Understanding IVF: The Ethical Considerations and Biblical Guidelines

December 11, 2025

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: Patricia Engler

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 12/11/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Thursday edition of Stand In the Gap Today, and it’s our monthly focus on apologetics biblical worldview and creation. And before we’re done with today’s program, all of these you will see will be blended together. My returning guest today is Patricia Engler. She’s a Christian apologetic speaker for answers and genesis. She also hosts her own podcast called Zero Compromise, and even in her young age, and I’ll say that because I’m older than she is, she’s the author of two books, at least at this point. One is Prepared to Thrive, a Survival Guide for Christian Students and Modern Marxism. We’ve talked about that in an earlier program. And then a guide for Christians in a woke new world. So we’re going to go from that because she’s going to blend a lot of what she’s been doing into our discussion today. One of the least discussed areas of, I’m going to say experimentation of which there is a lot out there in the realms of science and technology.

But this area is operating, I’m going to say in the merged realms of life and family science, technology, algorithms, artificial intelligence, government and public policy, ethics and morality, and more in all with a clear connection to God, to Genesis and biblical truth is this area we’re going to focus on today, that area of experimentation in this realm of human fertility involving conception obviously, and birth now becoming a very big business. This area called IVF or in vitro fertilization. It’s the process of artificially implanting a fertilized egg and the result frequently referred to as test two babies, if you remember alive back in the seventies, that somewhat came into being at that point. And that’s where a baby is conceived via IVF in vitro fertilization, not often, just in a tube. It’s in a dish of some type perhaps, but however that could be. But it became a media term more than a scientific term at that point. But I share this common description just to quickly describe the focus of today’s program between me and Patricia Engler, the title I’ve chosen to frame today’s conversation is this Understanding IVF, the Ethical Considerations, the Biblical Guidelines. And with that, welcome Patricia, it’s good to have you back again.

Patricia Engler:

Thanks so much. Great to join

Sam Rohrer:

Tricia. In order to get our listeners and ourselves on the same page, let’s lay out this foundation here right now. Can you start by defining the term IVF in vitro fertilization, for example, and describe the process of exactly what it is. We’ll go more into the depth of the history of the next segment.

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, absolutely. So IVF is just talking about fertilizing a human egg. So creating a human embryo in a laboratory rather than in a body. There’s a bunch of different ways you could go about that, but typically an IVF cycle begins by giving a woman hormones that affect your natural reproductive cycle, and then that stimulates your ovaries to maturate many eggs at once instead of just one as usual. Then a physician removes these mature eggs, which are then either stored frozen or incubated in a dish. Then later an embryologist either takes fresh or hawed sperm from the designated father. Hopefully there’s been mistakes made in some cases, unfortunately, and then adds it to the dish or injects one sperm into each egg. So then if this is successful, it produces one or more zygotes, which are single cell human, so living human individuals. And these little people will stay alive in the lab ideally until they’re grown into two or several celled embryos.

So then in the meantime, a really close eye is kept on them to check if they’re healthy, if they’re normal, and to keep an eye on which ones are most likely to survive. A lot of the embryos at this point go through genetic testing looking for disease and disability related traits. And then after this, the embryologists, the parents and then sometimes even AI will select which embryos to actually transfer to the mom’s womb, so they have a chance at life after birth. So clinics used to routinely transfer two or more at the same time to maximize the odds of birth and then aborting the extra fetuses if more survived. But now transferring one or two is a little more common. The ones that aren’t transferred, sadly, a lot of these little people are just thrown away and die because of that, or quite a few of them are also just frozen indefinitely for possible future transfer. And these so-called surplus kids can be either just stay in the freezer more or less forever or be adopted or be killed via just being thrown away or being donated to research that ends up destroying them. There’s just huge numbers of this. So even just in the one small country of the United Kingdom, there’s been an estimated 130,000 embryos thrown away since 1991 and another half a million in the freezers right now. So that is what’s going on with IVF,

Sam Rohrer:

And it’s very easy listeners, if you listen to me right now, you can see the multitude of potential ethical issues. Let’s go into the why here. If you were to describe the primary underlying goal or the purpose for experimentation in this area, is it perhaps for to help infertile couples of which is an issue that’s a genuinely moral motivation? Or is it a justification perhaps to develop the perfect human, which is a humanist motivation or is it perhaps a money driven thing where now, I mean the estimate, I looked it up at $28 billion, it’s big money in this, or is it perhaps a mechanism augmenting, I’m going to say the very antichrist goals of the Luciferian globalist transhumanist efforts right now, which are trying to combine man with machine guided by ai. What are your thoughts on that?

