Can I Do IVF?

What to consider before you decide

At Them Before Us, we get this question often: “Can I do IVF?”

We understand why you would ask. Maybe you’ve heard the stories about millions of embryos perpetually frozen and abandoned in storage facilities around the world. Or perhaps, the process of being told you can pick your ideal eye color or gender makes you uneasy. It might also be the thought of supporting a technology that could be used to eliminate any embryo with the possibility of an “inconvenient” disease or condition that has caused you to pause and seek counsel. Mentally, you add all that up and land with us here, wanting advice (and maybe permission) to use IVF guilt-free.

So, to the question, “Can I do IVF?”

We will answer this first and foremost as Them Before Us, a children’s rights organization, specifically advocating for a child’s right to her mother and father. While our entire staff holds Christian beliefs, we do not use faith to justify our position. We believe a child's right to his mother and father is a natural right because it preexists government and demands recognition regardless of faith background.

From this perspective, we must be honest, it is incredibly difficult (nearly impossible) to go through the IVF process as it is practiced today and avoid putting a child at risk of losing their right to life or their right to be raised by their mother and father.

If your IVF process involves any of the following, it unquestionably violates the rights of the child:

• The intentional destruction of embryos

• The freezing of embryos at any point in the process

• Third-party purchase of sperm or eggs

• The use of a surrogate of any kind (commercial or “altruistic”)

• Screening embryos for disease, disability, sex, or superficial characteristics (eye color, IQ, and whatever else may become available in the years to come)

The actions listed above are never justified, no matter how deeply you long to become a parent. You must remember, this isn’t about whether you want a child. It’s about whether you’re willing to protect that child’s rights from the very beginning.

We will not rule out the fact that a very narrow path through IVF that does not violate a child's rights could be possible. But even then you must recognize that taking that path may involve posing additional unnatural risks, to the child’s health, the mother’s well-being, and the parent-child relationship. Like any risk to a child, those must be minimized with seriousness and clarity. The discussion of risk and rights must also occur alongside serious consideration of alternate pathways that do not present any of these challenges.

At this point, the Them Before Us position can be summarized in this way:

• Some practices are always wrong, red lines cannot be crossed.

• Some practices unnaturally increase risk (would not be introduced except for doing IVF), and as a result must be considered with extreme caution.

• There are other methods that are less risky, more ethical, and more effective paths to parenthood that should be more widely known and supported.

Let’s expand on each of these one at a time.