But it just doesn't compute for me to imagine that actual people are dying every time a chemical pregnancy occurs. It feels like some part of my answer could come from the above: nature is selecting and de-selecting embryos all the time for healthy development in the womb. The real question is - how does this all sit with me, someone now unmoored from that great Christian Morality Play, and having to make decisions about IVF? I don't care that much about getting answers to the above - let the believers sort themselves out in whatever way makes sense to them. If you believe in God, and further believe that personhood begins at fertilization, don't you then have to grapple with the question of why God is killing babies left and right, not even giving them a chance at life? Is not God himself creating "designer babies" in womens' uteri by virtue of the fact that this biological process of rejecting embryos is occurring every day? As I said, patently ridiculous.Īs a few people have explained to me, some (many? most?) chemical pregnancies are the result of chromosomal abnormalities in the embryo - the miscarriage being nature's protective system kicking in. Considering that 50-75% of miscarriages are caused by chemical pregnancies, if such embryos are "persons" then humankind is well and truly overrun with murderous women. This struck me as patently ridiculous, because at the margins it meant that a woman who had experienced a chemical pregnancy - where an egg is fertilized and implants on the uterine wall briefly, but doesn't "stick," and thus no pregnancy develops - was theoretically at risk of a murder charge. Taken to its logical end, any woman who had suffered a pregnancy loss was at risk of being accused of murdering a person.
#SLAPDASH MEAN FULL#
But when Paul Ryan's Personhood legislation of 2011 was in the headlines (which proposed to give fetuses full personhood from the moment of fertilization), it did not take me long to reject that proposition on its face. (Easy because it eliminated a lot of gray areas that seemed too hard to parse.) Post-God, I didn't sit down and consciously re-examine my pro-life stance. I had always identified as pro-life and was never interested in drawing distinctions about when life begins: at conception seemed like an obvious and easy answer. Downside: is this not creating designer babies at some level, and again leaving unused (unhealthy) embryos in limbo? Such unhealthy embryos are a leading cause of miscarriage, so identifying which embryos are unhealthy means that only healthy ones are selected for transfer, thus increasing my chances of a successful pregnancy. Pro: Can help identify which embryos have chromosomal abnormalities.
More fertilized eggs = higher chance of healthy embryos. The argument for "as many as possible": some huge percentage of fertilized eggs from women my age become abnormal embryos (I think up to 80% have chromosomal abnormalities?). How many embryos to create from a single IVF cycle.But even if I'm generally cool with using assisted reproductive technologies, IVF in particular presents at least two thorny decisions: So, as a result, we want to try to give our son a biological sibling via IVF. The genetic pull is strong and since I've let go of God, I don't feel divinely judged for taking advantage of medical advances. I love seeing the strong resemblance our son has to his cousins. As much as I may believe that adoption is a wonderful way to build a family, I love seeing my husband's features reflected in my son's face, my husband's temperament in his actions. If you were meant to have children, you would have gotten pregnant. Treading on God's ground as creator of life. When I was a practicing Christian, the lines were clear: artificial insemination, creating "petrie dish babies," was an abhorrent concept. I now find myself feeling torn and uncertain about where to draw lines about what's morally and ethically OK, and what's not. Which in turn means I've never given much thought to the sticky ethical issues that can crop up in the course of building a family via medical science. It looks like we are going to be embarking on an IVF journey soon, something I'd never pondered doing before. So we did what many others in our predicament do: seek help from infertility experts. My husband and I have been trying to give our son a sibling for nine months.
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