On the personal level, a woman undergoing in vitro fertilization allows her body to be manipulated like a machine. Reproduction, which is supposed to be a beautiful act of love, becomes a mechanical act of fertilization.

On the social level, reproduction and its “product” (children) become a commodity to be bought and sold. We start to see family as a material right (like our i-phones, ipods, laptops, etc) rather than as a calling to love.

Are you scoffing? Perhaps an insider’s look into the professional medical community would help. A professional Ob-Gyn journal ran the following two ads:

Embryos piling up? Let us take care of your embryo storage needs.

These fertilized ovum are tiny human beings. Are they being loved? No – they have become a storage problem. How about this one?

Who’s watching the kids? Cryolert tank alarms offer true peace of mind, safeguarding your priceless biologicals.”

Now these children are “priceless biologicals.”

Dr. Hilgers briefly discussed these ads at the NaPro TECHNOLOGY conference I attended last Saturday. His comment was that doctors can now look at these ads without batting an eye. “Our profession has become awfully cold-hearted.”

It is no secret that most medical professionals and many people in the culture at large do not see fertilized ovum as human beings. What is less known is that abortion is not the only cause of this callous redefinition of human personhood. In vitro fertilization has done a lot of damage to our capacity to keep love and life united.

[ad#seasonal]

Related Links:

• Do you know of good links related to this post? Let me know by leaving a comment!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

There is one group thinking outside of the box (to borrow a cliche). This past weekend my wife and I attended a conference on NaPro TECHNOLOGY put on by Dr. Thomas Hilgers. While I was already aware of NaPro TECHNOLOGY and the Pope Paul VI institute, Dr. Hilgers opened our eyes to the difference between our culture’s twisted view of woman’s health and what true science can do for women.

For example, popular “scientific wisdom” claims that natural progesterone does nothing to help women suffering from PMS, post-partum depression or pre-menopause symptoms. The studies that led to this conclusion treated all of the women in the experimental group as if their cycles were the same length. Treating all women’s cycles the same resulted in an indiscriminate administration of progesterone. If progesterone is introduced into a woman who does not need it at this point in her cycle, the result is to negate the effect of all progesterone in her cycle, perhaps making her symptoms even worse.

The Pope Paul VI institute performed a study that targeted the administration of progesterone to each woman’s individual cycle. They found that supplementing the woman’s own progesterone production resulted in marked improvements in symptoms for PMS, post-partum depression and pre-menopause. I find it ironic that natural family planning used to be criticized for assuming that all women had similar cycles. Now natural family planning is the only woman’s health movement that treats women as individuals.

Another example of the lack of woman’s health in accepted medical practice is the difference in reported cases of endometriosis. In vitro fertilization clinics report that about five percent of women seeking fertility treatments have endometriosis. However, scientific surveys found that around 80% of women suffering from infertility had endometriosis. Why the great difference? In vitro fertilization clinics don’t even screen for endometriosis. In fact, most causes of infertility go undiagnosed because Ob-Gyn doctors prefer to offer hyper-ovulation drugs or refer their patients to in vitro fertilization clinics. After all, in vitro fertilization makes identifying and treating actual problems in the fertility system unnecessary. This is not woman’s health. It is circumventing true health for the sake of a quick solution.

The pill is often given for “medical reasons.” However, there have been only two scientific studies on the use of the pill to treat problems in a woman’s cycle. Therapeutic use of the pill is all “off-label.” Typically the therapeutic value of chemical contraception comes from shutting down the fertility system, which gets rid of the symptoms but does nothing to address the underlying problem. Again, this is not woman’s health but circumventing true health for the sake of a convenient quick fix.

Contraception and abortion are considered by “accepted medical practice” as woman’s health because they prevent the birth of a child. Preventing childbirth has nothing to do with health. In fact, it is contrary to the natural and healthy function of the fertility system. Natural family planning is able to help women plan their families without doing damage to fertility or to human life. It is also helps trained medical professionals to diagnose possible causes of infertility and recommend a course of treatment, ranging from simple hormone supplements to reconstructive surgery. These treatments have success rates over 80%, resulting in actual reproductive health. In contrast, in vitro fertilization and hyper-ovulation drugs have success rates under 25% – much lower even than success rates of unrefined treatments used before 1970.

Pharmacists that won’t dispense contraception and doctors that refuse to perform abortions are accused of denying reproductive health to women. Actually, our culture’s obsession with sex without consequences is the true culprit.

[ad#seasonal]

Related Links:

• Do you know of good links related to this post? Let me know by leaving a comment!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A Dublin Supreme Court recently ruled that at least one class of human beings don’t have human rights.

Irish Court Refuses Woman’s Plea for Her Own Frozen Embryos

In Roche v. Roche, a woman sued her now-estranged husband for refusing to let her use their embryos; the man said he does not want to father any more children. The woman argued that the protection offered in the Irish Constitution to the unborn child included embryos, but the High Court ruled that the three frozen embryos in question are not to be given the rights of unborn children, because they are outside the womb.

The embryos in question came to life during an in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure. They were the three “remaining” embryos from the process that resulted in the birth of their daughter. The woman’s husband had signed a contract saying that he agreed to be a father to any children produced through the IVF process. Now that the couple is separated, the father states that he does not want to be a father to any more children born by the process.

Three months later, the couple separated, and the woman asked for custody of her three remaining embryos. However, her husband argued that the visit to the IVF clinic was purely for “one more go” at a second child, and he does not want to act as father to the embryos, in the event that the implantation were successful.

