The pro-life movement has always advocated for the protection of human life from conception to natural death. Thus, pro-lifers often have a clear and united stance against abortion and euthanasia. However, not everyone in the movement tends to share the same position regarding Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), especially concerning in vitro fertilization (IVF).
The IVF debate resurfaced among pro-life groups with the recent ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court, which held 8-1 that frozen embryos are children under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The ruling came after three couples sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile because a number of the couples' frozen embryos were accidentally dropped and destroyed while being moved within the clinic.
This ruling has caused some confusion, prompting political and 'pro-life' organizations to revisit the implications of ART procedures and their morality. However, to understand the implications, it is important analyze what exactly is performed from a traditional pro-life perspective.
Is it possible to be pro-lifer and at the same time support IVF or any ART? First, the pro-life stance is that life begins at fertilization with the embryo's conception. If a person, group, or political party have a different opinion, that would be inconsistent with this basic pro-life principle and, thus, analyzing the morality of ART from that perspective is unnecessary. A claim that life begins at any other point is heterodox, and may be a misinterpretation, or simply pandering to conservative voters.
There are many types of ART, such as the use of fertility medication, In Vitro Fertilization, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, among others. It's obviously possible to be pro-life and support fertility medication. However, this is not the only type of ART. Most of these procedures start with the collection of the eggs and sperm. The number of eggs collected depends on the person from whom they are extracted, but it is usually recommended to extract between 10 and 15 eggs to obtain successful results. After that, the eggs are examined, and the mature ones are fertilized, resulting in the formation of zygotes.
This union of the egg with the sperm (zygote) is already human life. The problem is that out of all of the inseminated eggs, which can be up to all those extracted if they are mature enough, only those with the best "quality" and "viability" are chosen, while the rest are eliminated.
According to statistics, of the total number of eggs extracted, around 60-80% will be mature and, of these, 70-80% will fertilize. When embryo division occurs, there is a 50-60% probability that it will reach day five, which would be the optimal stage for implantation in the uterus. Due to the high cost of the procedure and the short time women have to get pregnant, clinicians usually try to fertilize as many eggs as possible in order to choose the best embryo or embryos from all of them, and therein lies the problem.
Depending on how many embryos survive, the majority of the clinics usually transfer only two or three of them; but now, the science recommends cataloging the viability of the embryos in order to transfer only the most viable one to avoid multiple pregnancies, thus discarding the rest of the embryos that have already been fertilized.
In that regard, if you, as a pro-lifer, accept that the life begins at the conception and that ART procedures end up discarding ‘extra’ embryos that have been conceived, then you cannot agree with ART.
Being pro-life does not mean being in favor of procreation at any cost, it means protecting human life at every stage, from conception to natural death. If the current culture war between pro-abortionists and pro-lifers hinges on the acceptance of human life beginning at conception, then acceptance of ART is more consistent with the pro-abortion worldview.
