NC Family Staff | September 7, 2024 | SHARE: 
As news outlets are broadcasting the dangers of America’s falling fertility rate, couples are having a harder time having children. Many are turning to IVF for help, but this is not the perfect solution that some profess. It is very costly, it isn’t always effective, and many people (such as Katy Faust) are highlighting some ethical concerns regarding the process. So where else can couples struggling with infertility look?
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Stephanie Gray Connors, author of the book Conceived by Science: Thinking Carefully and Compassionately about Infertility and IVF, to discuss alternatives to IVF for couples experiencing infertility.
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ADAMO MANFRA: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Filling in for Traci this week, this is Adamo Manfra, Director of Research and Education at NC Family. Today, an increasing number of couples are facing the challenge of infertility. As many as one in seven or eight couples carry this painful cross. Reproductive technologies offer opportunities for hope to these couples. The most well-known of these is IVF, or in vitro fertilization. The topic even became a national political conversation earlier this year after a case in Alabama that sparked national debate about how to regulate what is currently a wholly unregulated industry. How should we, though, as believers, consider this issue? We are grateful for today’s guest, who is one of the most seasoned international speakers on pro-life and bioethical issues related to the dignity of human life. She is also the author of the book Conceived by Science: Thinking Carefully and Compassionately About Infertility and IVF. She joins us today to help us do just that. Stephanie Gray Connors, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Thank you for having me on.
ADAMO MANFRA: Well, let’s jump right in. As we mentioned, there are multiple approaches when it comes to medical assistance with infertility issues. Perhaps our listeners have heard of NaProTechnology or restorative reproductive medicine, and certainly over the last several months, IVF has been given a lot of attention. Can you help us understand some of the distinctions here?
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Sure. So basically, in responding to infertility, there’s kind of two categories of approaches. One would be identify the underlying problem or pathology and try to correct that. The second approach would be to just bypass it entirely. So, the corrective approach would be to say, Are you not getting pregnant because you have endometriosis? Let’s do surgery. Are you not getting pregnant because you have PCOS, and it’s difficult maybe for those eggs to be released from that hard, leathery skin over the ovary? Let’s do surgery there too. Friends of mine had a what’s called wedge resection surgery, where a wedge was cut out of her ovary because she had PCOS, so that eggs could be released, so that when the couple was sexually intimate, they’d increase the odds of conception occurring. And indeed, a year later, they got pregnant, and have since had at least four children, as well as a couple miscarriages. Restorative reproductive medicine also involves saying, Is there something wrong hormonally? That was my situation, where I wasn’t producing enough progesterone in my body, which is needed to sustain pregnancy. And so, you just get a prescription, and a doctor advises you to take progesterone at a certain frequency. In my case, it was daily in order to maintain a pregnancy. So restorative reproductive medicine, NaProTechnology is saying, what’s wrong and how can we fix it? In vitro fertilization says, Let’s just make a baby in a lab instead of correcting the underlying problem and you making a baby through sexual inmates. So, then it involves getting the parts, the sperm, the egg, and putting them together by a third party at an in vitro clinic.
ADAMO MANFRA: Okay, so then, when it comes to IVF specifically, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what that really is, what’s the process there?
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: You basically get eggs from a woman, typically many eggs at a time, and a woman naturally would only release one, maybe two eggs. [There are types] of drugs that would cause a super ovulation, where many eggs are released at once, sometimes 5, 10, 15, even 20, maybe even more. And then a sperm sample is retrieved, and then both of these are either taken to the lab or retrieved in the lab. And then the IVF specialist would then take the sperm and take the eggs, put them together in a petri dish. And that’s why in vitro fertilization is really Latin for in glass. So, then the sperm and egg are put together in a glass petri dish, and then when embryos form, those embryos are then typically evaluated for genetic fitness, and then some may be frozen, some may be implanted within a couple days, and some may be destroyed right away.
ADAMO MANFRA: Wow. That’s definitely a different kind of process. So, we do want to think, as your subtitle alludes, think about this compassionately and carefully. So, let’s think about why someone might be inclined to pursue IVF. And I know you mentioned earlier, you alluded to some challenges you faced in your own journey towards motherhood.