“I have a right to say no. It is my human right,” he said.

The woman persisted in her desire to carry her own children to term. “These embryos constituted human life, I treat them as our children,” she said. “That is how our daughter came into the world.”

The bad news for this man is that he is already a father. These fertilized embryos are already living human persons. He is already a father to all six embryos (including the two that died during the first implantation). He may not be legally bound to pay childcare for them, but he is their father nonetheless.

Both the father of these children and the Supreme Court have made the assumption that these embryonic human beings are not human persons. What makes them different from unborn children who are protected by the law? Location. The fact that these tiny human babies are located outside of a mother’s womb is the only criteria the Supreme Court gave for their ruling that they did not deserve human rights.

Illogical? You bet. The same kind of illogic that continues to deprive unborn babies in the womb of human rights in the United States and most of Europe. Ireland is catching on. It won’t be long before they’re as pro-death as the rest of us.

Please pray.

[ad#seasonal]

End Notes

Gilbert, Kathleen. “Irish Courts Refuses Woman’s Plea for Her Own Frozen Embryos.” Lifesite News. [www] 9 October 2008. Available http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/oct/08100904.html.

¹ Please note the sarcasm with which this statement is intended. I certainly hope that Ireland not only stays well behind the developing Culture of Death in the United States and Europe, but that they actually retreat back to the Culture of Life and become a light unto the nations.

Related Links:

• Do you know of good links related to this post? Let me know by leaving a comment!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Frozen embryos better than fresh, study shows – Telegraph

Using frozen instead of fresh embryos produces healthier babies, a new study shows.

What caught my eye right away is the equation of embryos with produce – would you like frozen or fresh? The article quotes Dr. Anja Pinborg, from the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet:

“We think the reason for the differences is probably positive selection of the embryos for frozen embryo replacement.

“Only the very top quality embryos survive the freezing and thawing process.

“And you only get pregnancies in patients with lots of good embryos to freeze.”

Embryos – living human beings in the earliest stages of life – are treated exactly as products, and not only through language. If only the top quality embryos are chosen for implantation, this means that the inferior embryos are destroyed. Rejoicing that invitro fertilization results in healthier babies is the same as rejoicing that fewer babies are born with birth defects because babies with birth defects are killed before they can be born.

The Church’s teaching on invitro fertilization, artificial insemination and other new birth technologies preserves the dignity of the human person and ensures that babies are conceived in love. That’s something to celebrate.

Thanks to Wendy Wiese on Relevant Radio for bringing this story to our attention on Morning Air

Related Links:

• Do you know of good links related to this post? Let me know by leaving a comment!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Moral liberals and “we should do it just to prove that we can” scientists really need to read and watch more science fiction. Science fiction has the power to reveal the logical consequences of our moral choices in a stark and disturbing way. As a genre it dares to ask the question, “What if,” and then to explore the good and the evil that could come from certain choices that we make.

I just watched the movie The Island. In this movie, therapeutic cloning has become standard practice, though only available for the rich. Clones are created as fully grown human beings, but their minds are kept docile through a series of genetic alterations and brainwashing techniques. They are mentally kept in an almost childlike state, until an “error” enables some of them to start asking questions about their fabricated existence. The hope and dream of these clones in their fabricated world is to win the lottery that will allow them to retire to “The Island,” supposedly the last place on earth not contaminated by a rampant and deadly virus. However, instead of going to The Island, the clones are taken to the operating room where their body parts are harvested and transplanted into their “sponsors.”

When two of the clones discover the truth and escape, a high-tech manhunt ensues. The remaining clones with the same defect as the two escaped clones are scheduled for termination. One scene of the termination being carried out is very much like an abortion – “unborn” clones are cut out of their artificial wombs and left to die on the floor. Clones that have been born but have not finished their mental programming are killed by lethal injection, very much like euthanasia or capital punishment. The clones who had been living their lives inside the institution all “win the lottery” and are ushered into an incinerator – very reminiscent of death camps. The tone of the movie obviously invokes the horror of each act; the killing of each human being is murder no matter what stage of development. The clones are called products and they are “owned” by those who paid for their creation (basically their older twin siblings). The head of the company even remarks to the protagonist, “I brought you into this world. I can take you out.” The cliché never fit so well.

In the end, the hit man who was hired to seek and destroy the two escaped clones comes to realize that the clones are really human beings whose human rights and dignity have been taken away by nothing more than a trick of language.

The company keeps a safe public image by advertising their process as the creation of a subhuman biological entity that is kept in a vegetative state. By the end of the movie, it is pretty obvious that even if their spin had been true, creating human life and destroying it for the scavenging of body parts would still be evil.

Talk of therapeutic cloning has gone down in the media. However, the specter is still out there. What horrors will we visit on our fellow human beings just because we think we have usurped the power to create them? Perhaps it’s not too late for the necessary moral dialogue to take place to keep us from such evil. Perhaps science fiction has an important role to play in this dialogue.

The Island is a good movie as a whole, but it does contain violent scenes and the wrong attitude about sex (though no actual nudity). Rated PG-13, but I would recommend it only for older teens and adults. The USCCB also rates it A-III (adults) for action violence, scattered profanity, rough and crude language, mild sexual encounter and innuendo, an irreligious comment, a birth scene and nonexplicit urination scenes.

Related Links:

• Do you know of good links related to this post? Let me know by leaving a comment!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.