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, I mean, since it’s a tool, you certainly use it for all of those different things, and I think we do see a lot of those happening in many ways. I guess when you think of IVF, the typical approach that people are usually thinking of is for helping people get around certain forms of infertility. But beyond that, there’s a lot of other reasons why people might seek AI. For instance, if you have a homosexual couple that wants to use assistive reproductive technology for a child, or there’s another article that I’ve cited about a fertility clinic where most of the clientele actually aren’t infertile couples. They just want to be able to create a whole bunch of embryos via IVF to then select which of their kids they want to keep alive based on genetic traits and future disease risk, and even things like hair color and whether they’re a boy or girl.

And then you do also have researchers who are doing all sorts of experiments with IVF embryos destroying them in the process. Sometimes these are leftover embryos whose parents gave them up or just didn’t claim them. And sometimes, sadly, embryos are just manufactured specifically for research from donated eggs and sperm because there’s actually no protection on these embryos in many countries, including the states before they’re 14 years, 14 days old. So all of those are going on. So even though infertility is one of the main issues, we think about it, it’s actually a much bigger story than that,

Sam Rohrer:

And I think it’s very easy for anyone listening to say, oh, yeah, and if anything, 28 billion business and growing estimated in another 10 years to go almost doubled that. Ladies and gentlemen. Okay, have you ever thought about that? I think we probably all have this idea of in vitro fertilization. And most of the time within the community listening to this program in the Christian settings, it’s generally because of a genuine need and a desire for couples to conceive and have a child who are not able to, and that number percentage of people, it’s really climbing. So that need is there, but it goes far beyond. And that’s why the consideration of ethic, moral, and we’ll conclude today’s program with what the Bible says, but in the next segment, stay whether us we’re going to go and consider the historic aspect of it. When did this whole concept of experimentation come about?

How has it changed along the way? Well, if you’re just joining us today, welcome aboard. It’s always a pleasure to spend some time with you during the day. And some of you listen to this program I know live we’re doing it. We do this live noon to one eastern time. That’s where we are here in the studio in Pennsylvania. However, I do know because we hear from many, you will catch this program late at night if you’re in California and Alaska and Hawaii, and we heard from people in all of those states, it’s really a neat thing. I know you listen to different time, and for those listening to me, although we’re doing this Thursday here for the audience that’s in Central Africa, across Kenya, the countries that are there, thank you for listening. You’ll be hearing it on Friday, so just because of the way the time zones happen around the world.

But anyways, it’s a pleasure to have you aboard today. My special guest is Patricia Engler. She’s a Christian apologist, a speaker for answers and Genesis also does a lot of technical writing. She’s completing her academic pursuits, an area of bioethics and a number of things. And from that has come some research that she has done on the theme about which we’re talking today in vitro fertilization, and we give an introduction to it in the last segment. We’re going to go into the history of that now. So you can find that article@antersandgenesis.org. You can scroll through that somewhere and you can find it there. But anyway, let’s get into this. We have a lot to discuss, but based on generally available history such as what I’m going to say is english wikipedia.org, the IVF journey, as they call it, began over a century ago with animal studies.

It merged with human reproductive technologies and has now merged again. And what they are saying, and as I’m finding to be true into the transhumanist framework, moving as they say, quote IVF, in vitro fertilization on a trajectory toward, as they say, produced or enhanced, humans prompting, they’re saying philosophical and ethical, reassessment of reproduction, sex and human identity. So you get the flavor of the importance and the broadness of this area. Patricia, based on your research when and who is attributed with the advent of IVF and vitro fertilization, this experimentation, this area of doing artificial conception and so forth. And add into that your answer as well, why, what was the initial driving motivation? So who went and why?

