Opponents of IVF Should Oppose Natural Conception Too

An implication of taking the idea that embryos are people seriously

An Alabama Supreme Court ruling about the legal status of embryos threatened access to IVF in Alabama. Several IVF clinics stopped offering services after the court ruled that clinics could be responsible for the accidental loss of embryos under Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor law. The ruling has met backlash as even many pro-life advocates are in favor of IVF. However, there is an extreme faction of pro-life advocates who believe that IVF is unethical because it typically results in the disposal of embryos.

Banning IVF results in a strange outcome where excess embryos are never destroyed, but they are also never created in the first place. And unlike in banning abortion, the outcome is that a child is never born. A committed pro-life advocate might say that this is a worthwhile tradeoff. They may argue that sacrificing many babies is never acceptable, even if it saves the life of one.

An opponent of IVF would presumably hold all of the following beliefs: (1) intentionally disposing of embryos is equivalent to murder, (2) even accidentally destroying embryos is immoral—akin to manslaughter—and (3) despite producing a child, sacrificing embryos is unacceptable. Such a belief system seems like a consistent application of the idea that embryos are morally equivalent to people.

To be truly consistent, I think that the anti-IVF should go further by opposing natural conception. About 10 to 15% of confirmed pregnancies result in spontaneous abortion, and even more occur without being recognized. Boklage (1990) estimated that 73% of conceptions “have no real chance of surviving 6 weeks of gestation.” The exact numbers are not particularly important. The critical point is that trying to have a child is likely to result in the death of an embryo, whether it be in an IVF clinic or a woman’s body.

A principled stance would be to oppose the killing of embryos in pursuit of having a child generally, whether it be IVF or trying to conceive naturally. Such a conclusion results in a strange kind of anti-natalism, which surely almost no committed pro-life advocate would endorse. This line of reasoning can hopefully call into question the premise that embryos are equivalent to people and lend more support to IVF and genetic screening.

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