Chelsea Zimmerman from Reflections of a Paralytic has been posting here once a week for this month. Her posts have been great and we’ve been lucky to have her. This is her final post. Please read her and visit her at her own blog. Here she is:
On Wednesday, Matt highlighted here at CMR two very disturbing stories involving IVF: Mom To Have Dead Son’s Baby and World’s First IVF Lottery. If that’s not enough to sicken you for one week, here’s another one I found from the UK Daily Mail:
Dozens of women are aborting babies conceived by IVF because they have changed their minds about motherhood, figures suggest.
Many are in their teens, twenties and early thirties, implying that numerous abortions were carried out for social reasons, rather than on health grounds.
Relationship breakdowns, fears about motherhood and simple changes of heart are all likely to have played a part in the terminations.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority statistics, released by the IVF watchdog through the Freedom of Information Act, have angered family campaigners who accuse the women of treating babies like ‘designer goods’.
The revelation has also surprised fertility doctors who generally lose contact with patients after they become pregnant. Professor-Bill Ledger, a leading fertility doctor and member of the HFEA, said: ‘I had no idea there were so many post-IVF abortions – and each one is a tragedy.’
He added: ‘These women can’t be surprised to be pregnant. You can’t have an IVF pregnancy by accident.’
The statistics show that an average of 80 abortions are carried out in England and Wales each year following IVF treatment.
In 2007, the figure was as high as 97 – with almost a third of the women aged between 18 and 34.
This stuff really infuriates me. If it’s not clear as day to you by now, it should be: IVF is about fulfilling the selfish wishes of adults who rarely, if ever, think about what is good and right for the children. In fact, IVF contrary to the very dignity of the child, not to mention the dignity of the spouses and their relationship, as well as Man’s status as a creature.
But the children. Lord, have mercy, the children! While the ultimate goal of IVF may be to create life, not destroy it, I would venture to guess that the number of lives destroyed (killed in-utero or thrown in the garbage at fertility clinics) or ‘frozen in time’ probably outweighs the number of human beings actually living outside the petri dish or womb as a result of this technology. For example: this woman had six embryos implanted in her womb (at the age of 58!!) and only gave birth to two after purposely killing one of the three that attached themselves after implantation. Even then, the two who were lucky enough to survive implantation and avoid abortion almost died shortly after they were born premature with underdeveloped lungs.
And what about those lucky few who do make it out of the womb alive and well? Now we have a sub-culture of thousands of donor-conceived people growing up with a deep longing to know who they belong to, where they come from, and who they look like. The Center for Bioethics and Culture explores this in their latest documentary Anonymous Father’s Day in which many of these donor-conceived men and women speak-out about what is it like to find out that the man you thought was your dad is not your biological father and that your true biological father donated his sperm and is known only by a number. Just sad.
Offspring, human beings, are not goods that people are entitled to! Men and women are privileged to be allowed to participate in God’s creating work, but ultimately, life is a gift to be received, not obtained at any and all cost.
The good news for couples who legitimately feel the pain of infertility and want to share their love with another human being while adhering to the Church’s teaching on reproductive technology is that, besides adoption, which is always a loving option, there is a good, pro-life alternative in fertility care. Modern methods of “natural family planning”, like the Creighton Model Fertility Care System, together with NaProTECHNOLOGY can help women successfully achieve and maintain pregnancy without having to resort to manufacturing their children in a petri dishes. Using this technology, couples still respect and cooperate with His divine plan for the creation of human life rather than taking the matters of life in their own hands and forcing God to cooperate with them. NaProTECHNOLOGY can be used to treat male infertility as well as female and the problem of recurrent miscarriage.
For those skeptical of this kind of women’s health science, you can take a look at peer-reviewed and academic literature that supports NaProTECHNOLOGY and the scientific foundations of the CrMS System as well as read the personal testimonies of “Women Healed”.
Please check out Chelsea’s blog Reflections of a Paralytic.
July 13, 2011 at 9:45 pm
Awesome reflection! Too bad many in society don't share the Catholic view of procreation, et al. I don't think they realize how much they are also hurting themselves by trying to achieve pregnancy outside of natural conception. Thanks for sharing!!
July 14, 2011 at 2:13 pm
I disagree with IVF. But this:
"If it's not clear as day to you by now, it should be: IVF is about fulfilling the selfish wishes of adults who rarely, if ever, think about what is good and right for the children"
simply isn't true. A lot of infertile parents who have been trying for years come to IVF because they see it as a way to improve their odds of having a child. They come to it as any parent comes to having children.
July 14, 2011 at 6:46 pm
"They come to it as any parent comes to having children." What? What? We all know the mechanism by which couples try to become parents, it's biological and immutable.
But they get so frustrated with their desire and their biology that they mess with their bodies, pumping themselves full of hormones, forcing unnatural ovulations, etc, etc. They pull out eggs and sperm and mix them in dishes and then overload the uterus with too many fertilized embryos. Those poor embryos are created and mauled about as though they were property, commodities. They are left to die in the dish or in the freezer if they're not loading up the uterus, or too many develop and the pregnancy becomes dangerous and the burden of new family life too difficult.
If we discussed any other bodily function in these terms of artificiality and abnormal mechanics, it would be horrifying. But somehow IVF makes people suppress their natural understanding of the wrongness of interfering with biology to this extent of creating and then destroying human life.
July 15, 2011 at 10:42 pm
Narcissism. That is all.