Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Part I

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What Do We Owe the Embryo? Christians Must Now Face the Question of IVF and Embryo Ethics Head On

What do we do with the embryo? What do we owe the embryo? There are so many questions related to the existence of the human embryo, and we need to recognize this is a very modern question. It is only since, say, 1978 that we have much of a conversation here at all when we look at the development of what was called the world’s first test tube baby. And that was treated as a massive technological and scientific breakthrough that just might redefine the future of human reproduction, and it just might have or it just might yet.

The New York Times addressed this question, which it called the embryo question, in a massive set of essays, three different essays. And it’s to the credit of The New York Times that they treated this as a very legitimate moral issue. And they gave multiple pages in the opinion section of Sunday’s newspaper to the questions. We, as Christians, know these are vital questions, these are inescapable questions, unavoidable questions. They are questions of great urgency. We also understand that Christians have been doing their best, at least many Christians, to ignore this question. It can be ignored no longer. And quite honestly, the fact that the secular world understands that the question cannot be ignored ought to be a wake-up call for Christians.

Now, let’s just ask what kind of questions did The New York Times series address? The author is Anna Louie Sussman, and she directs us to many of the most urgent questions. For example, what do we owe this cluster of cells? Interesting way that’s put. But she’s at least asking the question, what do we owe this cluster of cells? What time limits should we set? Is this the future of having babies? Should human life be optimized? Are embryos property or people? These are all vital questions. They are questions that are vexing, the technological community, the scientific and medical community. They are vexing the world of politics and the legal community as well. This is uncharted territory.

For Christians, by the way, that is an alarm going off to say when you’re in uncharted territory like this, it just might be you shouldn’t be in this territory in the first place. And so we just need to recognize and say out loud that we are not currently asking “should this ever have happened?” I wish we could ask that question in a meaningful way. At this point, now we’re looking at, say, 50 years after the development of the first test tube baby. We really need to ask what now? What does faithfulness look like Now? The genie is proverbially out of the bottle. And just about every dark warning that Christians and others offered in the advent of test tube babies has come already to be true; that and more. Why weren’t these questions asked on the front end? This underlines the fact that so many of the biggest moral questions of our age are denied until they can be denied no longer.

We also look back to, say, the period after World War II and we see how there was a techno-optimism that marked the world picture of the day. The worldview was heavily marked by this technological optimism. We split the atom. We have built vast dams that create electricity. We have modern diagnostic medicine. We are able to do all of these things. And so you even look at, say, the television advertising for electronic appliances back in the 1950s, and it is presented as if they’re going to bring in the dawn of a new human age. And I guess in one sense, they did. You can push a button rather than pick up a cloth and start washing dishes. But the fact is that it is the technologies closest to human existence and to the nature of what it means to be human that are the most dangerous. And these are the same technologies that have been underdeveloped and often just outright ignored by Christians. It’s about time we face these questions.

If The New York Times says for the secular world it’s about time to face these questions and the questions are defined so carefully as they are here, then for Christians we have to recognize we need to be asking these questions before the secular world, and we certainly need to answer them more faithfully than the secular world. The first of the essays is asking the question, what time limits should we set? And the moral issue is, I think, correctly identified as asking the question, what do we owe this cluster of cells? And so as we think about, say, an in vitro fertilization process and all the steps that are involved, there is the recognition on the part of just about everyone involved that what they’re dealing with here as a developing embryo is at least potential life.

Now, as Christians, we understand that potential and life don’t go together in this context, that this is life and that to draw human dignity or personhood at any point along this continuum is actually just artificial and it’s arrogant, it’s a demonstration of human egotism. In a biblical perspective, we have to start at the moment of fertilization and say, “That is where this person begins.” And in the eternal purposes of God, this is how this person now has emerged, and this cluster of cells is far more than a cluster of cells.

The Reporter, Anna Louie Sussman, gets right to the point of our current dilemma when she writes this. “Starting in 1978 when the first IVF baby was born, embryos have been appearing outside the womb more and more often. Today,” she writes, “hundreds of thousands of them are banked away.” I’ll just insert here it could be a good deal more than that because there are no adequate records. But again, “Hundreds of thousands of them are banked away, sometimes abandoned in cryogenic storage tanks.” And then she says exactly how many frozen embryos exist in the United States is unclear since there is no requirement to record their number, unlike in other countries. The keywords there would be unlike in other countries. Other countries have at least the sense to have an adequate number, but it shows you something of the irresponsibility and the recklessness, here in the United States, they don’t even have a number. We have no number.