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Sure, yeah, we have to understand someone might pursue IVF because of the very natural and good desire to have children. In my book, I analogize it to the natural and good desire to get married, and I say the example of in China, there is such a male and female imbalance because of the one child policy that lasted decades in a culture that prefers male children, has resulted in, I think it’s 30 to 40 million more men in China than women. And the desire for a spouse is good, but you have a country now where it’s difficult for men to find a spouse, and some people are responding to that good desire in an unethical way by pursuing human trafficking and basically getting into the market of buying and selling women and forcing them to be wives. And we would say, Wow, the desire for a spouse is good, but human trafficking to solve that desire is not good, and so in the same way, someone might pursue IVF, because the desire for a child is good. But that’s where, by looking at this analogy, we have to pause and say, Wait, what am I doing to achieve that child, to get that child? Am I, in a sense, marketing in the creation of offspring? Am I contracting out my marital engagement of sexual intimacy that could create a child at the pinnacle of sexual intimacy, am I contracting that out to a third party to make a baby, to manufacture offspring for me? And there’s other elements to consider people, that aren’t even in a marital relationship who are pursuing IVF, you know, same sex couples, for example. So, the desire for a child is good, but we have to ask, Is how am I pursuing that unethical response? And I certainly can say both situations, this desire for spouse and the desire for children, are something that I had to struggle with. I didn’t get married until I was 40, and I have journals to Jesus since I was in my twenties desiring a spouse, and it didn’t work out for me until I was 40 to meet the man that I love, and then getting pregnant was something that came easily, but sustaining pregnancies was something that did not come easily. And of my six children, four are in heaven because I miscarried them, and my body just has a difficult time maintaining pregnancies. So although I can’t relate to the difficulty in conceiving, I can certainly relate to the difficulty in maintaining a pregnancy, and therefore that deep sorrow of not being able to hold in your arms a child you desperately wanted. In my case, it was four children who existed for a very short time. In other people’s cases, it’s children that they have never been able to see come into existence because they can’t even get pregnant.
ADAMO MANFRA: Well, this is certainly a sensitive and heartfelt issue for mothers and couples to struggle with, and you started to allude to some of the concerns with approaching or addressing this challenge and this cross but particularly the national conversations tend to center around policy or legislation or regulation. But what should we as believers be bringing to this consideration and conversation to really assess it from a Biblical worldview?
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Yeah, you know, I often say public opinion will inform public policy. And so, what is public opinion on IVF? And I think because people desire children, there’s a general support for Wow, we ought to help couples achieve this. And what we need to insert into that conversation is the question of, how are we achieving that? What is involved? And so, some of the problems with IVF are, first of all, it involves ending some lives in order to create others. So, as I mentioned, because you’ll harvest many eggs, and those eggs will typically get fertilized, you could create 10, 15, or 20 children at one time. Well, no woman’s body can have that many embryos inserted into her. So, when only one or two embryos will be inserted in her. Let’s say a woman has 20 children made, two inserted, that leaves 18 human children who are now in existence. What do we do with them? Well, in the world of IVF, a whole bunch of them get destroyed because they aren’t considered genetically fit enough for insertion. In other cases, if they are considered genetically fit enough, but you can only insert a couple at a time, then they’re put in a freezer, and they could be frozen for a year, multiple years, a decade or more. Sometimes they’re never taken out of the freezer. Couples may have good plans to go back for their children in the freezer, but what if something happens and a woman needs a hysterectomy after her first pregnancy and can never go back to retrieve the children in the freezer? So those are some problems with IVF. Another problem that we need to insert into this conversation on policy is, do we have a right to manufacture human beings? You know, if we think, why is slavery wrong? Well, it’s wrong because it involves possessing another human, being superior over someone we consider inferior, and claiming a right to another party. And although the desire for a child is good, the very nature of IVF involves a superior and inferior relationship where we are manufacturing, possessing, and essentially owning someone and doing with them things that can be quite terrible, as I just described, you know, subjecting a human to a freezer as an example. So, the question we want to ask is, how ought human beings come into existence? Are we objects or subjects? If we’re subjects, then we ought to come into differently than objects do. Objects are manufactured. They’re made multiple different people can work in an assembly line at a car plant, but who should be involved in the creation of a subject, not an object? Wouldn’t it be the parents who have been tasked, from a biblical perspective by God, to engage in sexual intimacy, that through their unitive act of sexual intimacy, has the possibility of the procreative act of new life coming into existence at the fruit of their marital love expressed through sexual intimacy, where the child comes into existence beneath the mother’s heart. That’s very different from IVF, where the child comes into existence not beneath the mom’s heart or even at the hands of the husband and wife, but at the hands of a stranger in a lab. And so you’re manufacturing someone instead of receiving them through sexual intimacy with one’s spouse.