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, this is a wild story and it’s a history you don’t hear about super often. So I was kind of shocked when I was researching it. So it turns out even back in 1944, there was a study reporting on scientists generating and destroying human zygotes in vitro. So that’s a tragedy, but IVF as we know it today really started with an independent researcher, Robert Edwards, and he developed IVF alongside a gynecologist named Patrick Strepto or Steptoe, and they experimented with infertile couple’s gametes for nearly a year before finally managing to keep four healthy embryos alive for five days. And then Edwards gave the command to flatten to kill these embryos, to check their chromosomes and tell the parents that research had taken a step forward. So that gives you kind of a sense for the type of person, the type of outlook he had. So this was around 1969, and it’d be almost another decade of experiments that destroyed human embryos until the first IVF baby was born winning Edwards a noble prize.

So as for motivation, it’s pretty telling that when Edwards experiments began in earnest, he was really involved in the eugenics movement and he was a council member of the British Eugenics Society. So as a reminder, eugenics was founded by Char Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, as an initiative to improve humanity by preventing the births of babies with unwanted traits and promoting babies with wanted traits. So Yex fell from favor after nazim, but it never disappeared. We’re just seeing it in other forms now like deciding which IVF babies to let liver die based on their genetics. And even back in 1989, Edwards himself was looking forward to the kind of time period we have today when genetic testing would mean, this is in Edwards words, that embryos carrying crippling genes could be identified and fleshed away. So he’s literally looking forward to a time where you can destroy embryos based on not having genes that you like. So while not every case of IVF will involve eugenics today, we see this strong historical connection between IVF and eugenics movement all the way back from even before the very founding of this procedure.

Sam Rohrer:

And see that’s very interesting at ladies and gentlemen, again, the idea, this is not brand new, but it doesn’t go way back into the 1,817 hundreds because it didn’t have the ability technology and the advancement of what is, if you can call it advancement regression perhaps, is significant in this area because now you’re talking about the human genome, the ability to pick and choose, and of course, well, that’s the ethical part of it. Going beyond that now, Patricia provide, if you can, some history of now the further development kind of bring us up to date now with where things are and throw into that the change in motivation. Because the beginning with the idea of trying to do it with animals, you could see, all right, you can make a case for that. But then when you move up into humans and you move up into experimentation of the Hitler days, you throw in the word eugenics, alright, bring it up to changes from where you kind of left off to where we are now.

Patricia Engler:

Yes, certainly. So we still do see this genetics or eugenics going on. Eugenics has had more opportunities to rear its head as we have gotten more advanced genetic testing and genetic editing even abilities. But then as you had hinted out earlier, we’re also seeing a lot of financial motivations because the fertility industry is super lucrative. So within the decade it’s projected to surpass 62 billion in value. And Forbes reported back in 2023 that in the US just one IVF cycle can range from 15,000 to $30,000. And these costs increase with add-ons, which another study shows aren’t really even that well supported. These are just kind of additional tests and such you can get, so each cycle is expensive and a lot of patients have to pay for more than one cycle because unfortunately the birth rates for IVF embryos are really low. So in the US in 2021, even if the transferred embryos 63% didn’t survive, same with in the UK in 2022, 76% didn’t survive 78% in Germany. So factors like maternal age correlate to success rates, but most babies don’t survive IVF overall. And then the cycles add up, so then the expenses add up along with the death tally. So you’re seeing unfortunately, financial motivation as well and a lot of humans being killed in the process.

Sam Rohrer:

Alright, interesting. Now I want to look ahead here. You did your research on that. I read your research. I did some additional research in putting together the program and I have been following, and I’ve done programs on this concept of transhumanism and the merger, which actually was referenced in the information that I just read a little bit ago. But I pursued it and tried to find out is there more of a linkage? And I have to say I was surprised to some extent because I did not know the linkage that there was an actual linkage between IVF, which we’re talking about AI and the march to transhumanism. Again, I wasn’t totally surprised because even during the COVID days, some five years ago, the World Economic Forum, people during that time came out and clearly stated that part of the goal for what they were intending in the modifying of the human immune system and all of that was a connection to the move to transhumanism.

And then now over the last couple of years with the AI and data center emphasis with the billionaire oligarchs, I’m putting them all wanting to do warp speed implementation of AI and predictive surveillance and control that that is all connected. I mean, not something we can’t get into totally. But what are your thoughts about that? Because it’s moving from where you started, it’s moved a long way into these areas of eugenics and all of that, but it’s also moving now into ways that I’m going to say I don’t know how it’s going to end. What do you think?

