To me, one of the wonders of parenthood is that, after spending years of caring for helpless babies, changing nappies, forcing yourself up at night, you suddenly come face to face with an adult person.
Not only do they start to clean up after themselves (sometimes) but they start to get involved with you in ethical discussions, like about IVF, and often teach you a point or two.
The difference between an infant and an embryo is nine months, as long as it is to my son’s next birthday. The changes that take place in the first nine months of life are, however, the most dramatic, and, from being almost invisible to the naked eye and without a will of its own, the newborn baby’s screams clearly show this has changed.
In the modern world, we have realised the technology to initiate life by our own will. The fact that embryos are so small and fragile has allowed a moral disconnect between grown adults like you or me and our embryonic stage.
Enslavement of adults is rightly illegal, as is killing.
Why is human conception apparently such a ‘hit-and-miss’ affair?
Enslavement of persons in their embryonic stage by freezing and killing by discarding is, however, not only not illegal but actively condoned by some individuals.
The new person’s unique molecular genetic signature is initiated at a scientifically definable moment at conception and continues uninterrupted from then into adulthood.
Is it a lack of imagination that loses the connection between embryos and children or a need to justify procedures that would otherwise be unethical?
It is easy to understand how the deep-seated motivation of a couple to have a child may lead them to consider IVF. But is there not a moral disconnect in the minds of individuals who know that they will get a healthy child from an embryo in the laboratory but at the same time are willing to freeze or discard extra embryos?
It may be that prospective parents become so fixated on having at least one child that they become blinkered to the evils of embryo destruction. Most certainly, however, those who set up and run IVF clinics are major forces in this desensitisation.
IVF has become a huge financial industry that will reach $11.3 billion worldwide by 2021. IVF providers, gynaecologists with the expertise, private hospitals and even governments that encourage medical tourism stand to make, and are already making, a lot of money from fertility procedures. Financial motivations are very insidious drivers of change in behaviour, of hyperbole in advertising the perceived benefits of IVF and in the minimising or eradication of the negative moral issues.
Why is human conception apparently such a ‘hit-and-miss’ affair?
For those who would force all human reproduction into the laboratory and remove all the inconvenient vagaries of normal marital intercourse, it must indeed seem ‘hit-and-miss’. However, life is a gift from God and, in his simplicity of mind, man cannot understand the nature of God’s design.
It is God’s decision when to bring new life into existence. In His love, He permits us to manipulate life in vitro but those who do so are taking on themselves a prerogative that is God’s alone and, as John Paul II has said, this is profoundly unlawful.
Patrick Pullicino is professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Kent