One of the things about our current cultural milieu that has always puzzled me is the drive to create an absolute fundamental right to procreate–and the concomitant push to permit an absolute and fundamental right to destroy unborn life. (You know how it goes: Today, the child is wanted so it is a baby. Tomorrow, the child isn’t wanted so its a fetus, not yet human life.) And when both IVF and abortion are coupled in the same pregnancy, it really makes my head spin. A new study in the UK shows that this happens more than previously thought. From the story:
Data released under the Freedom of Information Act has shown that an average of 80 abortions are carried out in England and Wales a year on women who have undergone IVF treatment. Doctors have said they are surprised at the figures considering the expense and difficulty that many couples go through when having fertility treatment. However critics said women were treating babies like ‘designer goods’.
Some women said they were pressured into IVF by their partners and others said they aborted their pregnancy after their relationship broke down. Around half of the abortions are carried out for women aged between 18 and 34, who are less likely to suffer complications in their pregnancies or conceive babies with abnormalities, raising the question that they may have had abortions for ‘social reasons’. Prof Bill Ledger, a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which regulates fertility treatment, said: “I had no idea there were so many post-IVF abortions and each one is a tragedy.”
The figures were released by the HFEA and show that in some of the cases the fertility treatment had been funded by the NHS. Selective reductions, where some of the foetuses in a multiple pregnancy are terminated to reduce the risk to the children and mother, are included in the figures. Ann Furedi, head of the BPAS, formerly known as the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said it was likely that every doctor carrying out abortions had treated at least one woman who had IVF treatment only to change her mind when it was successful. She said: “For infertile people, overcoming the problem becomes a goal in itself.”
So, we see IVF leading, at least in some cases, to objectification of the life created, as it furthers the contemporary sense of entitlement: I want to be pregnant–make it so! I don’t want to be pregnant, make it not so!
I once heard a Canadian bioethicist give a lecture urging women with multiple IVF-created fetuses to undergo “selective reduction”–boy, talk about a euphemism!–to, he said, “turn triplets into twins.” Such sophistry! Aborting one sibling triplet doesn’t magically transform the surviving babies into twins. It means they are triplets and one sibling is dead. How must that feel? There but for the location of the forceps go I.
June 15th, 2010 | 12:44 pm
[...] is the question being asked over at Secondhand Smoke as a result of a study we reported on last week: One of the things about our current cultural [...]
June 15th, 2010 | 1:23 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by American Life League, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Does IVF Promote Objectification of Unborn Life? » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/my8X3 [...]
June 15th, 2010 | 3:23 pm
I’m glad the article answered the selective abortion question. I bet at least 60 of those 80 abortions are to selectively reduce the number of children born.
I’d be interested, so as to have good context for the numbers, what the total number of abortions and the total number of IVF pregnancies there are per year in Brittan.
June 15th, 2010 | 3:30 pm
I don’t know what the writer means “raising the question that they may have had abortions for ’social reasons’” as if this surprising or unknown. All most all abortions are for social reasons. Almost no abortions are due to any threat the unborn poses to the mother.
IVF certainly does objectify unborn humans, children and humans in general. It also justifies cloning and transhumanism. The chattering class is lying to themselves if they think they can do IVF and not go to cloning or transhumanism. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is eugenic abortion. It says only a certain child will do. We want a certain kind with certain characteristics and we’ll abort/root out/dispose of the ones that don’t meet our expectations/criteria. Not only that, we think people have a right to select the human embryo in the Petri dish that they want and reject the others. How can the same people reject cloning to produce children when they allow/support IVF? America is known, with our IVF technology, as the designer capitol of the world. So if people want to clone a child with certain characteristics by cloning, how is that different from designing or screening your kid through IVF/PIGD? Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch because cloning has to take the life of another human life to create a clone by SCNT. But someone could argue that IVF creates a bunch of lives to get to the ones they really want to try to birth, and that others are destroyed in the process.
And if people have the right to try to design their kids by IVF, why shouldn’t they be able to design/modify their own bodies, integrate it with non human DNA or machines to enhance our capacities and capabilities and control our own evolution? I think it leads to the genetic arms race that Wesley speaks about in Consumers Guide to the Brave New World (I’m not loaning Wesley’s books anymore because I never get them back).
All of this objectifies all of us because it leads us to value each other by arbitrary and subjective criteria.
June 15th, 2010 | 8:28 pm
The rationale given for the abortions strikes me as being almost self-evidently false. If a woman’s “partner” were so keen on having a child by the woman, why walk away, after all that anguish and expense, with the goal in sight.
It seems to me more probable that the woman was desperate to hold onto her “partner”. So she applied all the pressure for the IVF. The baby is, for her, just a way of holding onto the man. When that fails, and the man walks, the baby is of no further use.
Nice.
June 15th, 2010 | 9:19 pm
It’s pro-choice after all. It’s the choice to change your mind. Who cares what the reason is? It’s a woman’s body, she can choose for whatever reason she wants.
June 15th, 2010 | 10:27 pm
I’ve been thinking about this more often lately. At age twenty seven, I’m not sure I’m going to get married and I might want to have children someday. Adoption is definitely a great option, but I’ve also considered IVF. I’m not sure the actual process is wrong as long as certain things, such as selective abortion and preimplantation diagnosis, are avoided.
June 15th, 2010 | 11:16 pm
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever, ever heard of IVF praised for its benefits to the children born due to its use. It is always discussed in terms of the benefits to the parents, and their wants – reasonable or otherwise – for their offspring.
To me that’s very telling.
June 16th, 2010 | 12:24 pm
[...] Smith writes at the First Things Blog: “So, we see IVF leading, at least in some cases, to objectification of the life created, as [...]
June 17th, 2010 | 3:20 am
Ken Crawford: “I’d be interested, so as to have good context for the numbers, what the total number of abortions and the total number of IVF pregnancies there are per year in Brittan.”
From the article: “Around 12,000 women give birth in Britain following fertility treatment and about 200,000 abortions are carried out a year in England.”
80 abortions is about 0.04% of all the abortions in the country. It’s about 0.6% of the women who had fertility treatments.
The article also says, “Selective reductions, where some of the foetuses in a multiple pregnancy are terminated to reduce the risk to the children and mother, are included in the figures.”
I think it’s a safe bet that many of the 80 abortions are in the selective reduction category – women who don’t want to be Octomoms.
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