Test Tube Babies

Robert Edwards, the English gynecologist who pioneered in vitro fertilization, has won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, 32 years after the birth of the first test tube baby in 1978. Sometimes it takes a decade or two for the importance of a scientific discovery to become clear, but it strikes me that the significance of IVF was pretty well apparent in 1985. Dr. Edwards had to wait 25 more years for his prize because it took the world that long to get used to the idea. As the New York Times points out,

Though in vitro fertilization is now widely accepted, the birth of the first test tube baby was greeted with intense concern that the moral order was subverted by unnatural intervention in the mysterious process of creating a human being. . . . . The objections gradually died away, except on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, as it became clear that the babies born by in vitro fertilization were healthy and that their parents were overjoyed to be able to start a family. Long-term follow-ups have confirmed the essential safety of the technique.

The Catholic hierarchy objects to the whole business of scientific childbirth, since they hold that who has children should be up to God. Anti-abortion Protestants also object to IVF, though, because it leads to the creation of many embryos that are then discarded. This is not required by the technique, since it is perfectly possible to fertilize eggs one at a time, but since the failure rate is high a dozen or more eggs are almost always fertilized in each trial.

You don't, though, hear much about protests at fertility clinics. Everybody is happy when nice married couples have the children they have always dreamed of. The politics of standing in the way of 35-year-old women desperate to have a child are pretty awful, so you just don't see anti-abortion politicians or big conservative preachers taking this stand. Which shows, I think, the hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement in the US. If every fertilized egg is a person, then fertility clinics are responsible for many, many more murders than abortion clinics. Abortion seems to be creepy in a way that flushing lots of unwanted blastocysts is not. And if every fertilized egg is not a person, then there is no reason to take a stand against all abortions, and we are left judging abortions the way most people do, with increasing unease as the fetus gets older and a natural birth gets closer.

We are taking ever greater control of many things about human life that we used to let happen "naturally", from when people die to when babies are born to who can conceive a child. Unless we are going to turn our backs on the whole enterprise, which I cannot imagine, we have to think all of these issues through like grown-ups and resolve them as best we can, not throw tantrums over things that offend our inherited sensibilities.