Links to all blog entries related to In vitro Fertilization found here.
IVF – be informed
-for a brief description of IVF.
IVF – Organ Donation – Asking Difficult Questions
-encouragement to ask difficult questions about IVF, especially if the questions challenge the path we our our loved ones have already travelled.
What If You Did Not Know?
-a posting that tries to help us to deal with these sensitive questions compassionately.
The definition of personhood, or how we define a person, is important when considering IVF.
Personhood – What is it?
-to have personhood, is to have the intrinsic value of a human being with all the rights and responsibilities that go along with being human.
Personhood – The Most Important Question Today
-in IVF, many tiny growing fertilized eggs end up dying, being left to die, or are killed. Like the fetus in abortion, these are tiny growing human bodies. Are these tiny bodies persons, or do they become persons with souls at some later date?
Personhood – Conception and the Soul
-when does a pre-born baby take on the status of a person? This is an important question when considering IVF.
More on IVF.
IVF – Strength from Weakness or Weakness from Strength?
-God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty,,,IVF doctors likely choose the fertilized eggs that they think appear the strongest….Is it possible, within God’s design, that man’s choice of the embryo that appears the strongest does not achieve the best result?
IVF – Birth Control Connections
-the challenge is this. If I am willing to accept some forms of birth control, do I have any right to challenge the use of IVF? How can we plan small families by preventing conception and then say, after we have our desired family, that a couple unable to have any children should not try IVF?…In what ways are IVF and birth control similar?…To what extent does birth control fight against the Lord’s blessing?…To what extent does IVF struggle against the blessing of the Lord?
IVF – More than Husband, Wife & God
-compare natural procreation to IVF….in the normal way of procreation, that God has designed, the husband leads his wife, who, out of love, submits to his loving advances and opens herself to him and they share an intimate sexual union….In IVF there is more than husband, wife and God…the husband, with his body, does what another person tells him to…the husband allows the other person to take control of the wife and, in a sense, the wife submits her body to the other person.
IVF – And the Image of God
-The oneness of husband and wife is expressed through sexual union. Within the oneness of this relationship, there is a reflection of God. They are to be fruitful and multiply. God creates. They procreate. This, also, reflects something of God….Does IVF work at separating the “one flesh” relationship that God created in His image?….Does it also commit the image of God, that is conceived, to an unnaturally hostile beginning?
IVF – Possible Where Abortion Accepted
-How is it possible for a doctors to arrive at the point where they would be willing to involve themselves in destruction of tiny human beings?
IVF – Babies’ Hostile Beginnings
-the child is made in a glass container along with many siblings in a hostile chemical soup (I say hostile because most of the child’s siblings will begin life, to die shortly after or even to be discarded and die, or to be suspended frozen in liquid nitrogen.)
IVF – Complications & Birth Defects
-until recently, whether IVF was associated with a higher incident of birth defects was controversial. Now in 2012, the jury is in….The increased risks were 1.18 to 2.49 times more likely as then in normal births. One can argue that these risks are low but should we be trying so hard to have babies using IVF when we know that it puts mothers and our children at increased risk?
Footnoted Essay about IVF
Book – Questioning Medical Technologies: Organ Donation & IVF
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All blog entries in Category – InVitroFertilization