Feb 29, 2024 | News, Wisconsin Family Voice
| In Dr. Seuss’s book Horton Hears a Who!, we read, “A person’s a person no matter how small.” Little did Theodore Seuss Geisel know how poignant his words would become over the next decades. Dr. Seuss clearly wasn’t making a political statement about abortion, but what he expressed is profoundly biologically accurate.
The moment a human egg is fertilized, a human person is formed—a human person distinctly different from his or her biological mother—right down to distinct DNA. Yes, a person’s a person no matter how small.
That reality played into the news this week here in Wisconsin and around the country. Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case involving in vitro fertilization that seemingly set the world on fire. Much of the firestorm is because people don’t understand what happens with in vitro fertilization. Typically, in this process, many eggs are fertilized creating many embryos. Only a few embryos are implanted in the woman using this process. The embryos that are not implanted are usually frozen. If they are not used or adopted in a certain amount of time, they are destroyed.
The Alabama case focused on whether someone responsible for destroying some of these frozen embryos could be held liable under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor law. In this instance, someone had wandered into the room where these frozen embryos were stored and removed several, ultimately dropping them, which in the wording of the majority opinion author, “killed them.”
Bear in mind that these tiny human persons were the developing children of identified couples. The couples bringing the lawsuit alleged their minor children were killed. The high court agreed, ruling that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies on its face to all unborn children, without limitation.” The majority opinion also stated, “Unborn children are ‘children’ under the Act, without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics,” meaning the fact that these embryos were not implanted did not make them less human.
Essentially what the Alabama high court said was a person’s a person no matter how small and no matter whether that person is in utero or in a frozen suspended state.
Some are saying this ruling means IVF will be deemed illegal in Alabama and perhaps elsewhere if other courts follow suit. That’s not what this decision says. What it says is you cannot destroy these tiny humans with impunity. We have long said every embryo—every tiny human— created in the IVF process must be implanted and given the opportunity to grow and develop. Creating excess embryos to freeze them and then most likely destroy them is wrong. You don’t have to stop doing IVF, but it must be done ethically.
Then, here in Wisconsin, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin announced last week that they have petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court to, in their words, “clarify” whether our State Constitution provides an unfettered right to abortion, apparently right up to birth. Planned Parenthood says our Constitution’s Declaration of Life, Section I, includes a right of “self-determination,” meaning women have a right to decide if they want to carry to term their tiny unborn human baby.
That section includes language declaring people “have certain inherent rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It appears Planned Parenthood takes the “self-determination” idea from “the pursuit of happiness,” conveniently ignoring the first inherent right—life. Tragically, the abortion giant has never acknowledged that a person is a person no matter how small, and now wants our state’s highest court to agree with them.
Rounding out last week on the life issue here, another abortion facility, one that has been shuttered since Roe was overturned, is reopening on March 5, putting our state back to where we were with abortion before the Dobbs decision.
Societies that do not operate by the biological reality that a person’s a person no matter how small are on a disastrous, destructive path—especially when you consider that at the moment of conception, a tiny human is bearing the image of God. |
Dec 20, 2022 | News, Wisconsin Family Voice
Couples struggling with infertility are increasingly turning to artificial reproduction, namely in vitro fertilization (IVF). While this technology seems to provide hope to couples with a well-intentioned longing to start a family, the reality is that IVF exploits women and strips tiny children of their fundamental right to life.
Oxford University fertility expert Professor Imogen Goold notes that artificial reproduction clinics “are selling anxious women a false dream” and “preying on women” by charging them for a procedure that almost never works.
When it comes to Big Fertility, there is no independent overseer, and among women aged 42 to 43 who try IVF, a mere three percent will end up with a baby. “Clinics offering egg-freezing rely on women being scared and wanting to throw money at a problem. But these clinics have a vested interest in convincing women they need to buy into this process as an insurance policy, highlighting their success rates while burying their failures,” writes British doctor Max Pemberton.
The lack of success and exploitation of desperate couples is not the only problem with IVF. Most importantly, every time an IVF cycle is performed, multiple tiny children are destroyed.
In the first stages of IVF, clinicians perform a preimplantation screening of early embryos for chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. The tiny humans that are determined to be “healthy” are implanted or frozen to be used in the future. The remaining embryos are simply discarded.
Further, many of the embryos who aren’t discarded during the first stages of IVF lose their lives during the implantation phase. In fact, only seven percent of embryos created through IVF are born.
Each of these embryos is a human life formed by God. Once fertilization takes places, a human being made in the image and likeness of God is formed, regardless of where or how that life is conceived.