Patricia Engler:

Well, yeah, certainly our worldviews reflect and drive how we develop technology and use technology. And we are seeing a lot of these sort of transhumanist motivations in the development of technology today. And even its regulation as you were talking about with places like the World Economic Forum. So I think that it is certainly important to think about these links and transhumanism and IVF do have links both in theory and practice. So in theory, both transhumanism and kind of the mindset behind IVF align with the view that humans can be their own creators of themselves and their nature. And by using technology, we can master the human race essentially. So then in practice, IVF provides this tool for manipulating humans at the embryo stage. And you can do that for, you can try to do that for positive things like curing disease, but you can also try to do it for this sort of enhancement motivation. And in either case, embryos are going to be killed in the process even for good motivations. It’s something we don’t want to see happening. But yeah, this is a tool that I think we can expect to see being used in these ways more in the future.

Sam Rohrer:

In the last segment, I’m going to ask you to share some biblical principles again that you’ve put together to help guide because one of the problems that the world is facing, God-fearing people are facing is this merger of technology into areas that, whereas once ladies and gentlemen, there used to be self-imposed moral guidelines. In some cases, legal guidelines, experimentations in some areas, but you could not go beyond them because there was danger. There was a stepping into areas that historically from a biblical perspective are in the realm that belongs to God. But if you throw God out, well then why not experiment and try to come up with combinations and permutations and create the quote perfect person. That’s what we’re talking about in part. So again, that’s why the ethical concern, moral concern, biblical guidelines become so important. Stay with us when we come back.

We’re going to compare and talk about these things. Now we’re talking about in light of specific worldviews. Well, we’re now midpoint in our program today. If you’re just joining us, we’re talking about an issue you’ve probably maybe read about considered a little bit, but likely not the way we’re doing it today in depth. My special guest is Patricia Engler. She’s doing a lot of work there at Anders and Genesis. She’s an apologetic speaker, but she’s also doing a lot of writing and a lot of technical areas. And she’s been with me a number of times on this program and I’ve heard from many listeners who have appreciated these programs and things that we’ve dealt with. Today is one of those. It’s an area involved in, I’m going to say bioethics, you could say it. It’s involved in a lot of things and it’s that area called in vitro fertilization, IVF.

But there’s a lot of aspects that come out of it and we’ve been talking about it. I’m not going to go back and repeat that, what we’ve gone over, but Patricia, let’s move into this because as we’ve referred already, the different aspects, the genesis, literally the genesis at the beginning of this movement back 1944 before, as you referred to earlier, the merging of connections and motivations with people involved in eugenics, those that Hitler mindset we’re going to create the perfect human being to now transhumanism, merging technology, artificial intelligence with a range of unrestricted experimentation with people trying to come up with this perfect because people think they are God. And you went in that last segment and you mentioned that it is worldview behind it, and I totally agree, but there are many issues that naturally flow out of this that are part of our concern today, ethical, scientific a whole lot more.

But from my perspective, when many of the global elites, which we’ve referenced some, but like the World Economic Forum people, the Bill Gates of the world, the Peter Thiels of the world, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the other big tech billionaires, I’m calling guys, they’re all in there together. If you look what they say, they all have this vision of blending machine and technology with the human body, and they have their vision of how that’s going to work out. They think it’s going to work out for their benefit, but very clearly different worldviews do make a difference. So according to your research, how are the issues of ethics and morality and more regarding in vitro fertilization and its ancillary developments that we’re talking about today, how does that connect to worldview and how is different shaping what is happening?

Patricia Engler:

Certainly, yes. Our beliefs drive our actions including our approach to technology. So it’s a key question. And even though IVF is a new technology, so the Bible doesn’t talk about it directly, what I love is that God’s word does give us this worldview, this view of everything we see in the world that then applies to thinking through the things that IVF touches on like family and procreation and the value of human life. So for example, biblically we understand that God created an orderly world. He called it very good, and every human being is made in God’s image. All living human beings, including embryos, have inherent value that then God our creator defines not us. And when God made humans, he ordained that one flesh marriage union between a husband and wife as the context in which to be fruitful and multiply. So that’s going to be relevant.

