People who are anti abortion from conception, how do you feel about IVF?

@Endofthedays unless for medical reasons sex selection is illegal in the uk.

www.parliament.uk/documents/post/pn198.pdf

Has there even been any picketing of IVF clinics anywhere? I expect they dispose of a lot more embryos than the average abortion clinic.

This is a good point. It makes it very, very clear that the pro-life movement is more about controlling women than about actually caring about foetuses and the babies some of them will turn into. Seems to me the majority of pro-lifers don't give a shiny shit about caring for babies once they're born either, especially if they're from poor families who will struggle to clothe and feed them and buy nappies.

I had IVF. I have PCOS. I produced around 30 eggs on my only cycle and this resulted in 25 embryos. They did this without asking us if we wanted them to attempt to fertilize all the eggs. They'd told me that probably most of those eggs would be duds as I'd produced so many, and I suppose, since none of the embryos resulted in pregnancy that may be true, but having so many embryos something I was unprepared for.

Having been through IVF I do believe that there are a lot of moral issues with it which aren't being addressed. I certainly wasn't prepared for what happened to me, ethical issues weren't discussed, and I felt under pressure to 'try the next thing' when attempts failed. I refused to use donor eggs in the end as I felt that was wrong (I'm not saying, by the way, that others shouldn't do this, I don't really know where I stand on that but I would not have been comfortable with it).

I feel that IVF was a money making exercise and we were in some cases pushed to do things that would have made the clinic lots of money but wasn't in our best interests / weren't ethical. Creating so many embryos was one such thing - we kept going back and back for cycles to use up all our embryos and not a single one worked. As it turns out I had two beautiful babies naturally (took me the best part of 20 years mind) so I feel rather relieved we don't have frozen embryos left over as I did feel morally obligated to keep using them until they were all used up. Due to my medical condition, I doubt they would have been ok to use for donation and I could not have destroyed them. So maybe it was a clever money making decision by the clinic to fertilise all those low quality eggs.

I also feel it was not in my best interests in terms of mental health to have so many low quality embryos created as it made my infertility and trying to conceive a very drawn out and painful affair with many, many failures. As I had one of my DCs mid way through, it also had an impact on her and has had an impact on my relationship with DH.

I do not think they should have fertilised all of my eggs. But they did.

End To answer a couple of your questions:

Each transfer both parties have to sign forms and prove id: I can't see how a man could use an old embryo with new wife. Perhaps in the US but it's very strictly regulated here. The only exception being that when we started off this process, DH signed a form saying that if he died or became mentally incapacitated I could do what I liked with the embryos. There's no corresponding form for a woman to sign though.

As for who owns the embryos, we do so long as we pay our storage fees: if we don't then they're treated as abandoned and the clinic can discard them.

What do you call undesirable traits? You can choose to have them screened for genetic conditions that would mean they wouldn't survive or would have conditions that the vast majority of people abort for. You can't have them screened for eye colour.

I don’t see those as being the same issues.

There are complex moral issues around miscarriage and around sex selection of foetuses in the womb that are very different to IVF moral issues.

In the UK you can adopt if single, in a same sex partnership etc and there isn't a strict upper age limit.
There are very few "unwanted babies" ready to collect at a few days/weeks old. While there are a large number of children awaiting adoption they are usually older and often have additional needs.

I'm sure some posters on this thread would like to see something like the hand maids tale, the ability to have children reserved for those that can pay for the treatment

No I would like to see IVF and surrogacy banned , regardless of ability to pay.

IVF is nothing like sex.

The message of the handmaids tale was not that only the wealthy had treatments.

Endofthedays

A few of those apply to a lesser degree with sex.
There have been hundreds of threads on here over the years from women looking to use various techniques to sway the chances of getting one sex over another.

And destruction of embryos - there was a heartbreaking thread here recently from a woman who was having her 7th miscarriage in a row, and she got nothing less than kindness and encouragement from posters (as is entirely right)
I know several women with an underlying condition which means they have miscarried half their pregnancies, and knew about the risk each time they ttc

Where is the judgement of them? Are they also 'morally repugnant' for wanting to try and have a baby even though they knew there was a high chance an embryo wouldn't make it?

I'm sure some posters on this thread would like to see something like the hand maids tale, the ability to have children reserved for those that can pay for the treatment.

Do you mean in terms of not paying for fertility treatments?

In the end we always have to make a decision about what kinds of treatments are going to be covered, and I think there will always be a values element there, and also looking at things like success rates and costs, and how it affects the ability to deliver other kinds of treatments.

As technology develops it becomes more possible to make all kinds of interventions, many that are extremely resource heavy. I don't think we'll be able to avoid deciding which things people have a right to and which must be paid for, or simply not allowed.

I don’t know enough about it to create a comprehensive list, but fertility processes outside the human body I can think of would be-

Egg donation and the fertility risks to the donor.

