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| Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra. Photo from Chopra's Instagram |
Horse-wrangling a baby into the world is one way of describing the work of the fertility industry, which is sucessfully promoting its technologies at a time when society otherwise cries out for nature to be respected to the utmost degree.
There is the physical and mental torture that women must endure in in vitro fertilisation (IVF), but also the health impact on the children arriving in this way.
The ways in which IVF is an attack on a woman's body are made clear for us in Kourtney Kardashian's confessions on the most recent episode of The Kardashians. She said medication as part of her IVF treatment 'basically put me into depression'. She added:
'I think because I'm so clean and careful about what I put into my body, it's just like having the complete opposite reaction and working as a contraceptive instead of helping us.'
'I have everything in the world to be happy about. I just feel a little bit off and not like myself. Super moody and hormonal, like I am a lunatic half the time.'
The article goes on to explain:
IVF is usually used by women or couples who are struggling to conceive naturally, and it involves the retrieval of eggs from the ovaries, which are then fertilized by sperm in a lab, before being transferred into the uterus.
Many women who are preparing to undergo IVF will be given one or more forms of fertility drug by their doctor, which are used to trigger the release of hormones that then stimulate egg production.
As well as the destruction of unused human embryos, a scientific journal lays out the dangers to women:
There are a number of potential risks to women who conceive through in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Among these, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and multiple pregnancies are the most serious. Other potential risks include increased levels of anxiety and depression, ovarian torsion, ectopic pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, placenta praevia, placental separation and increased risk of cesarean section.
Another article reports how unserious this manner of having a baby can be, given the self-centred mentality so apparent in society:
Last year, Kourtney confessed on Ellen DeGeneres' YouTube show Lady Parts that she was peer pressured into the freezing eggs procedure before turning 40.
She explained: 'I froze mine too. Hopefully they're sitting there okay. Just for... you never know. I really got talked into it.
'I was like, "Okay whatever, I'll do it one time. Since everyone else is doing it I might as well."
'Everyone's doing it. I believe I was 39. Top notch, top tier. I think it gave me a feeling of, like, taking a deep breath. You know I was 39 and I was about to turn 40 and everyone was like, "If you're going to do it, you've gotta do it now."
'So I was like, "Okay everyone, stop rushing me. I don't even know if I want to have another kid or if that's like in the future or whatever."
Meanwhile, children are affected by this technological process. A study has found that children born after IVF treatments have a greater chance of certain health problems. A newpaper report of the study states:
Children conceived from parents who used infertility treatments may be at an increased risk of developing asthma, eczema or having allergies, a new United States study finds.
Researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that the treatments have been growing in prevalence in recent years may be leaving the child vulnerable.
Children who are conceived after the use of the treatment are 77 percent more likely to suffer from eczema, at a 30 percent increase risk of asthma, and are 45 percent more likely to require a prescriptions allergy medication in their youth.
The mechanism causing this phenomena could not be determined by the NIH research team, but they are calling for further investigation into potential links between the treatment and these types of conditions.
Background to the study included these points:
These types of treatments are gaining popularity around the U.S., making the findings of the NIH have wide reaching effects on Americans.
According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2018, around a third of U.S. adults had either used themselves or know someone that used the treatment. Nearly half of college educated adults, and half of those that makes $75,000 per year or more, also reported using or knowing someone that had used the treatment.
The researchers, who published their findings last week in Human Reproduction, gathered data from 5,000 mothers and 6,000 children that were born from 2008 to 2010.
The mothers were surveyed on whether they used the treatment before, their own health and the health of their children.
'Specifically, we saw that children conceived with infertility treatments – including in vitro fertilization, taking drugs that stimulate ovulation, and undergoing procedures that insert sperm into the uterus – were more likely to have at least 2 reports of wheeze by age 3, which is considered a potential indication of asthma early on,' Dr Edwina Yeung, a researcher at the NIH, told DailyMail.com in an email.
'When we followed these kids to about seven to nine years of age we found children conceived with these treatments were more likely to have asthma, eczema or have a prescription for allergy medication.'
