Amid an ongoing national conversation around IVF after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling, attempts by both Republicans and Democrats to “protect IVF,” and Tim Walz’s Stolen Vitro controversy, the Dallas Morning News published, “I’m a pro-life pastor. IVF allowed me to become a dad.” Fox News reprinted it. Even though the author, Jeremiah Johnston, has a Ph.D., M.A., M.Div., and B.A., he gets both biology and Christianity wrong.
As usual with matters of marriage and family, the adult frames himself (and his wife) as victims. Johnston details the suffering they experienced due to infertility. While infertility is incredibly painful, when we get IVF wrong — or any parenthood question — it’s the hundreds of thousands of lives discarded and frozen by the fertility industry who are the actual victims, not the adults.
I don’t know what his pastoral duties have involved, but my Baptist pastor-turned-Navy chaplain husband and I have been in ministry for 30 years. And I’ll tell you something true: Everyone suffers. Nearly every Christian I know has some longing — let’s call it “a thorn in their side” — to which God says, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Whether that’s unwanted same-sex attraction, unwanted singleness, longing for a healed marriage, a wayward son, a disabled daughter, chronic illness, or infertility — it’s hard to name a Christian to whom God doesn’t seem to be saying, “Not on this side of heaven.”
Our longings, even for good things, are not a license to take matters of life, à la Sarah and Hagar, into our own hands — because the result is the transfer of suffering from adult to child. Yet that’s the path Johnston and his wife traveled, pursuing “the modern medical miracle of IVF” and even suggesting that God “inspired [them] to do everything [they] could to become pregnant.”
Here Johnston communicates a misunderstanding of God’s will for his people. The Lord does not “inspire us” to fulfill our own desires regardless of the cost, especially if it forces the weak to sacrifice for the strong. Rather, God mandates that his people defend children.
In the first century, child protection required rejecting abortion and infanticide, adopting children who had been “exposed,” and standing against the sexualization and abuse of children. Today, we find ourselves manifesting our “pure and undefiled religion before God” in the same ways: rejecting abortion, adopting children, and standing against their sexualization and abuse. While we are no longer defending children’s right to life by battling the gruesome first-century practice of infant “exposure,” we are battling the 21st-century threat of lab-created babies who are being mass-produced, commodified, and treated to eugenic-level screenings by a virtually regulation-free, multibillion-dollar industry. Christians can have no part in it.
Continuing the “I am the victim” narrative, Johnston shares how they had to accept the “financial and emotional risk” of IVF but gave no specifics on the untold number of children who lost their lives through the process. This is the crux of the anti-IVF position. It’s not because we deny their longing for children nor reject that Johnston and his wife would be wonderful parents. I assume they are. It’s because we are clear-eyed about the unfathomable destruction this industry wrecks on the lives of our smallest citizens — numbers that make the abortion industry jealous.
Johnston then erects several well-stuffed strawmen. The apologist claims, “Women struggling with infertility are being shamed with religious jargon with which some claim IVF lacks the ‘mystery of natural conception’ or that children conceived through IVF are less than human.”
I work closely with the most staunch pro-life, and therefore IVF-critical, voices including Allie Beth Stuckey, Lila Rose, the Colson Center, Kristan Hawkins, Seth Gruber, and Stephanie Gray Connors. After checking my notes, I found that exactly zero say or believe that IVF babies are “less than human.” In fact, we repeatedly state that every child born through IVF is precious and worthy of protection. We are so serious about child dignity that it forms the basis of our IVF opposition — we have the audacity to actually believe that every child created via IVF deserves protection, including the 93 to 97 percent who do not make it through this process alive.
Christian critics oppose IVF not because it lacks “the mystery of natural conception” but because ethicists and theologians, in both Catholic and Protestant circles, understand that God intends for sex, marriage, and babies to be an indissoluble triad. When man tears asunder any one from the other two, children are always the victims. That is certainly the case with IVF — which separates babies from sex — as is evident by the 1.5 million embryos in perpetual frozen storage, the undisclosed number of little lives donated to research, and the small humans discarded because they were not genetically “fit” or the wrong sex. It’s not a “mystery” problem. It’s a child victimization problem.
Then Johnston states what I can only hope is some kind of misprint. “An embryo is not synonymous with a child,” he tells us, noting that “attach[ing] in a mother’s womb” is the actual sacred moment, not conception.
A Christian ethicist friend remarked that by this bizarre logic, an embryo born via a (thankfully not-yet-existent) artificial womb would not be a child. For a guy like Johnston who aims to “teach Christians to become Thinkers and Thinkers to Become Christians,” his rationale is neither thoughtful nor Christian. When a supposed “pro-life” pastor has to adopt abortionist talking points, something other than orthodoxy and biology is at work.
Sure, there was a time when our origins were more mysterious, so we charted life as beginning at “quickening,” when a woman could feel the baby move. But Johnston lives in the 21st century when he can open an embryology textbook or type a few words into Google and discover that biologists agree a new human life is formed not at birth, nor quickening, nor even at implantation, but at fertilization.
When sperm and egg meet, a new genetic code is created, and at that moment life begins. Call it what you will, it is without question the very earliest stages of human life — the same origin that I, you, Mr. and Mrs. Johnston, the five of his living IVF children, and the undisclosed number of his IVF embryos which were deselected for implantation all have in common.
Johnston doesn’t deny that embryos are lost in the IVF process — how could he? Fertility doctors unashamedly broadcast that grading, selecting, and discarding embryos are critical to their business model. Instead, Johnston explains that discarding unwanted lab-created babies is OK because some natural pregnancies fail too.
While it’s true that not all babies conceived the old-fashioned way will come to term, 100 percent of those babies at least have a chance at life. This stands in stark contrast to the lab-created babies who will be frozen or discarded before they ever know the warmth of their mother’s womb. From an ethical and biblical perspective, there’s a vast difference between spontaneous miscarriages and adults determining which little lives should live or die.
But then Johnston stumbles into truly unscientific territory by asserting that the “female body does naturally [create multiple embryos] throughout its life…” Here the reader, or homeschooled sixth grader, will note that the female body does not create multiple embryos, nor even single embryos. For that, the female body requires a contribution from a male body. But at this point, it’s clear Johnston is reaching for any justification for his anti-life, anti-Christian choices. And he does so by bending biological reality.
He then takes a page from supporters of abortion by seeking to redefine the pro-life position: “The whole purpose of being pro-life is to see the value in children and help moms and dads enjoy their God-given ability to raise them.”
Hm. NO. The whole purpose of being pro-life is to protect children’s lives from forces seeking to snuff them out because adult desire is being elevated above their fundamental right to life. And unfortunately, when it comes to embryonic children, the baby-making industry of IVF is racking up numbers that surpass the baby-taking industry of abortion.
He wraps up by telling us that “prohibiting IVF will indeed prevent children from entering our world.” The stomach-churning reality is IVF intentionally prevents the vast majority of the children it creates from entering this world already. The 2 percent of children born via IVF today are only a fraction of those who had their unfortunate beginning in a laboratory. IVF is a death sentence for the majority of lives it creates.
If he were honest, Johnston’s headline would have been, “I wanted a thing, therefore biology and theology needed to bend so I could have it.”
Christianity has a name for that. It’s idolatry.
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