The pro-life movement is not about promoting pregnancy at all costs. The pro-life movement is about securing the dignity of every human being, born and unborn, from conception until natural death.
IVF is an evil, undignified practice because:
It necessarily results in the death or indefinite cryopreservation of the other “extra” embryos fertilized but not implanted.
It commodifies human reproduction and creates a previously nonexistent demand and marketplace for eggs, sperm, and embryos.
It encourages women to artificially delay childbearing until later years when their bodies may be less capable of healthily carrying their baby to term.
It necessarily renders parental love conditional on the parents’ preferences since they generally choose among several embryos (e.g. health, sex, genetic profile, etc.).
It robs children conceived through IVF of the possibility of ever knowing their own siblings if their parents choose to never implant any remaining fertilized embryos.
It creates the temptation and the opportunity for sick “doctors” to clandestinely use their own sperm to fertilize the eggs of unsuspecting women.
It introduces the unacceptably high risk of the wrong embryo being accidentally implanted into the wrong woman.
It encourages women to bear children using the sperm of men they may have never even met, robbing the children of the opportunity to know and be recognized by their natural fathers.
It robs childless couples of tens of thousands of dollars when they could have had a free outlet to express their maternal and paternal love toward children and others who needed it (e.g. orphans, foster children, migrant children, organizations for boys and girls, nieces and nephews and cousins, etc).
It robs parentless children of the maternal and paternal love of childless couples with whom they might have otherwise been connected through charity.
It unjustly enriches doctors and companies who toy with human life, dignity, and reproduction.
It wrongly separates the unitive and procreative ends of the conjugal act between fathers and mothers such that there can now be procreation without unity.
Surrogacy is also an evil, undignified practice for every reason mentioned above regarding IVF, plus:
It steals away children from the women who carried them to term.
It robs women of their own childbearing years and the chance to healthily bring up their own families.
It treats women like cows.
It robs the husbands of surrogate women the opportunity to have children with their own spouse while suffering the indignity of having his wife used as a cow.
It jeopardizes the health of women conned into agreeing to be surrogates with little to no certainty if and by whom, if anyone, they will be cared for should their health decline due to the pregnancy.
It turns children into bargaining chips by unscrupulous surrogates.
It subjects women to reproductive slavery whereby their “customers” can demand the embryo they are carrying be terminated whether they want to or not.
These lists are not exhaustive nor are they ordered in any particular way. Suffice to say that both IVF and surrogacy are wrong for many reasons of varying gravity. The same goes for wrongly pursuing pregnancy through artificial insemination, sperm stealing, cuckoldry, or any other avenue that prioritizes pregnancy over human dignity.
All children are good and deserving of love and protection at every stage of life, but that does not justify achieving pregnancy by any and all means.
