” These are either aborted, left indefinitely on ice, discarded, or donated for medical experimentation.  

The few clinics committed to a more (though not completely) ethical IVF, by creating a single embryo at a time or requiring that every embryo is implanted, won’t be affected by abortion restrictions, but most of them will. And they should be. 

Copyright 2023 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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Agencies Offer Women in Arkansas $60,000+ to Bear Children as Commercial Surrogates

Bioethics, Surrogacy,

Agencies are offering women in Arkansas tens of thousands of dollars to bear children as commercial surrogates.

Commercial surrogacy agencies work with individuals and couples who pay women to be artificially inseminated and bear children for them as surrogates.

The agency American Surrogacy advertises that women in Arkansas can make more than $60,000 as commercial surrogates. Other companies on Craigslist offer commercial surrogates upwards of $55,000 to $75,000.

The reality is that commercial surrogacy uses this kind of money to exploit women and children.

In California, surrogate Brittney Pearson recently made headlines after she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Because the cancer treatment could harm the unborn baby she was carrying, doctors recommended inducing labor early and caring for the baby in the NICU while she started chemo. However, that isn’t what the same-sex couple paying Brittney Pearson as their commercial surrogate wanted.

Even though she was 24 weeks pregnant, and the baby might have been able to survive outside the womb, the men wanted Brittney to have an abortion. If the baby were born alive, the men asked that no life-saving measures be taken for the baby.

With her cancer having spread to her liver, Pearson found a hospital to induce birth. The child died shortly after being born on Father’s Day, June 18.

All of this was made possible by state laws that facilitate commercial surrogacy.

Family Council has lobbied for legislation that would prohibit commercial surrogacy in Arkansas.

In 2017 then-Rep. Greg Leding sponsored a bill prohibiting commercial surrogacy in Arkansas. Unfortunately, the bill never came up for a vote.

Being pro-life means believing that innocent human life is sacred at every stage of development from conception until natural death.

Commercial surrogacy violates the sanctity and dignity of human life, because it treats women like commodities, and it treats unborn children like property that can be manufactured, bought, sold, or destroyed at will.

To put it simply: People aren’t products.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

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