In a similar fashion to the above, the news that Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas have had a baby through surrogacy was widely featured when news broke in January. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong reported:
According to multiple reports the couple decided to opt for a surrogate because their busy work schedules were interrupting their family planning. It is reported that the actress does not have fertility issues, but it was difficult for them to plan to be together when she could conceive.
It was also reported that Chopra, who is 39, had been involved in a film in London while Jonas was living at their home in Los Angeles.
The SCMP also reported that in an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, Chopra had said the couple wanted a family and “by God’s grace, when it happens, it happens”.
It's a shame that the couple did not hold steady to that sentiment, for the reason that, as with IVF, surrogacy is a dehumanizing and unnatural business that represents a renunciation of the created order. Employing technologies of various kinds to achieve a child is a distortion of the curative purpose that health care and medical intervention rightly pursue.
Barton Gingerich is an Anglican pastor in Virginia with a concern at the 21st-century’s rapid submission to the customs bred from a Brave New World mindset. He writes:
Obviously, surrogacy finds itself on the fast-track to normalcy (at least among those who can afford it). Only a few years ago, the promises of the fertility industry were the stuff of science fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety. To implant donated sperm and eggs into another woman’s womb and for her to carry the baby to term would strike previous generations as deeply unnatural—which it is.
And surrogacy is a business. Although some generous souls do voluntarily offer to carry someone else’s child, the vast majority of these birth mothers are paid for their services. There’s big money to be had in fulfilling the primal paternal and maternal desires of parents who cannot conceive or, more sinisterly, refuse to suffer the burdens of childbearing but still desire offspring. To the shallow and well-resourced, surrogacy can ensure ease of life and a pre-natal Hollywood body for the wife. Let someone else deal with the wear-and-tear of pregnancy, just pay someone to bear the child. It’s not difficult to see how this could become incredibly popular in materialistic, immoral cultures, with the wealthy offloading the burden of childbearing upon the poor.
Gingerich supports the view that surrogacy dehumanizes both women and children:
Laying aside the immense confusion of who the real mother of a surrogate child truly is, separating a woman from an infant she carried in her womb for around nine months is traumatic and exploitative. Surrogacy turns the woman’s womb into a rented space. Couples that opt for surrogacy simply because they renounce pregnancy do themselves dishonor by revoking their own created nature—a God-given order that governs our flesh and our shared human life.
As for children, they aren’t products—they are sacred gifts of the Creator who opens and closes the womb. In terms of our own conception and gestation, we are begotten, not merely made. When God closes the womb, the right response is not to seek unnatural means.
Of course, children resulting from surrogacy are still of sacred worth and full human dignity, to be cherished by God and men, just like those that were conceived in other bad circumstances, including rape, adultery, incest, and so forth.
Likewise, surrogacy is not the same as adoption. Adoption pivots on pre-existing children who are orphaned or in a deeply broken situation in need of love and care. Surrogacy is about producing children to suit desires. Finally, there is no proof-text verse against surrogacy, just like there isn’t one for insurance fraud or cybercrime. It’s still wrong because it violates clear Biblical principles, particularly the sacred bond that exists among father, mother, and child—a bond God created, ordained, and blessed.
A potent conclusion offers food for thought:
To put things more clearly, women are not incubators. Children are not products. Despite all our pride in our enlightened “progressive” society, we still haven’t learned that the human body is not for sale. Christian ethicists have been sounding the alarm on this issue for decades now, and they will continue to do so in the future.
Ironically, the chaotic moral hellscape of The Handmaid’s Tale may arise, not from patriarchal, religious right-wingers who prize traditional moral values, but from wealthy Hollywood elites and, eventually, aspirational suburban couples who want babies but without suffering and sacrifice.
Carrying and protecting an unborn baby does entail sacrifice, but that sacrifice lays the foundation for a family in which suffering is inevitable, but where an upwelling of love is achieved through the perserverance already learned.
Already we are seeing in the WEIRD world the use of IVF and surrogacy of various kinds by single men and women, as well as homosexual couples, with donors providing the means to achieve a child. The use of technology may ensure the satisfaction of "parental" desires, but it also leaves the child with the deep-felt urge to plead: "But tell me who my real mother/father is!"
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