Child’s feelings about being implanted into an unrelated mother.

Invasive nature on women’s bodies of IVF procedures.

Sex selection.

Genetic screening for undesirable traits.

Creation of embryos that are used in research.

Donation of embryos.

Deliberate destruction of embryos.

Who owns the embryos beyond a certain date. The clinic? The parents?

Implanting an embryo after divorce. Husband getting embryo from wife implanted in someone else.

All these seem different moral issues to moral issues around procreative sex, which itself has a massive range of moral issues which would not apply to fertility treatments.

crans adoption is the a highly favored response of the UK government to manage the care of dc who have or are likely to be significantly harmed by their parents.
This is called forced adoption in Europe but this is a highly politicalized term in the UK.
Dc tend to be 2 plus (although not always) and have often experienced significant trauma before being placed for adoption.
The assessment for adoption is significant and can easily take a year as would be parents.
There is no cost for this adoption and parents have the same leave entitlements as birth parents.
Overseas adoption is very difficult and very expensive.

Some interventions are very positive in an ethical sense but we can’t make those moral distinctions unless we’re really clear that those interventions are really different and need to be scrutinised as such.

Yes, I think that's very clearly put.

The Catholic Church and CofE are against ivf. I suspect many other religions are also.

I suppose that answers the op's question really.

Iirc my clinic offered a mini/lite Ivf package where the aim was just to collect 1 or 2 eggs to avoid excess embryos.

I'm sure some posters on this thread would like to see something like the hand maids tale, the ability to have children reserved for those that can pay for the treatment.

end I think it is very important to remember that ivf follows the same process as sex, there isn't anything particularly different or weird about it.
The differences between a planned sex induced pregnancy and an ivf one are minimal, there are no extra ways of producing life in a lab. The only thing possible is to recreate the natural process but with a little extra nudge to help through the stages.
There are no different ways of ending up pregnant to the ones that having sex produces.

Cranston I think I'm my part of England there is a wait /process or around 2 years, shorter if you will adopt an older child. But I haven't researched it fully and I think it varies by region.

If there are no children needing to be adopted in the Netherlands, that is a really good thing.

I'm now a little bit against IVF, only because I think that there are too many unwanted babies in this world. Of course I love my DCs completely and utterly but I think we should have considered adoption. (Easy for me to say now that I have my 2 DCs, I know).

I read so much about adoption on this forum. Is it that easy in the UK? Because it's damn near impossible in the Netherlands and it costs a lot of money. Basically you have to be young, married, already have children, finished with any fertility treatments, have about 10.000 euro left over and then maybe, maybe you can qualify to adopt a severely mentally and physically disabled child from Africa. Providing that you actually go to Africa for two months or so to collect said child. How you can go away for so long and keep your job and family, I have no idea.

I’m not keen on the blurring of IVF into sex because we do need to make very clear distinctions between ordinary human processes and medical/technological interventions.

Some interventions are very positive in an ethical sense but we can’t make those moral distinctions unless we’re really clear that those interventions are really different and need to be scrutinised as such.

Science continues to develop new technologies, and we need to keep asking questions about the consequences and ethics of them.

My third (privately funded) cycle was successful (1 & 2 weren't but followed a similar pattern) 12 eggs were collected, 12 fertilised, at 5 days zero had reached blastocyst. The two most developed were implanted. I got one baby. I had a total over three cycles of approximately 30 fertilised eggs but not a single one suitable for freezing. The same would have happened in my body, though admittedly over a longer time scale because my infertility is a result of fertilised eggs not developing properly. I don't give a sparkly shit if anyone else finds that immoral. I'm off to tell my aged mother to cancel her NHS fund cataract surgery as it not life saving. I will also be hugging my beautiful "made to order" (as oppossed to what? Unwanted?) little boy extra tight tonight because I forgot sometimes that there are people out there who think the "right thing" would be for him not to exist.

My friends and indeed myself started 'trying for a baby' when we felt ready to start a family. This meant ceasing contraceptive methods whatever they are, starting to have sex with half an eye on the calendar. Baby making sex is different to regular sex unless you have an unplanned pregnancy.
Ivf is the next step up in planned pregnancy, usually because the more basic diy methods have failed.

That's positive Dreich

Also, in our clinic you can opt to give away any left over embryo's.

In our clinic you can let them know if you feel that all embryo's should be used due to the reasons mentioned in your OP. Those couples get less drugs so less eggs develop. That means that the success rate is lower but you only end up with one or two eggs so it's more in line with these peoples beliefs.

I would like to hope something more is happening in procreative sex than having a baby to order.

praying makes a good point. I had 7 successfully fertilized eggs but only 2 developed into implantation grade embryos. The rest were discarded.
The discarding of low quality embryos is something the human body does naturally though.

nc rest assured from a children's social worker there are not lots of babies looking to be adopted, demand far outstrips supply.