Writing for the Catholic News Agency, Tyler Arnold brings the alarming report that “the [IVF] industry’s death toll for preborn life is likely higher than that of abortion.” While I share many of his concerns — not surprisingly, given that both of us are Catholics who accept Church teaching on this subject — I would be careful about this comparison.
Arnold first calculates that IVF clinics create seven to eight embryos per patient. He continues:
The CDC estimates that more than 238,000 patients attempted IVF in 2021. If clinics created between seven and eight embryos for every patient, that would yield about 1.6 million to 1.9 million over a year. Despite these high numbers, fewer than 100,000 embryos were brought to term, which suggests that somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million embryos created through IVF were never born.
The substantial majority of embryos were either intentionally killed or died at some point in the IVF process.
It’s that phrase at the end, “either intentionally killed or died,” that I think needs unpacking.
The vast majority of abortions are undertaken with the intention to kill the unborn child: Its death is both means and end. The intention to end the existence of a living human organism is also present whenever human embryos created through IVF are “discarded.” But it is not present in these three other cases: when an embryo created through IVF is frozen rather than implanted; when such an embryo fails to implant; or when an embryo or fetus created through IVF miscarries. Those three types of case may well raise objections or concerns for reasons other than violating the norm against intentional killing. But the gravity of any injustice involved is different, and lesser, than that of deliberately ending nascent human lives, and pro-lifers ought to keep track of the distinction.
P.S. Do read this Atlantic article on the much-misunderstood, and often-misrepresented, Alabama case:
The kind of scenario that unfolded in the clinic in question, with an unauthorized individual walking through the facility and handling frozen embryos, is obviously not how the IVF industry generally seeks to operate. It is precisely the kind of breakdown of standards that laws against negligence exist to address, and which calls for greater industry regulation more generally. But instead, and in response to the widespread distortions of the case in the national media and to threats from clinics in the state to stop providing IVF treatments, the state legislature exempted the industry from (and thereby denied the families it serves) even the basic consumer protections available in every other domain, let alone the sorts of guardrails that should be available when vulnerable parents and children are involved.