Approximately 12 percent of married couples suffer from infertility or struggle to sustain a pregnancy, which creates deep emotional and physical stress. These couples deserve care and support as they suffer from the immense pain associated with the unfulfilled longing for a child, and a healthy society must encourage couples to have children and build strong families. However, lab-created children are not the answer. Instead, we should provide hope to couples struggling with infertility by encouraging them to adopt. Adoption benefits and respects the rights of everyone involved.
Unfortunately, couples trying to conceive through IVF aren’t made fully aware of what the process entails. Unless they ask the right questions of the doctors, they won’t know what the problems with this procedure are. It’s up to Christians and pro-lifers to share the truth about IVF with compassion for those who are desperately trying to conceive.
Once again science and technology are ahead of our ethics. Just because we can do something, does not mean we have a moral imperative to do it. It’s never right to create human life with the intention of it being expendable.
Sep 22, 2022 | News, Wisconsin Family Voice
California Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CD 28) recently introduced the Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act, which purportedly aims to help those struggling with infertility; but in truth, it only creates a larger issue for children’s rights.
Currently in the United States, couples are eligible to receive tax benefits for fertility treatments only if they are in a heterosexual relationship since these are the only relationships capable of fertility in and of themselves. However, sexual revolutionaries view nature and biological truths as an injustice, and they are attempting to expand the definition of “infertility” to include those who cannot reproduce “either as a single individual or with a partner without medical intervention.”
In response to the legislation, Joseph Backholm in WORLD explains: “Under this definition, single people, as well as people in same-sex relationships, could be ‘infertile,’ which only makes sense in a world where men can get pregnant, and no one can define what a woman is.”
This is exactly what the Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act aims to do. In a press release, Rep. Schiff says, “our tax code is sorely outdated and makes it harder for LGBTQ+ individuals and couples to afford treatments to bring children into their families, such as IVF. This bill would rectify this iniquity by allowing LGBTQ+ couples to deduct the cost of assisted reproductive treatments as a medical expense—a privilege heterosexual couples already have.”
He went on: “Every person regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, or relationship status deserves the same opportunity to start and expand a family.”
This is an entirely adult-centered view of the relationship between parents and children.
This legislation treats a child as “an accessory that exists to meet the needs of adults,” as Backholm puts it. Children have a natural right to both a mother and father, and Schiff’s proposal completely disregards the best interest of children.
“In his view, the adults deserve the child simply because they want the child. Any disadvantage the child experiences by being commodified and denied a relationship with one or both of his or her parents is outweighed by the emotional satisfaction the adults will experience.
However, if the needs of children are primary, a child’s right to be known and loved by his or her mother and father is more important than the adult desire to have a child. After all, men cannot mother and women cannot father. Children need both mothers and fathers,” writes Backholm.
Further, this legislation encourages the use of technology to bring children into the world, which has serious moral implications. Surrogacy, for example, intentionally separates a child from one or both of his biological parents. This creates in them a “primal wound” that manifests as depression, abandonment issues, and emotional problems throughout their lives.
Artificial reproduction often disregards the physical as well as the emotional well-being of lab-created children, as only 7% of children created in a lab will be born alive. Most will perish in forgotten freezers, won’t survive “thawing,” will fail to implant, or will be discarded if they’re non-viable or the wrong sex, or be “selectively reduced” (aborted), or be donated to research. This happens largely because there are no limits on the number of embryos created for someone seeking IVF. The unused ones are then “frozen” (commonly referred to as “snowflake babies”) and then, after a time, if not used, are disposed of.
We have a medical doctor friend who is also a biological ethicist, who a number of years ago recommended that if IVF is to continue, then at a minimum, a law should be passed that limits to three the number of embryos that are created for a single IVF attempt. All three would then be required to be implanted, which means none would need to be “frozen.”
Approximately 12 percent of married couples suffer from infertility or struggle to sustain a pregnancy, which creates deep emotional, physical, and financial stress. These couples deserve care, support, and compassion as they deal with the immense pain associated with the unfulfilled longing for a child, and a healthy society must encourage couples to have children through legislation that supports parenthood.
However, the desires of adults must never take precedent over the rights of children.
“We live in a broken world, which means the ideal is not always possible. Adoption is a beautiful example of how we can make the best of situations that are already broken. Still, making the best of difficult circumstances is very different than creating difficult circumstances on purpose, which is exactly what Rep. Schiff’s Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act would do,” concludes Backholm.
We agree. The Equal Access to Reproductive Care Act submits the rights of children to the desires of adults—even if well-intentioned—and we dare not make this the basis of policymaking.