Speaking of the embryos, “They are the subjects of highly regulated experiments. They can be ‘adopted,'” quotation marks around that, “or ranked by quality. It’s in part our ability to manipulate and encounter them in this abundance of novel context that has generated so many questions.” And indeed, there are so many questions.

The most urgent question that is addressed in this first essay in The New York Times is what should be the limit for human embryo experimentation? Right now, it is 14 days. And it is 14 days because it was rather arbitrarily drawn at 14 days because there is the recognition that beyond that, you have a developing embryo and it is reaching a point of complexity that becomes more and more difficult to deny in terms of personhood. Or at least on the part of so many scientists and medical practitioners involved in this, it is a thing, they’re clearly treating it as a thing that has the potential to become more than a thing.

I’ll just again say Christians can’t enter into this logic. We can’t think of any human being made in God’s image at any point of development merely as a thing, but it should tell us a lot that the secular world has no such category and has no such intellectual defenses. But it does apparently, at this point, decades after the development of IVF, it does at least at this point have some twinge of conscience.

And predictably, when you have a limit like that, 14 days, what you have is a pushback. And the pushback is largely driven by what I would call the technological mandate, and that is the claim that somebody’s going to do it, so we need to be the people to do it. Someone is going to exceed that limit. And it’s going to lead pragmatically, it is claimed, to vast breakthroughs in terms of medicine and medical technologies.

Even back in the 1970s in Britain, Ethicist Mary Warnock, who was quite famous, indeed; a commission was named for her. She said, “At least there’s a moral instinct here.” She didn’t get to the right place, I lament to say, but she did know that there was something different than a thing here. In her words, it was the belief, “There was something especially horrendous in deliberately creating a human being only then to deprive it of its chance of life by failing to place it in a human womb but instead throwing it down the sink.” That’s jarring language. But that’s not even new. That goes back to the 1970s. Even then, those involved in this technology knew they were dealing with something that is more than a thing.

At about 14 days of development, the embryo shows what is called a primitive streak. That is a key developmental stage. There’s a before and after when it comes to that, so in that sense it wasn’t just arbitrary, although it’s arbitrary in the sense they just decided this. And one of the principles we see here is that if they decide on the limit, they can re-decide. And that’s exactly where the pressure is now. The claim is that if the 14-day rule were relaxed, then new medical models and medical treatments and technologies could well come from attempts to understand the development of the embryo in an experimental setting beyond 14 days. One person involved in all of this ask other questions, “Is this an embryo? Is this a future baby? Is this a single cell? Or maybe it doesn’t matter that much.” Well, I’m just going to offer that you don’t dedicate this much newspaper space in The New York Times to something that’s not a question that doesn’t matter that much. I think there’s a common grace explanation for the fact that we understand there is something here that matters a very great deal. You have other scientists who are mentioned in the article calling for an extension beyond the 14 days.

The Times report also acknowledges something else that’s very important, even just looked at in a pragmatic frame. Are very important medical treatments coming out of the embryo research? And this is where we are taken back to the administration of George W. Bush as president of the United States. I was all hooked up to appear on the Larry King show along with others on CNN that night to respond to the president’s announcement of his policy. And when that policy was announced, President Bush, guided by a commission on bioethics headed by University of Chicago, Professor Leon Kass, the president came to the determination that federal funding could go to continued research on existing stem cell lines drawn from human embryos but no further embryos could be destroyed in order to determine additional human stem cells.

Now, the pressure from the research community was to use the stem cell research with stem cells drawn from human embryos. That means the destruction of the embryo, by the way. The promise was that all kinds of medical breakthroughs would follow. Well, that’s almost now a generation ago, and even The New York Times concedes there have been no major breakthroughs by that research. It was a false promise.

The Times report also makes clear that some researchers don’t want any limits at all. There are those who follow the idea of a technological imperative. It is simply going to happen. It’s an inevitability. Just go with it. And yet we have a moral sense that just going with it isn’t possible.

Part II

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From So-Called Healthcare to the Commodification of Babies: The Massive Moral Dangers Behind Embryo Technologies

The second major essay asked the question, “is this the future of making babies?” That means designer babies. And that is something that was warned about in the 1970s, even more so in the 1980s. It’s real now. We have embryo sorting right now. We have the ability to offer consumer-manufactured human embryos. We also have what is known as polygenic screening, that’s negative screening, so embryos can be subjected to genetic analysis to determine if they are acceptable to us or not.

