LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2019, Page 327

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IV. THE CHILD AS A GIFT OF GOD
fects or children of a desired sex. A couple or an individual desiring
a child may commission others to fill some of the necessary roles.
Thus, the sperm or the ova (or both) may come not from the commissioning parent(s) but from “donors” (as they are usually called,
although often they have sold rather than donated their gametes).
The embryo(s) produced in the laboratory—whether from one’s
own or acquired gametes—may be transferred not to the woman
who has commissioned the reproductive project but to a surrogate,
who agrees to gestate the child and then give it after birth to the
couple or the individual desiring a child.
Because more embryos may be produced in the laboratory
than can safely be transferred to a woman’s uterus, the commissioning couple may decide to freeze the remaining surplus embryos.
They may use them at a later date to try again to conceive a child,
or they may never use them, leaving the embryos frozen indefinitely, or discarded, or perhaps made available for use in research.
An embryo that is produced in the laboratory but not implanted in
a woman’s uterus is often referred to as a “preimplantation embryo,” as if it were simply an accident of nature that this embryo
was somewhere other than in the womb of its mother. We should,
however, train ourselves to call such embryos “unimplanted embryos,” making clear that their condition is no accident but, rather, one
that we have willed and chosen. Such frozen, unimplanted embryos
now number in the hundreds of thousands, and our society seems
willing to permit that number to continue to grow.
Many of these frozen embryos will never be needed or wanted
by those who produced them in an effort to achieve a pregnancy.
What, then, is to be done with them? There is no satisfactory answer to that question. As long as we permit, and even encourage,
freezing of embryos, we create for ourselves a moral problem for
which there is no good solution. Leaving embryos frozen indefinitely seems unsatisfactory, but using them for research—which
will inevitably involve their destruction—would be wrong. They
have already been used once as a means to someone else’s reproductive project; surely once is enough.
One proposed solution to the problem of surplus, frozen embryos—a solution that has been attractive to some Christians—has
been called embryo adoption. This means simply that a woman
(and, generally, her husband) make use of IVF technology to gestate someone else’s frozen and now unwanted embryo, hoping to
bring that child to term and raise it as their own. No doubt those
who do this are often moved by several considerations—both desiring to become parents and wanting to offer the possibility of continued life to an abandoned embryo. For some it may also be a way
to deal with infertility. Although we cannot say that such embryo
adoption is wrong, we can hardly recommend it when we remind
ourselves of the millions of orphaned and abandoned children in the
world who need a familial home. If we are searching for children
in need of adoption—children who need but lack a family committed to their wellbeing, children who are likely to suffer continued
harm unless they find such a family—these children are all around
us in our society. If we have the resources and the ability to adopt,
it seems better for us to direct that energy toward children already
born who need a place of familial belonging.
More recently and increasingly, young, single women are using IVF technology to take the further step of freezing their unfertilized eggs. They do this not because they experience fertility
problems but as a kind of insurance against any future health or
reproductive problem, or simply in order to have time to pursue career opportunities before committing to marriage and parenthood.

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Closely connected to the practice of IVF is the use of genetic
testing. Our society has by now come to regard genetic testing of
fetuses in utero as almost routine. Amniocentesis was available in
the 1950s and chorionic villus sampling (taken from placental tissue) in the 1980s. Still more recently, Noninvasive Prenatal Testing, which can isolate fetal DNA in blood drawn from the mother,
can be done early in the first trimester of pregnancy, and, at least
in principle, it could enable the entire genome of a fetus in utero
to be sequenced. (It has also, we might note, been extraordinarily
profitable, with worldwide revenue in 2016 estimated at more than
a billion dollars.) Of course, at least at the present time, no treatment is available for most of the conditions that can be detected by
means of prenatal screening of fetuses in utero. The only “treatment” that can avoid the birth of a child who will suffer from disabilities and genetic defects is abortion, which eliminates suffering
only by eliminating the sufferer.
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)—that is, genetic
testing in the laboratory of the unimplanted embryo—moves the
testing process back still further, prior even to the establishment
of a pregnancy. It is now possible to identify in an unimplanted
embryo hundreds of disease mutations as well as its chromosomal
makeup. This allows the commissioning parent(s) to select only
some of the embryos for implantation, avoiding in particular any
that may have genetic defects (and, of course, any of what they
regard as the “wrong” sex).
In principle, therefore, it is now possible for a child to be born
with as many as five people who might be called its “parents” (the
donors of sperm and ovum, the surrogate who carried the child during pregnancy, and two commissioning parents who undertook the
reproductive project in order to have a child to rear). We stand on
the brink of a world in which we will hardly know how to name
some of the relationships produced by technological reproduction.
A woman can give birth to her own “grandchild” by gestating a
fetus produced in the laboratory from gametes taken from her child
and his or her spouse. People can “have children” posthumously if
their frozen embryos are implanted and gestated in someone else
after their death. A woman lacking ovaries can receive an ovary
transplant from an aborted fetus, in which case that fetus could become the genetic “mother” of a child born to the woman. By means
of eggs made in the laboratory from induced pluripotent stem cells
(iPSCs) it may soon be possible to avoid the costly and medically
burdensome process of retrieving eggs from women. And given
that sperm are readily available, this would mean that an individual
or a couple could produce many embryos from which to choose.
Perhaps even—it is too soon to say for certain—researchers may be
able to use iPSCs to make sperm from a woman’s cells or ova from
a man’s cells, meaning that a child could be produced using sperm
and egg derived from cells of the same “parent.” And it is not impossible to imagine that—as has already been done with a lamb—a
child could be gestated entirely in an artificial womb. Thus, without
any bodily connection of child to mother, we would have achieved
in fact what Aldous Huxley only imagined in Brave New World.

Competing narratives: procreation vs. reproduction
Clearly, two quite different and competing ways of understanding the bond between parents and children are at work in our
society; we tell two different stories about this most basic of human relationships. It is worth considering how they differ and the
implications of each.
One story, deeply embedded in Christian teaching and belief,
understands the child as a blessing given to a man and woman who
2019 Convention Workbook