ADAMO MANFRA: Well, that is, just even having to talk about going back to the freezer is itself, just, you feel the artificiality there. That is shocking. So, I think the instinct would be, right, in our community, that we’re pro-life. We love babies, we, I mean, we just cherish those small, little humans. I have three at home, and how do we wrestle with that sense that we’re pro-life, we want babies, but maybe not IVF, and I know you’ve touched on this, but certainly there is some amount of hope that we can still bring to that couple that’s struggling with the cross of infertility and honors our love of babies, but also sort of wrestles with honestly, carefully, and compassionately these considerations that you brought up.
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Sure, so we as the pro-life movement, do love babies. Our love of babies and our love of life doesn’t mean we support in principle every way to create a baby. You know, the pro-life movement believes in sex and marriage, not, you know, the hookup culture of a one-night stand, or, you know, something like the evil of rape. I mean, that can bring life into existence, but we would never support the evil of rape. A hookup can bring life into existence, and if that life comes into existence, we need to reverence it. But it doesn’t mean we support the hookup culture. So, there are lots of ways to create life. It doesn’t mean we support the way. It just means once life has come into existence, we reverence the life. But the way, the one path we do support is the path aligns with our nature as men and women, as creatures created by God, that we are creature. We’re not creator. We’re in submission to Him. And if his plans are for offspring to come in as the fruit of sexual intimacy, then we reverence that, rather than bypass it and create our own path of manufacturing life by contracting out to a third party external to one’s marriage. Having said that, then, kind of what hope is there for people, as I mentioned at the beginning, this world of restorative reproductive medicine is phenomenal, and a lot of people aren’t aware of how it is possible to correct underlying pathologies. There’s an amazing group in Ireland called NeoFertility, and they have so many success stories of couples who have been told they wouldn’t be able to conceive. Have, in fact, done rounds of IVF and failed, and then they’ve gone to NeoFertility, had their underlying problems addressed, as I mentioned, whether it’s endometriosis, PCOS, maybe even low sperm count for the husband, low ovarian reserve for the woman, maybe progesterone issues, maybe other hormone issues. And they have seen couples get pregnant and have successful, healthy term babies through natural methods, as opposed to couples who, those same couples failed at their attempts with IVF. So, I think we need to let people know about this, but at the end of the day, we also need to have a conversation about what is our ultimate calling as men and women at our highest maturity, it is motherhood and fatherhood, but that can be lived in a variety of ways. Yes, we can live that out biologically and physically, and most people do, but we can still fulfill our calling to be maternal and paternal in a spiritual capacity. And so, when someone struggles with infertility, by all means, we should try to correct the underlying pathology so that when a couple is sexually intimate, they increase the odds of that act naturally achieving its end of children. But if that never happens, it’s still possible to be full and satisfied through spiritual motherhood and spiritual fatherhood. That might be adoption, that might be playing a very strong role with one’s nieces and nephews. It doesn’t take away the cross of infertility, but it still allows us to experience maternity and paternity, and that’s something I address in a book with a story of a friend of mine who realized she had turned having children into an idol. And I reflect a lot on that through her own words, and then she just reflects on her life. While she has no biological children today, her life is so full with spiritual children all around the world through the ministry work that she does.
ADAMO MANFRA: Wow, definitely a lot of hope there, especially that NeoFertility clinic in Ireland. I’m gonna have to go look that up. Well, I think we’re just about out of time for this week’s episode. But before we go, Stephanie, where can our listeners go to follow your work and get a copy of your inspiring book Conceived by Science: Thinking Carefully and Compassionately About Infertility and IVF?
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Yes! So, people can go to my website, LoveUnleashesLife.com. It’s also available on Amazon, and you could just search it there.
ADAMO MANFRA: Awesome. Well, thank you so much Stephanie Gray Connors for joining us today on Family Policy Matters.
STEPHANIE GRAY CONNORS: Thank you.
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