Dehumanising Marriage
One petri dish at a time
In the natural process of making babies, the husband during the one-flesh union inseminates his wife with his seed. His male gametes, the spermatozoa, enter the wife’s womb. If at the time the female gamete, the oocyte or egg cell, has matured and is present in the oviduct or Fallopian tubes, sperm and egg cells encounter and one sperm penetrates and fuses with the egg cell. In this act of fertilisation of the egg cell by the sperm cell, a new human being is co-created who did not exist before. Most readers would have come into being in this way. And after the nine months of gestation, you will be born. And after years of growth and development until the present day, you are now reading this.
Clinical Love
IVF stands for in-vitro fertilisation. That is, the taking of oocytes or egg cells and mechanically injecting spermatozoa so that fertilisation takes place out-side the body, in a glass vessel in a laboratory. And so human beings get created in labs, by technicians, paid for by individuals or by the state. Frequently these embryonic human beings are used in research, or else if manufactured for “fertility” purposes, they are cultured for some days – to select the better ones, and then they are put into the womb of a woman. Sometimes this would be the woman whose egg cells were used, or else it is a paid gestatrix or surrogate mother, who may carry the child to term.
In Sri Lanka “fertility clinics” or baby factories, have mushroomed of late, and they are found as departments within private hospitals and also as stand-alone facilities. The government hospitals have also jumped into this bandwagon. This is purported to be a noble service where god-like doctors provide pregnancy for couples who have been unable to have a child.
The industry is estimated to be worth 13.5 trillion dollars in just the Asia-Pacific region, by 2028, and Sri Lanka already offers this service as part of medical tourism with the options of your own gametes, or someone else’s for perhaps an extra $1000 or so.
Daughters of Lot
There is no question that there is sadness when a married couple who desire children have none. It is a particular grief to a woman who yearns for motherhood, but has not attained it. Certainly private businesses, the public sector, scientists, physicians and society in general would do good in taking steps to provide a solution to married couples who have discovered that they are infertile or perhaps sub-fertile. Indeed infertility is a growing problem, no less since the populace was inoculated and boosted with fertility-inhibiting factors in the not too distant past.
Yes solutions need to be sought, right solutions. So what’s wrong with test-tube babying?
Man Falls
In order to make the test-tube baby, the technicians need sperm. The potential father supplies this raw material for the process. And how does he do it? Usually by masturbating, possibly with the support of pornographic materials. So in the beginning, the one who seeks fatherhood debases himself with a vile act.
Sometimes, fatherhood is not the objective, but rather money. Men deposit their semen into sperm banks so that women may purchase them. Higher price if you are a graduate, a premium if you are tall, or blue-eyed and blond as the case may be.
Made not Begotten
The eggs harvested from the woman consequent to hormonal drug treatment that bring about maturation and ejection of multiple oocytes, are combined with the sperm obtained by the man, in a glass vessel, under the fertility practitioner’s watchful eye through the microscope. And so, the child is not loved into being, but rather synthesised.
Having recognised this means of the child’s origination, one needs also to accept that the child once conceived is a human being with due dignity, and we should not treat IVF produced children as of lower value than those naturally conceived.
The Multitude
In the test tubes, not one but many eggs are fertilised and many embryonic children are conceived. This is to ensure better success rates in fertilisation, and also so that quality control processes can kick in to eliminate the babies that are not up to standard. Quality fail means rejection, rejection means the incinerator.
This is also an opportunity to select based on other factors, so if you want boys, they can kill off the girls. And there’s more, you get to eugenically pick your baby.
Culling
Even after baby quality control and attributes selection processes, they may still be a number of embryos left, and the mother only wants one. So the extra babies are killed immediately – or deposited in an embryo bank for later withdrawal or sale, or for use in research and embryonic engineering. Many are kept frozen for an undetermined time until there is a power cut.
Reduction
Furthermore, since the success rate for implantation after introducing the embryos into the mother are low, frequently not one but several babies are introduced, hoping that one will implant and continue to develop. Sometimes, implantations are too successful and there are two or three or more babies gestating. Then the gynaecologist gets his injections of potassium chloride to kill these excess babies who die and are then miscarried. This is called foetal reduction, but reduction by murder.
Quality
Compared to naturally conceived children, test-tube babies may have a higher incidents of problems related to neurodevelopment, cardiovascular function, metabolism and allergies. Higher risk of epigenetic disorders, birth defects and poor perinatal outcomes are perhaps not surprising, although the doctors who receive the payment may not volunteer such information. There may occur cell lines, in the bodies of these children, that contain an abnormal number of chromosomes (mosaicism); and more rarely there might two different genotypes (chimaerism). There are higher rates of pre-term births; and low birth weight for fresh embryos transferred, and high birth weight for frozen embryos.
Repeat
There is a failure rate. So if the first round does not provide the desired outcomes, the payments, the masturbations, super-ovulations, the creation of human beings by a man in a lab-coat playing god, and the killing of siblings so that one child might be birthed, will repeat.
Assenting to Masters
Sri Lanka is running helter-skelter into the chasm, accelerating into promiscuity education curricula in schools, inclusivity in institutes, sodomy in leadership, on top of dignifying prostitution and ennobling abortion of babies.
The latest initiative is the liberalisation of divorce via a private member’s bill. And the one to rule them all, the digital ID will be upon citizens if they continue to flow with the tide.
Image and Likeness
There are deeper moral reasons why IVF is a blight on society, but these are outside the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, what has been presented above is sufficient to make clear that the process makes a child a technological commodity, and removes child-making from the context of marriage and family.
Moreover what might start off purportedly as a service to married couples soon becomes a service to be paid for and purchased by all any and sundry, and the starting materials sperm and egg can come from anywhere. Sodomites shall have babies made for them by the state by the time the gender activists have the penal code 365 on gross indecency repealed. There will be interesting variants of family when marriage law has been reformed to enable no-fault divorce making marriage meaningless, and the propaganda and money behind the dignity of sodomy has made marriage available to two – or more, men.
There is always the option of adoption. So many orphaned children seeking a family and home, and parents to belong to. Can this be a solution for infertile married couples desiring children?