One Silicon Valley influencer, as she is identified here, and influencing about investment in this field, by the way, simply said, “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.” And she also shared on X or Twitter, “It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things.”

Now, here is where I think Christians need to understand every alarm is going off. At this point, we need to just stop and understand what we’re being told here. We’re being told, and this is not news in one sense, this is not something we didn’t know, but now it is given to us in a form that is articulated just this way. We know that there are people, and by this we mean lots of people, who are going through IVF and they are screening the embryos for acceptability in terms of genetic traits. And that is not just–as if you could say just–screening out certain kinds of things that would be described as fetal abnormalities, but it is also screening on the basis of what at least are predicted to be genetic traits. And so it’s not by accident you have, say, gamete donors, sperm donors, egg donors. And they are listed by their hobbies or their alma mater in college, which is a way of saying, “Hey, an embryo created with this cell, it could well score very high on the SAT.”

The reason I cited that Silicon Valley influencer is because we’re not talking about something that’s way off in the future, we’re talking about something that is at least available and at least applicable in many cases right now. And you’ll notice how the imperative changes. The imperative changes to you ought to have a healthy baby, and you know that means healthy according to somebody’s arbitrary standard. You know what it also means? It means a pretty baby. It means a baby that has the eye color you want. It means a baby that has the attributes you want. And you know what else comes from that? It is the argument in its negative form, which in many ways is more powerful than the positive form. I want you to follow me very carefully. The positive form says you have the opportunity to have a perfect baby. The negative form of the argument is even more powerful. There’s something wrong with you if you don’t want a perfect baby. You are actually burdening society with medical costs and responsibility and long-term obligations if you have a baby that doesn’t meet these standards.

And The New York Times article clearly anticipates the argument that you will do a moral wrong if you bring, say, a Down syndrome baby into existence. There are plenty of genetic tests in which you can screen that out. That is your obligation not just to yourself to have a good consumer product, it is an obligation to the larger society. Don’t inflict us with those people.

This second essay in The New York Times is very long. It’s very extensive. It raises a host of issues related to what we’re talking about here. But I want to tell you that even as I was reading this essay, I received from a dear Christian friend a photograph. Indeed, a series of photographs. This dear Christian friend sent me a picture of his newborn granddaughter. And she is absolutely beautiful, astoundingly beautiful. In the photos was a picture of this grandfather lovingly, proudly holding this baby. The baby is diagnosed with Down syndrome and was diagnosed in the womb as having that characteristic. And you just look at that baby and you recognize this baby demonstrates the glory of God. This baby is a gift. And the world now wants to say that baby is an affliction, an imposition. You have a moral imperative to avoid this. Just imagine how humanity is redefined. It is like a wild Nazi dream turning into a nightmare.

And here is where Christians look at something like this and recognize it would be so tempting to go along with this argument. It’d be so tempting to take advantage of this kind of logic. But this is where we as Christians simply cannot go.

No doubt parents raising children with special needs have an unbelievable challenge and obligation, but you know what? The Christian church and Christian parents, Christian families, even extended families have learned how to show the glory of God in these children for generations, for centuries, going all the way back to biblical times. The big issue here is that this Christian family hasn’t merely accepted this child, they thank God for this child. They celebrate this child as this child. That’s a point not to be missed. And so now we all of a sudden demand that we will be liberated from the obligation of dealing with persons who do not come up to our standards of genetic excellence. We did recognize in the 20th century the deadly nature of this ideology coming from Nazi Germany, but it could now be coming from a reproductive care center right down the street. And of course all of this is presented as a way of having the perfect baby.

Part III

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Is an Embryo Property or a Person? Courts are Avoiding This Massive Question

The third of these major essays ask the question right out loud, are embryos property or people? And it acknowledges the fact that the medical community doesn’t know how to answer that question or doesn’t want to answer that question. And the legal community isn’t certain about this either. The reporter says even the courts don’t know.

Now, at least part of what’s in the background here was the decision handed down by the Alabama Supreme Court. That state Supreme Court in February of 2024 handed down a ruling, and the background to this was the destruction of some human embryos. And the ruling was that the embryos are persons, that they are human beings, and thus that this is a criminal act. It’s not just a property crime, it is something far more significant. The justices ruled that the destruction of the embryos violated Alabama’s 1872 wrongful death of a minor act. And in this case, it was tort litigation, not criminal litigation.

