EXCLUSIVE: How IVF and surrogacy have led to consumer eugenics

Emma Waters, Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, joined Live Action spokesperson Sami Parker for an exclusive interview about IVF and surrogacy and why they are so harmful — not just to individual women and infants, but to our culture.

Key Takeaways:

• As a policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, Waters focuses primarily on "emerging biotechnologies, restorative reproductive medicine, and family policy."

• She argued that assisted reproductive technology (ART) is reshaping what it means to be human, and how we interact with the world.

• Currently, there are few regulations or limits regarding how technology can be used to help someone have a child.

• Though ART is sometimes seen as pro-life because it helps couples conceive children, the truth is just the opposite.

The Pro-Life Case Against IVF & Surrogacy | Bioethics Interview with Emma Waters

The Details:

Waters explained that her research led her to realize the issues surrounding ART today. "[I] became aware of the way that technology is radically reshaping every aspect of what it means to be human and how we're interacting not only with ourselves, but with the world," she said. "And so I wanted to shift my research wholly into the tech space to really think about the ways that technology is either helping us flourish as humans, or really hindering us in that pursuit."

While she said she is tech-positive, there are limits, particularly when the wants of adults supersede the rights and needs of children. She then explained different methods of ART:

In vitro fertilization is where you take egg and sperm, and fertilize the egg in a petri dish to create an embryo. And so that accounts for about 99% of all assisted reproductive technology treatments.

Other assisted reproductive technologies would include artificial insemination; surrogacy is an extension of it. And then maybe like contrary to that, you have restorative reproductive medicine, which is an umbrella term that looks at treating infertility, not through IVF, which tends to bypass the body by removing egg and sperm from the person and putting it in a clinic, but actually looks to treat the root causes of infertility and reproductive dysfunction like endometriosis, PCOS, or male factor infertility.

And so it's not simply asking how can we create a child, but saying how can we apply the best knowledge and medical innovation that we have to actually healing the human body.

Many people see no issue with ART methods like IVF and surrogacy, reasoning that because they bring new life into the world, they are pro-life technologies. But this is far from true.

Reality Check:

Waters said every child conceived through IVF or born to a surrogate is a blessing, that does not make the technology used to create them ethical:

As pro-lifers, we believe that life begins at that moment of fertilization with an embryo, not just at the moment of implantation when pregnancy begins. And so in IVF, based on like 2021 numbers, which is our most recent year, it showed that about 100,000 children were born using IVF in that year. However, based on some rough estimates that we have, there could have been as many as 4.1 million embryos created in one year using IVF; and yet, only 100,000 children were born.

And so when we're talking about IVF, we have to look at the big picture and ask, what is happening to all of the embryos created? Because if you're looking at the success rates or the pro-life question when it comes to the life of the embryo, then the conclusion is that... IVF has very low success rates for the embryos involved. Somewhere between 2.3% and maybe 15% of embryos created are born. The rest of them are either destroyed intentionally or through neglect. They're frozen in freezers.

So across the United States, there's about one million embryos who were simply frozen in these very ghastly-looking freezing chambers, frankly. Or they are donated for research, which means they'll just be destroyed after 14 days of experimentation.

Additionally, many couples choose to undergo genetic testing on their embryos, destroying those who are deemed to be defective or undesirable. The overwhelming majority of fertility clinics offer pre-implantation genetic testing, allowing couples to not only screen for serious birth defects, but create a designer child.

What we're seeing with the rise of embryonic genetic screening... is a far expanded version where they're testing for polygenic conditions. So conditions that arise with the interplay of multiple genes in an embryo.... And so what they're doing is they're testing these human embryos for upwards of 1200 different conditions. And then much like a dating app, they're then giving you embryo one, here's your report. And you can look through, in this visually pleasing format, all of the testing outcomes that they provide for you. 

And you can say, well, embryo one is a boy, and he is only 30% likely to get Alzheimer's, only 45% likely to have hearing loss. Here are the other conditions he has. Well, embryo number two is a girl. Let's look at her health outcomes. And then you can choose the embryos that align with the kind of child that you want.

And so it's far beyond just a question of treating infertility, but it's actually selection of a given child.

Watch the entire interview here.