Scripture also portrays biological parenthood as a vocational calling and a blessing from God, but it’s not biblically a promise or an entitlement that all adults have. And sadly, especially in our fallen world, we have pain and grief and suffering that everybody deals with. Now, God didn’t leave us without hope, he sent his son and he will reverse the effects of the fallen on that new heaven and earth. So until then, we can seek to alleviate the pain of our fallen world, but we understand that we’re only going to cause more pain if we try to pursue even good goals in ways that go against God’s designs and commands. So that’s some biblical worldview background that’s going to be relevant in contrast to secular worldview assumes there’s no creator who designed us or our kids or marriage or parenthood. So it’s up to humans to just make out what we want to do with all of that.

And the founder of IVF who we talked about in the last segment, Edwards, he illustrated this type of thinking. So he said, this is a quote, it was evolution rather than an arbitrary one-off act of God that bound the transmission of life to the sex act. So this association between sex and procreation in Edward’s view is always open to modification or abandonment. That was his words. So this view of humans and self-creators so we can modify reality to fit our own values, that’s been called expressive individualism. And a legal scholar, o Carter SNE argues that this thinking underlies the IVF practices we see today where voiceless embryos are becoming casualties in the service of adults’ abilities to make choices based on their own wishes. And even when those wishes are for good things, young people, embryos are ended up marginalized in the process. So that’s a little bit of worldview background.

Sam Rohrer:

I think that’s excellent. We could go so much deeper into that. But I want to move into another area because when you consider what you have just said, there must be a number of very relevant ethical issues that arise out of that. In fact, in your article, which people can find@answersingenesis.org on this theme of understanding in vitro fertilization, you identified actually four relevant ethical issues that you determined to be worthy of special consideration. To the extent that we have time, we’ve got about five minutes left in this segment or whatever, can you identify these and explain them to the extent that you can? Why them? Anyways, build them out please.

Patricia Engler:

Sure. So I’ll move kind of quickly here, but the first issue is that IVF destroys countless human embryos as we’ve said. So sometimes that’s intentional, sometimes that’s unintentional. So you have people arguing that, well, the unintentional ones aren’t really different than other normal tragedies like miscarriages. But one of my former ethics professors pointed out that there’s a moral difference between the possibility of natural embryo loss. I’m quoting him here, Matthew, and the intentional use of a technique that will result in embryo loss. And then another difference is that natural reproduction doesn’t actually allow parents or clinicians or AI to selectively destroy certain embryos that don’t meet certain criteria, which unfortunately we see happening a lot. And even if parents do commit out of a love for God in human life to just transfer every single embryo regardless of his or her traits, the overall birth rates, if there are any indication, suggests that over half of embryos end up dying in this process.

And that’s a lot higher risk than most parents would normally willingly subject their existing children to. So it’s just something to consider. Certainly not all couples have been made aware of those risks for embryos, they choose IVF on good faith. And again, this can be a matter of personal conviction in some ways, but it’s just an aspect to think about. Second, then, the technology of IVF affects our view of family and medicine, procreation and parenthood and children. So there’s a Christian ethicist Oliver o’ Donovan, and he explained that IVF encourages people to think in terms of what he contrasted reproduction versus procreation. So procreation recognizes children’s as gifts received from the creator and they don’t belong to parents, they belong to God. But reproduction these kids as manufacturable consumer products that are subject to quality control procedures, which we see going along with a lot of IVF practices today.

And then that leads to the third issue, the commodification of reproduction and of children because today’s fertility industry puts a price tag on every possible aspect of reproduction and even on the  embryos themselves. So an America egg donations can involve many transactions of over a hundred thousand dollars. And I found it crazy that a lot of states also allow IVF clinics to combine donor sperm and eggs into embryos with no prearranged parents. So you’re basically manufacturing orphans. And then clinics can use these orphans as anonymous donor embryos using set prices per embryo. So when research team summarized human embryos have thus also become a tradable commodity, this is a quote, even though ethical guidelines for embryo donations still prohibit the sale of embryos. And then the fourth issue is that IVF embryo selection, especially these practices are inescapably eugenic with the bursts of existing embryos being prevented or promoted based on genetic traits.

