Hi everyone,

Forgive the blatant plea for comments, but I would adore your input on the IVF posts; I want to add to the voices and perspectives of this issue and it would be great to have your comment…so anything you’d have to share would be great.

Did I say please comment yet?

Psalm 139:13-16

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

One of the biggest struggles with me is really coming face to face with the idea that ‘Life begins at conception’ and that all life should be valued.  This week, I’ve been working through the whole notion of conception and exactly when a soul is implanted and a life begins.  One of my misconceptions going into this process was that once an egg was fertilized that was it, barring any damaging external stimuli, this little guy forms into a baby.  After reading, I get the impression that fertilization is no guarentee for implantation or even ultimate survival.  At some point there are switches that get thrown that keep a zygote or blastocyst from developing (correct me if I’m wrong) and that often, there is a point where those that work survive and continue on to birth. 

Even in my limited knowledge, I’m in awe of the process that starts with a fertilized egg and how it develops into a blastocyst within 5 days and how it goes from a single cell to 100-200 cells during that same time. 

Where I get fuzzy is exactly when life begins.  If achieving fertilization is no earmark of ultimate survial are there an untold throng of fertilized eggs that are hanging out in heaven as fully developed people?  What about the status of the hundreds of thousands of embryos in cryostasis in the US?  At what point does God embody an embryo with a soul? 

These are weighty questions, indeed, but I think people that are overly preoccupied with these ideas fall in the ranks of missing the forest through the trees.  David, in Psalm 139 was taking the focus off of himself and was in awe of a powerful, soverign God.  Blastocyst wasn’t in his vocabulary as a shepard, but the soverign Yahweh was, contemplating the deeper mysteries of God’s ultimate care for him and development of him was.  I believe it should be mine.  Asking these big questions is good, but ultimately one embraces a a big grey fuzzy area that is void of clear cut answers. What is dangerous as well is that drawing a clear line at any point in this process has its own ethical issues (e.g. Life begins with a zygote?  What is human or ethical about freezing it for 10-20 years until it is ultmately disposed of or dies a lengthy death?  Life begins at birth?  You’re delusional; there’s nothing magical about bringing a baby through a mom’s vagina). 

Where do you go with that?  I believe that these are questions that are deserving of a copious amount of prayer and council, but I believe God is soverign enough to answer. Prying into the world of IVF has continually increased my reverance of a God who created an incredibly complex process and ultimately one I’ll never quite fully understand but I will endevor to honor God in.

I leave you with this.  It’s a quote from Chapter 5 of A.W. Tozer’s “The Pursuit of God”. 

“Important as it is that we recognize God working in us, I would yet warn against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, “O Lord, Thou knowest.” Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God’s omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.” 

In searching this afternoon, we found stepping stones (http://www.bethany.org/step) – a resource guide for infertility.

 –pete

One of the first issues that we’re going to be dealing with is embryonic adoption. 

There are a couple of existing resources out there, and thankfully, they are from a Christian perspective.

Several organizations got together to answer the question of what should happen with the embryos that are left over after a couple had achieved their family goals.  They could be donated to research, discarded or donated to other couples looking to use embryos they themselves can produce for whatever reason.

Where this really is hard to work with is how, in my mind, it complicates issues of identity, adoption and even race.  What would happen is couple A decides they are done and donates their embryos to couple B who adopts them and uses couple A’s embryos for transfer to the wife of couple B.  Couple B has a baby from couple A’s embryo and, genetically, the baby is adopted. 

Where this really gets fuzzy for me is that it redefines ‘biological parents’; are bio parents people who gave birth to you or are they people who just simply donated their DNA.  An adopted child who came into the family as an embryo has a mom who gave birth to them but yet is not their ‘Biological mom’. 

Another area where it could get even greyer is that the potential is there to adopt cross-culturally an embryo should everyone agree.  I think that if anything could do it, this scenerio could really fry traditional notions of race and ethnicity.  What would define identity gets thrown out of the window and you can imagine the complexity of an answer when the child would be asked ‘Who gave birth to you?’

As a potential parent of an embryo that would be given up for adoption, my concerns would be that the family be a couple of similar world view (Evangelical Christian) and would raise a baby as good, if not better, than we would.  But yet, I have a hard time thinking about what it would be like to have a twin of A3 knock on the door one day and say ‘Um, Hi, I’m your embryo and you’re my DNA dad.’

Like I said previously, there are multiple threads to this issue that I feel like we’re just now beginning to work through.  I hope this offers a bit of a good springboard for thought for others in this situation and if anyone out there has experiences to share, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve created a new category.  I have to admit, I’ve been struggling with how best to do this justice without compromising what I can and should reveal online.

We’ve been trying to have a sequal to A3 for about a year and a half now with no success.  After some additional testing, we’ve discovered that we’re a prime canidate for IVF (InVitro
Fertilization).  For the fertility-challenged, this is a process where an egg and a sperm are combined (either by choice or by force, as in a process called ICSI) and the embryo is transfered back to the woman where, hopefully, it will grow.

The procedure that we’ll be doing is called Blastocyst transfer where, as I understand it, the fertilized eggs are allowed to grow to day five where the embryo has reached blastocyst stage (the embryo goes from 8 cells to a couple of hundred from day 3 to day five).  The result is that the remaining embryos have a better chance of successfully implanting and continuing development than embryos that are traditionally transfered at day 3. The nice thing, in my mind, about this ethically is that embryos are allowed to weed themselves out and by the time you get to day five you usually are left with a limited number of blastocysts (usually around 4, as compared to 8 or more on day three). 

The issues surrounding this are numerous; especially for Christians.  I saw a talk at Educause this year by Ray Kurzweil who made a interesting claim that IT and computers are the undergirding for societal advancement; any advancements made by computers further advancements in other fields that that technological advancements are increasing at a dramatic rate.  I’d never been so close to that as I have with this situation; current reproductive technology was new, and some never existed, 2 years ago.  It seems as though 2004 was a long time back as I have done reading.

Hence the problem, and I hope you’ve gotten this far, is that guidance from a Christian perspective just simply doesn’t exist yet; it’s a moving target.  Questions have arisen at every turn in terms of ethical considerations for us and we’re just beginning to get started.  What I’d like to do with this category is walk through some of those questions and, hopefully, start a dialogue and place where other people of similar convictions can work through these issues. 

To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, check out the next post.