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

[KennDodd]

Watching Newsnight and the anti abortion debate in America. Person saying life begins at conception and deserves protection. Well what does that mean for IVF? If life begins at conception and deserves protection, then does that include protection for life before implantation in the womb? If not, why not?

Interested to hear pro lifers view on this.

obviously, I was trying to get you to explore your odd Luddite-esque stance on medical support of sub-fertile couples

Your analogy of world wide, mass infertility is still irrelevant and makes no sense.

It seems that Pro lifers and Catholics have a very high reguard for embryos

I am neither pro- life nor Catholic.

It seemed pretty clear Lass was referring to surrogacy involving technology; that was the context

Thank you. The relevance of the practices of the Babylonians towards slave women has little relevance- other than poor women nowadays are "volunteering" to be temporarily enslaved as surrogates using high tech as opposed to being raped by a slave owner.

I'm opposed to the death penalty: if DH were to be murdered in a country that still had it, would I still be against it? I hope so, but I'm practical enough to know that when circumstances change so can opinions on what is moral and ethical. It's very easy to sit in judgement from afar.

Likewise, it is very easy to sit there and be ethically opposed to certain medical treatments when you have never actually needed them. I would be very interested to hear from someone who is ethically opposed and has actually refused treatment.

It’s more difficult to make a judgement from afar than to simply have no opinion whatsoever.

Ivf doesn't artificially create a human being. If it could do this the success rate would be 100% not 30% per cycle.
All ivf can do is create an opportunity for a pregnancy it cannot create the pregnancy and thus the human being.
Bringing the word Frankenstein into the debate is unnecessary. It is also inaccurate as the same biological process, with the same biological parts occurs in the lab as occurs during sex albeit with assistance in some cases.
My dc have only the dna of their parents. I assure they they are perfectly indistinguishable from their peers who didn't spend a few days as a tiny cell in a Petrie dish.

The lab based elements are all technological. That’s not being debated.

Life cannot be created through technology.
There is not the slightest guarantee that separating out the separate biological components will create life, there is no magic jolt of electricity to create life.
The human element cannot be ignored or replaced.

I think im coming at it from the point of view that it is such a rare occurrence and is not the intention, so (IMO) it shouldn't govern the entire conversation. Is destroying potentially viable embryos the main issue to pro lifers? Could the answer instead be to provide more options to donate these or promote gentler methods to reduce the risk of this happening at all? I guess I'm not comfortable with the idea that the entire process should be stopped if it's based on the rare occurrence of viable embryos being discarded. Maybe that's because morally/ethically I'm on board and it's a question of managing that risk rather than an ethical question.

I would not characterise it as rare, really, it seems to me even from this conversation that it is not at all unusual for a couple to have a few left over embryos that they need to make a decision about. And unless you are talking about only creating ones you intend to implant for sure, that's potentially a problem.

I would agree that it's not some kind of huge numbers, but that's why it isn't paid as much attention by pro-life advocates. You don't tend to hear a lot of people talking about it unless it's in a discussion like this.
Now, could they do the process differently? I expect that's a possibility, and that would be fine for some people. For others, that's not the only element of IVF they have concerns about, so while they might be glad to see that change it isn't going to make them supportive of the process as a whole.

Disposal of frozen embryos has been identified as a category within the typology of areas for potential 'abuse within assisted reproductive technology', to be published in a forthcoming systematic review

Lots of really great points raised in this thread, so def food for thought & questions I hope I can raise in the working sessions for the workshop on Monday I mentioned earlier in the thread. Lots of bioethicists attending so v much looking forward to hearing what they reckon

I’m not sure what point you are trying to make Dreich.

It’s biotech. It’s technological interventions in biota to achieve certain outcomes.

Exactly my thoughts on reading through this awful thread (should have stopped after page one - and don’t ask me why I didn’t - I get dragged in). I’ve never come across anyone with strong views against ivf who hasn’t had their own biological children.
I have 2 ivf children and I take zero offence at some of the awful comments and warped opinions on this thread. They can spout on as much as they want but it makes no difference to the fact that it exists (thank god - and like many other advances in medicine) and it is available and I have my beautiful “Frankenstein” daughters as a result. And I’m sorry but yes, I did have a right to be a mother. I’m not going to have some idiotic opinionated fertile woman tell me otherwise. Maybe they should be adopting as well as birthing their own children?