And these sorts of selection practices aren’t just on the sidelines of IVF. Instead one journal article quote, states embryo selection is essential in IVF practice for increasing pregnancy rates and reducing the negative effects of repeated failures, end quotes. So these practices end selective abortion. We’re seeing this actually play out in the eugenic context because these are facilitating almost the entire disappearance of kids say with down syndrome in certain countries. And this is just classic eugenics. So that was pretty quick, but those are the four ethical issues I talked about in the article. That’s the destruction of embryos changing our worldview in terms of how we view the family and kids commodifying kids and reproduction, and then bringing in these eugenic mentalities. And the article impacts that in a lot more detail.

Sam Rohrer:

Ladies and John, again, I invite you to encourage you to go and get that interest generous.org. You can find this article. We don’t have much time left here, Patricia, but have you found any real advocates out there in our country as an example that are making the case for why any of these four that you just mentioned is something that ought to be considered? I mean, I haven’t seen very many people talking about it.

Patricia Engler:

Yeah, unfortunately it’s not something that we talk about a lot. We often think that IVF is supposed to be pro baby and a lot of people’s motives are pro baby. But unfortunately in practice you see that it ends up often marginalizing an awful lot of voiceless embryos. So one person who has done a fair bit of work in this area is Katie Faust, who wrote the book then before us, and there’s a whole organization surrounding that. So that organization has done an awful lot in terms of this regard. So that’s one who’s working on it? So yes, we are seeing more signs of people beginning to think and talk and raise awareness about these issues, which is encouraging.

Sam Rohrer:

And ladies and gentlemen, that’s part of the reason we’re doing the program today because this is worthy of consideration and there needs to be discussion about it. But I’m telling you, there’s not very much. Now when we come back, we’re going to conclude by, as we often do, we’re going to go to scripture and we’re going to say right now, what are the biblical guidelines to help a person who fears God to make the right, moral, ethical? Well, as we move into the final segment here today, thanks for being with us. And I would think, and I would hope, and I would encourage you that this program, if you’ve found it interesting, if you’ve tuned in, maybe not caught the whole program, that you could back and listen to it because probably I think it would be safe to say you’ll not find any other discussion out there, certainly not from a biblical perspective that would touch on the things that we’re touching on today.

Again, the full article in the research that my guest Patricia Engler has done, you can find that the website of anters and genesis.org, and again, this program here, you can find it on our website or on our app standing the gap you can get, actually the transcript is available there, so you can take a read it and follow along, listen to it. Very, very helpful and a lot of people do it. I would encourage you to do that as well. Also, as we move into this month here further, if you’ve not written to us this year, please do so. I would encourage you very, very strongly to not only let us know how God is blessing you through this program, but commit to praying with us as a partner and for us also consider a year and gift. Many of you give monthly, and that is a wonderful thing.

You don’t know for those of you’re listening who do that, this program would not be here if you did not do what you did, but we need the help of others in this time. And so I would encourage you to consider that I don’t beg a lot on this program. We don’t make that. I pray to the Lord that he would touch hearts and I would ask that he would do that for you as well. Okay, now, Patricia, we’ve discussed a lot of what I would say really pertinent facts today. Let’s conclude with what we can find in God’s word, which is really the truth that can help to instruct and guide people. And I want to say this very problematic area in our age, which is increasingly God less. So it’s more difficult to find truth in these days because the world has thrown it off. Truth is out the window, truth has fallen in the streets as the Old Testament would talk about. Pragmatism prevails in politics, expediency prevails even from most pulpits. So the word of God is unchanging. In your article, you seven Genesis Truths, I’m going to put it that way, which provide guidance to us not only on this issue, but frankly all issues. Would you begin to walk down through those right now?

Patricia Engler:

Yeah. So these are seven Genesis truths that as you said, apply to thinking biblically about anything and especially technology. So to apply them to IVF, the first truth is that humans are fundamentally created beings, not themselves, creators. We don’t define and create ourselves or our kids ultimately. So this truth affirms what we talked about in the sense of the concept of procreation rather than reproduction. So kids aren’t products that consumers are entitled to just manufacture and store and process and discard. Instead, every single child is God’s own craftsmanship, so belongs to God. So that’s truth one. We are created beings. The second truth is that every human life is costly as bearers of God’s image. So that truth then of course prohibits any use of IVF that intentionally harms or destroys or devalues or just otherwise dehumanizes embryos. And this implies that no embryo should be created apart from the unconditional intention to parent that child.