But what’s really interesting and incredibly disappointing is that even in a state as conservative as Alabama with so much Christian influence as Alabama, churches are thick on the ground, the fact is that politicians in Alabama, including the governor of the state, state legislators, they rushed to correct the decision handed down by the state Supreme Court because of the implications about IVF. You had a major IVF clinic that said they were no longer going to be practicing in the state of Alabama. Panic ensued. This is where we see how far behind we already are on this question in moral terms.

There are court precedents in other states indicating that human embryos are goods, they’re property. This is reduced to a property issue as if you stole someone’s watch or you took gold out of their safety deposit box at the bank. Okay, is it a person or is it property? You’ll notice how giant that question is. What about let’s just say a baby in the newborn delivery area in the hospital, you take the newborn care unit, is that baby a person or is it property? Well, in all 50 states, at least right now, thanks be to God that baby is considered a person. But when did that baby become a person? Courts don’t want to answer this question. And in a previous era, it would be rare that anyone would have to answer this question, but now it’s a question that can’t be simply swept under the rug.

One of the most accurate lines in this report simply says, “Our political system and the characters who preside over it have created a situation of utter incoherence.” That is absolutely the case, a system of utter incoherence. And some kind of coherence is likely to develop. That’s the way societies work. You have a confusing situation, somehow with policy, politics and all the rest, you get to a more clarified situation. My great fear is that it will be clarified directly at the expense of human dignity. 

I guarantee you this: If you leave it to the marketplace, just given human sinfulness, it’s going to be turned into a very dark marketplace, indeed. We will continue to track this issue. And it’s going to be very interesting even in the short term to see what kind of responses come to The New York Times series. And just given the influence of The New York Times, this is likely to spawn other series from other journalistic outlets, and every one of those is going to be interesting to watch and important to watch because of the vital importance of this issue.

Part IV

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A Parable of Our Age: Blue Origin’s Space Stunt

Meanwhile, in the category of not so important but quite illustrative, you probably know right now about the all-women space trip that was undertaken by Blue Origin to a lot of celebrity fanfare. As The Guardian in the UK reported, it is Blue Origin’s all-female crew that gained so much attention. But even The Guardian said, “Most of them weren’t obvious astronaut material.” This was a celebrity event. It was what Daniel Boorstin, the historian would call false news. It is a pseudo-history. It is pseudo-event in his terms. And even or maybe even especially many women who are all for ideological and political feminism, they weren’t for this. The New York Times ran a couple of articles. One came with the headline, “The Death of Celebrity Feminism,” the other “One Giant Stunt for Woman Kind.” And by the way, they’re referred to as a crew, but insofar as anyone can tell, all they did was put makeup on and sit through the ride. And the makeup was a big part of this.

This is something that tells us a lot about ourselves. The six women who went, and I’m not going to give them attention by telling their names other than, say, pop star Katy Perry and the fiancee of Jeff Bezos, who is the, of course, founder of Amazon and also the founder of Blue Origin, which is the space company. There was an exchange between two of the passengers, celebrity passengers on this flight that was included in The New York Times article in The Death of Celebrity Feminism. One woman said, “This will be the first time anybody went to space with their hair and makeup done.” Lauren Sanchez then said, “Who would not get glam before the flight?” Katy Perry responded, “Space is going to finally be glam.” Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that.”

That led Jessica Gross, who considers herself a serious feminist, to say, “The all-female Blue Origin flight is a superficial stunt.” It does tell us a lot about our age, or at least it tells us a lot about what some people think and anticipate in this age. But it also points to the fact that there are limits to how you can pull off a stunt like this. When you have The New York Times pulling the curtain back and saying, “This is a stunt,” when you have even the major news media treating the story with embarrassment because it’s really hard to say flight crew when you look at that crew, and when you have feminists making the argument that women should be admired for their brains and for their contribution to society, having the passengers on this particular all-female flight brag about having perfected their makeup before they got on, and then in embarrassment watching as they get off the spacecraft, it is the fulfillment of someone’s very bad idea.

It does tell us about the age, but it also tells us about our age that, at least when it comes to something like this, people do see through it for what it is. When you do something intending it to be serious and serious people don’t take it seriously, that’s an indication that you’ve crossed some kind of barrier. And it just might’ve worked because what Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos want to bring about is an age of commercialized space travel. But put “space travel” in quotes because there are scientific arguments about whether or not the craft even reached what we would call space. It’s enough for the advertisement, it’s enough for the media attention and, hey, it was enough for this discussion on The Briefing. I guess you could say they wanted to get noticed, and they did.