The point I am trying to make is that there has been talk about Frankenstein, artificially creating humans and similar.
Like some other posters I am highlighting that while assisted reproduction is assisted that is all it is.
It simply isn't possible to artificially create life.
It is no more possible in a Petrie dish than anywhere else, it is one of the things that makes ivf so stressful.
The basics of reproduction are the same in the female body or a Petrie dish.
There is no tech to create life all you can do is give the natural process the best chance of success during each step.

I'm sorry, the "you can't know something is right or wrong until you have struggled with the issue yourself and then you will undoubtable agree it is right" thing is really.... don't even know what to say.

It isn't true for one thing. But if it were, it would be a good argument that we should NOT let people who struggle with an issue have a say in whether it is an ethical practice.

Luckily we don't have to say that.

IVF does not artificially create humans 🤣. No eggs or sperm are artificial in the first place so how do you suggest the embryos that are created are somehow artificial?

Who is suggesting they are artificial?

There’s a list of cases here around rights to family life, to privacy etc, including those around IVF:

www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Reproductive_ENG.pdf

I don't think anyone is saying that the spark of life or whatever you want to call it is being artificially created or is different in itself somehow. People are thinking of the process. The objection is that the technological element of the process has consequences of some kind, perhaps ones that aren't all that obvious - - like the way we conceptualise that spark of life.

Those kinds of consequences are very difficult to get hold of, and also very difficult to fully predict. But they can be hugely, unexpectedly transformative in a society over time. There is a tendency, especially for naturally practical people, to see it all as worryworting or too abstract to matter, or just impossible to do anything about.

I think that's a mistake though, it's part of what's made us so vulnerable to technological changes driven by industry in recent years, and we can see that has had real impacts. Maybe even including the tendency to see the human body as a container for some sort of "inner essence."
All of which is to say, it's important to think about the details clearly, to draw out the implications, to look at processes.

Yes, I see all these issues as having wider implications for transhumanism.

I have not issues with IVF, but then I am mid-treatment cycle at the moment!

I do not see the destruction of an embryo as the destruction of life. As a pp has said, conception needs implantation to sustain life or otherwise we would consider a period a miscarriage as the egg could have fertilised but not implanted. Not all embryos within the body implant or stay implanted in the same way that not all embryos created in IVF will implant when placed back in the body.

The embryo in itself is not a life but has a potential for a life. The embryo in the lab cannot exist by itself, so without being placed into a host it cannot live.

On looking at the telegraph story, it does contain the details, just without a link to the HFEA source data.

The figures cover all embryos created since they started records in August 1991. It does not give an end date, so on the basis they say the records are for 21 years, presumably to are to some point in 2012 when the article was written.

In those 21 years, there were 3.5 million embryos created.

1.4 million were implanted, 840,000 were frozen for future use and about 7,000 were frozen for scientific research and donation.

The other 1.7 million were the embryos discarded. Those would have been the embryos that either did not fully fertilise, did not make it to blastocyte stage or which did not develop well enough for them to be frozen. There were the embryos that did not make it or were not going to make it and were highly likely to miscarry.

The only relevant figure to this is that it says 23,480 were taken out of storage and discarded. Some of those could be the frozen for donation/research embryos (discarded once the research had been finished), but most would be the ones frozen for future use.

Even if we count them all as the ones for future use, that comes to 1,118 formerly frozen embryos discarded each year. Given the number of cycles each year, that is a low number.

Plsnomorepeppapig

I’ve never come across anyone with strong views against ivf who hasn’t had their own biological children.

Me either at least not to my knowledge.

CornishMaid1

I have not issues with IVF, but then I am mid-treatment cycle at the moment!

I send you all of my positive energy for success in this round. The whole thing is a harrowing process - we put our bodies through so much for the chance to be mothers. Sending you love and hugs.

The embryo in itself is not a life but has a potential for a life. The embryo in the lab cannot exist by itself, so without being placed into a host it cannot live. I don’t think this is a great argument because the same could be said of the majority of under 5s and all infants.

Thank you all for contributing. I remember a thread a while ago about mitochondrial donation leading to children with altered DNA from three people. I was a little surprised that as far as I could see nobody had any reservations about the treatment.

www.hfea.gov.uk/treatments/embryo-testing-and-treatments-for-disease/mitochondrial-donation-treatment/

As far as I can see saying the embryo has only a potential for life is completely unscientific. It has it's own DNA, it's not dormant, or dead, it's growing and developing, etc. It reminds me of people who claim that a human embryo isn't human, because then it would be a person... there are a few steps missing there, whichever way you want to take it.