So then even then, even parents need to consider just the high risks and unequally distributed burdens that the embryos have. And remember that no embryo as a unique image bearer of God should be treated as just a means to an end, and certainly not as a statistically necessary sacrifice for other people’s ambitions. And then third, the truth that humans are not just biological machines and not just kind of disembodied souls, but we’re body soul unity. We have material aspects and immaterial aspects that go together and both matter. And reflecting on this topic of embodiment has led some, not all, but some Christian ethicists to just question how wise it is to just technologically remove procreation from its God-given context of marital intimacy. And then a related but slightly different note is that a scholar I mentioned earlier, O Carter Snead argues that America’s lack of IVF regulation, which I get into more in the article and answer and genesis.org as truths should know about IVF, if you search for those keywords that should pop up, he argues that America’s lack of regulation ignores the fact that humans are embodied and finite, embodied beings, and that as a result, the law not only fails to recognize embryos as bodily human individuals, but also neglect to adequately protect the parents themselves who are vulnerable from the anguish of bodily infertility.

So those are the first three truths we’re created, beings we’re costly, we’re embodied. The fourth is that we’re finite. We depend on something other than ourselves for our existence. A professor I quote in the article says, infertility profoundly brings home the reality that we’re fine and contingent creatures who don’t control all aspects of their lives. And she says, technology cannot compensate for finitude, even though society assumes that it can and kind of encourages parents to try to do so at any cost. But as we see, those costs are really high. So when we remember that we’re contingent beings and we depend on our creator, and that reminds us that our loving creator won’t withhold anything that he knows is right for us and can give us some comfort in that. So then moving on to the fifth and sixth truth, which go together. The fifth is that God made us as relational beings designed for relationship for him with himself and others.

And that goes in with the sixth truth, which is that God called us to certain vocations that go along with those relationships. So things like parenting and marriage are specifically human callings all throughout scripture. Not that every single human being is called to those, but the fact that they are callings and relationships are so important reminds us that we need to consider how any application of technology, including IVF, could be affecting our relationships and vocations, marriage and parenthood, and these effects can vary by the situation, but we are seeing IVF change the landscape of what family looks like in such cases. One author, for example, notes that practices like donating sperm contribute to more kids just coming into what she calls a family, nomads, no man’s land that deliberately imposes a foreign origin on a child, which he says will be a great challenge to overcome.

So just thinking about how it affects our relationships and vocations. So those are five and six and then seven. The last truth is that humans, sadly, we’re broken because of sin. We live in this fallen world. There’s grief and there’s suffering. We want to apply technology to try to mitigate these effects of suffering, but only in ways that go along within work, within the creation boundaries that God gave us. So I really like kind of to summarize what the Southern Baptist Convention said in their resolution regarding IV Fs. They’re another example of an organization that has been thinking about this issue. They conclude we grieve alongside couples who have been diagnosed with infertility. We affirm their godly desire for children, and we encourage them to consider the ethical implications of assisted reproductive technologies as they look to God for hope, grace, and wisdom amidst suffering. So those are seven truths that apply to thinking through IVF and any technology

Sam Rohrer:

CIA excellently done. And we just have about a minute left here, so I’m going to take and wrap it up here. Ladies and gentlemen, again, you can find this entire article. I encourage you to do that interest and generous.org. And again, just put, like Patricia said, key keyword of IVF or whatever you’ll find that. But ladies and gentlemen, doesn’t it make you think when we talk about these things of a combination of a couple of things, all throughout the history of this world, the devil has sought to subvert God’s plan. Beginning right there in the beginning of Genesis, the Lord had to destroy the earth because it became so evil. And there was a lot of this type of thing with fallen angels enter, marrying with mankind and trying to disturb God’s plan. And then the Tower of Babel came and they still didn’t want to do what God said, and God had to disperse them.

And he said, if I don’t disperse them, they have the ability to do whatever it is they set their mind to do, and God stepped in these days in which we live. The scripture also says that these kinds of things that we’re seeing a complete turning against the God of heaven will result in unbelievable developments and does it involved in the things we’re talking about to some degree, but I’d leave it there. But God’s word holds the answer. And one day soon, the Lord’s going to come back. One day we’ll be with him. Sin will be done my way with and all will be made right. Patricia Engler, thanks for being with me today. God bless you for all the work that you do. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. Again, share this program with a friend. Listen to it again, and stand in the gap for truth as God gives.