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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

The screening for significant genetic conditions is an interesting one, as I understand that ivf is recommended to some couples in that situation who could reproduce through sex.
The ability to screen to ensure that any implanted embryos are healthy seems a tremendous thing.

Lysis, they’re moral questions, not ones that can be answered by stating the law.

Ivf is heavily monitored in the UK. The irony of a being a child protection social worker who was being assessed for my moral fitness to under go ivf at the same time as I watched women who had had their last dc removed for abuse and neglect become pregnant again wasn't lost on me.
There are significant double standards in the amount of intrusion and control women who under go ivf have to accept compared to those who can reproduce using sex.

Endofdays in the UK many of the things you list have been carefully considered and a judgement has been made on whether they are acceptable or not. Sex selection is not allowed in UK clinics, neither is screening for "undesirable traits" (assuming you mean non medical issues). A man can't have his ex-wifes embryo implanted into another woman. what happens to embryos after a set time period is laid out in legal documents signed at the start of the process.

Child’s feelings about being implanted into an unrelated mother one of the most heart breaking things I've ever watched on TV was a documentary about a man searching for his biological father his mother gave him no information about his father and he was desperate to find out where he came from. He was the result of a one night stand (or possibly prostitution). Children can end up distressed by their background when they result from sex.

Many of the things are carefully considered because their are significant moral issues around IVF that need considering by society and always will do.

Yes, there are also significant moral issues around single parents, and these are discussed all the time.

@naughtynorm

“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.“

I’m undecided on a precise ethical position on IVF. As to who pays for it I do believe that if it is a question of publicly funding IVF on a stretched NHS budget basic triage principles would mean that life saving procedures should have adequate provision ahead of others.

I do however believe in the general principle that children cost a lot of resources quite aside from the cost of IVF, and I believe that bringing children into the world that you can’t afford does neither the parent, society or even sometimes the child much good. So framing parenthood as a right is dangerous.

However the fact that opportunities for social mobility have utterly stalled in recent decades is the issue that upstream is causing the problem. I do recognise it is a pretty fundamental human desire to procreate so wanting to live a peaceful life and having a couple of children should not be an unreasonable aspiration for a majority of people to have, but committing vast amounts of time and resources to ensure everyone who wants them get as many as they like would be folly.

One of the Alabama(?) congressmen who'd voted to ban abortion was asked about left over embryos, and he stated that they only cared about the embryos in women's bodies. It really is about controlling women. I'll see if I can find the exact quote somewhere.

@GrumbleBumble

There was this case in Arizona:
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.azcentral.com/amp/3205867002

It’s a massive ethical conundrum a woman got breast cancer and told she would be unlikely to be able conceive following treatment. So she and her then boyfriend had embryo’s frozen in case they got married one day and wanted children. Well they did but then got divorced and she wanted to use those embryos to start a family in the future without his consent. The court ruled in her favour but it’s impossible balance rights here fairly and justly?

I accept you are talking about (UK) law but I think we need to examine all the ramifications of any position.

Lysis, here:

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/why-alabama-s-abortion-law-includes-an-exemption-for-infertility

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 don't see this as very similar. In the kinds of cases you are talking about, someone conceives, and sadly the baby dies at some point before birth of natural causes. As do we all.

The particular objection of some pro-life persons is that in IFV you knowingly create embryos with the idea that if there are too many, they will be discarded (from this perspective, killed) and that people do in fact discard them. Obviously this doesn't apply when that is deliberately avoided in the process, and it doesn't cover all the reasons people object to IFV, but its what is comparable to your example.

There is always going to be an ethical difference between someone dying of natural causes, without any intent, and someone being deliberately destroyed.