When I read this article, I couldn’t shake the chills that went up my spine. I’m sure there is plenty of evil out in the world that I’ll never know about, but it doesn’t cease to amaze or shock me at man’s capacity and almost downright ingenuity — for lack of a better word — and inclination toward sin. This is just seeking profit from humanity, turning people into a disposable crop to be sold, like corn, or pork bellies.
I feel for people that have infertility problems. I have friends who are infertile or have difficulty having children, and it is painful process that can have a toll on your faith. But this type of preying people’s desperation and indiscriminate peddling of embryos has the moral stench of slavery.
A doctor whom I refuse to name to give him publicity, offers a “money back guarantee” on donor eggs and sperm that he mass produced into embryos (read: human beings without the comfort of their mommas’ wombs and worse, no immediate womb to call home) and sells them as essentially adopted embryos by couples who are at the end of their emotional and financial rope with traditional IVF methods.
What’s worse? Google “Money Back Guarantee IVF.” Pages of results for companies offering lowballing guarantees. I was informed by a friend and fellow contributor that this approach is actually not as uncommon as I had originally thought. What stood out to me in the article was not the idea that we as a society have truly commoditized (like corn or pork bellies) our children, as sad as that one particular aspect is, but rather that ethicists were gobsmacked by the lack of ethics that this doctor in question has.
Critics who are in favor of traditional IVF are horrified at this. But why should they be? This is only the next logical step in a series of steps that remove the unitive from the procreative act. If children are a choice due to artificial birth control, then the slow slide through abortion, homosexuality as normal, gay adoption and surrogacy, IVF, and now open market peddling of embryos has become, if not moral, legal.
Many things here horrify me. Things that go back to the slippery slope of IVF to begin with. Secular doctors can’t honestly be surprised at the supposed horror of the doctor’s methods when the intrinsic reality of procreation left the bedroom decades ago. Clearly this doctor feels he is doing a perceived good for his clients by saving them money and further heartache. He is so confident that his work will result in a child that he has guaranteed the baby or you get your $9800 back.
Our secular minds have been transformed to think we are owed life. If, when, how, where and with whom are all now “choices.”
This is painfully wrong. We are no more owed the gift of children than we are to expect any other gift God sees fit to bless us with. I know how painful that sounds, but you don’t have a right to do whatever you want to have children. You just aren’t. What’s happened over the years is that we have allowed what used to be moral minds to be twisted to a secular mentality with the perversion that encourages and embraces the turning of children into a commodity, like crude oil or soybeans.
We have become a society of entitlement, choice, and self-will.
We feel entitled to ignore our bodies capabilities.
We feel entitled to “choice” no matter what that means.
We feel entitled to kill children in the womb.
We feel entitled to force conception of human beings in ways that go beyond the marital act.
We feel entitled to remove the ultimate Author of life from the equation, as if we create life.
The ultimate horror of this doctor’s sin is that he does not view it as sin. Its a financial alternative. And that is the essence of the Evil One’s work. He will woo you by encapsulating sin in a sugary coat that appears to look “good” or cloak it in false compassion. He will put a question mark where God has put a period.
“Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?”*
As Catholics, we recognize the dignity and value of all life, but we also realize that there are limits to man’s participation and cooperation in the creation of new life. This goes back to the understanding that the primary function of marriage is to bring new life — with God’s aide — into this world. This is the cornerstone of our existence on this earth and why we fight against the assault against marriage. We are not owed children. God entrusts them to our care, but as a wonderful priest put it at a meeting I recently attended for my daughter’s First Holy Communion, they aren’t ours. They were His first.
Am I being harsh? No. People cannot create children. They can take what we have — eggs and sperm, or DNA — and put it together to possibly conceive a child, but we cannot create life from nothing, and we cannot create the soul. God is the Author of life; not us.
You or someone you know may be thinking, “You can’t just go around telling people what to do since you obviously have six children and have not struggled with infertility! How can you have such a strong opinion about this when you are ignoring the very raw emotions that folks who are infertile go through?”
I realize this may fall hard on the ears of those who have struggled with this issue. I hope that you will take what I’m saying for what it is. It’s not meant to be an emotional slap on the face. What I am saying has to do with something that goes beyond the understandable and palpable heartache of couples who are childless. We know IVF now appears to create and astonishingly high rate of rare developmental and genetic disorders because of gene expression in vitro. We have seen humanity turned into a cash crop with stem cells. And now we see doctors peddling random embryos to the desperate and peddling their wares with money back guarantees. It is a pervasive, objective evil, and people need to wake up.
The problem for many though is that they have committed themselves to IVF, and with it their minds are wedded to the sin.
In my years of discussing IVF online, I have found that the vast majority of those who were adamantly in support of their choice to use artificial means to conceive their children, quite literally could not separate out the sin from their children. The sin clouded their ability to see IVF as an objective evil. To admit they were wrong for using IVF, they reasoned, was to say their children were wrong. And no amount of persuasion on my part was ever successful in telling them otherwise. The impact of the emotional and financial investment ran so deep that there was almost no way to separate the sin from the precious, innocent children who were not at fault for the means by which they were conceived.
The Church has warned us about the danger of IVF since its advent in the 1950s. A friend has shown me moral theology texts from the 1950s condemning IVF as intrinsically immoral. The Church has warned about the consequences of artificial contraception. The Church has warned about the rise of homosexuality. The Church has warned about abortion and the culture of death. The Church has warned us all, and many have ignored the Church as “a bunch of celibate old men.”
Well, I think there is something do be said for those celibate little old men. Their warnings were correct, and this Doctor’s street peddler attitude about human life only goes to show it. Time for the sisters out there to wake up and realize we are the place that life begins. That is the way God designed things, and that is the way we have to live, and insist that society live, because the alternative is a godless monstrosity.
This article courtesy of CatholicSistas.com.
