IVF and surrogacy witness to the most natural and most glorious of human desires, that of a man and a woman wanting together to create the life of another person. Yet the very procedures require society to treat that person as a thing, a commodity. It is the quintessential tragedy of our modern, technological age.

Several times over the last year, I have criticized IVF in my lectures. Each time I have been asked the same question afterward: “Do you think that children born by IVF are human beings?” The questioner is usually someone with a vested interest in the answer—the parent or the grandparent of a child born as a result of IVF or surrogacy. It therefore has an emotional power that the same question asked in a college seminar lacks. Seminars trade in abstractions and hypothetical situations. But real life happens at a personal level. Our children and grandchildren are individual persons, not generalized abstractions. They have faces. “Do you think my child is human?” has a sharp, understandable edge to it.

On the surface, the question is easy to answer. In critiquing IVF and surrogacy, I am in no way implying that children born by such means are not human. Simply because I disagree with the ways in which the human person has been conceived and brought to term does not mean I deny his or her intrinsic humanity. There are other ways that children are conceived with which I disagree—for example, anonymous one-night stands where neither love nor any real relationship exists between the parents. That does not mean that I think those children are not human. A sperm has fertilized an egg. A human person is the result.

Yet at another level the question is more difficult. While I do not deny the humanity of the child born by IVF or surrogacy, the procedures do. The child in the womb is treated not as a person but as a thing, not as a subject but as an object, not as intrinsically valuable but as having value only as instrumental to some other end.

This is something that many Christians fail to see. Ask about the moral problems of IVF and surrogacy and one is often greeted with confused looks. Perhaps some have hesitations over the fate of the surplus fertilized eggs that are disposed of or cryogenically frozen, but that is likely the only area of unease.

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