Pioneers of IVF believed they were mocking God, not 'doing God's work'

President Trump recently announced his administration's plan to “reduce barriers” and “lower costs” for IVF, claiming his incentives to expand access couldn’t “get more pro-life" — but the history of IVF and the true intentions of its earliest pioneers demonstrate that IVF is not pro-life.

As Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. attempted to portray cheaper IVF access as “doing God’s work,” pro-life groups including Live Action criticized the move.

While the pioneers of IVF — medical researcher Robert Edwards and obstetrician and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe — claimed the motivation behind their research was to help women and couples struggling with infertility to conceive, their research legacy is dark and full of documented unethical practices, with direct ties to the eugenics and abortion movement. 

Key Takeaways:

• The pioneers of IVF were not motivated by altruism. One of the pioneers, Robert Edwards, said that their intent was to find out if God was in charge of human reproduction or if they were. An avowed socialist, he reveled in the fact that Christians, in particular, began using IVF.

• Induced abortion was required if any fetal defects were discovered while a woman participated in IVF.

• Edwards was part of the Eugenics Society in Britain and felt eugenics was positive, except when the Nazis used it.

• Baroness Mary Warnock also played a role in the spread of IVF, fighting against the rights of preborn children, endorsing infanticide, and calling for euthanasia — particularly for those with dementia.

• Large and well-known foundations already in support of abortion also began to fund IVF.

• Edwards directly influenced other researchers who went on to "transition" an infant with sex reassignment surgery in an infamous and tragic case, and those researchers began the first IVF clinic in the U.S.

The Backstory:

In 1976, Lesley Brown and her husband were struggling with infertility. They sought assistance from Patrick Steptoe, Mrs. Brown’s gynecologist, and his colleague Robert Edwards. At that time, Dr. Steptoe offered Mrs. Brown ‘an implant’ of a baby into her uterus. What Brown didn’t know at the time was that, by ‘an implant,’ Steptoe was referring to new, highly controversial assisted reproductive technology (ART) known as IVF, which Steptoe and Edwards had worked on for nearly a decade without prior success. 

In Brown's case, however, it worked. The first successful baby born using IVF was Louise Brown, born on July 25th, 1978, to the Browns in Northern England. Three years later, Elizabeth Carr became the first baby successfully born after IVF in the U.S.   

Mocking God

Robert Edwards, who described himself as a “very left-wing socialist,” openly admitted that for him and his colleagues, the intent behind IVF was about far more than infertility.

It was about mocking God.

Edwards said in an interview, “I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory.” He concluded, “It was us.”

Edwards further delighted in the growing number of professing Roman Catholics and Protestants turning to IVF. He was very open about his support of using IVF for sex selection, saying, “Go ahead and use it.”

While testifying to Parliament, Edwards also admitted that IVF could also be used by same-sex couples to conceive.  ​

Defending Eugenics

Osagie Obasogie, professor of law and bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, exposed Edwards' direct and deeply eugenic motivations to use scientific advancements to “control human reproduction in order to breed preferred types of people,” noting that IVF was a means to achieve this dehumanizing and racist goal.

Obasogie confirmed that documentation showed Edwards served on the Council of the Eugenics Society in Britain for several years. This society later changed its name to “The Galton Institute,” in memory of the father of eugenics (and cousin of Charles Darwin), Francis Galton. Today, this same institution is called the Adelphi Genetics Forum.​

Edwards defended the idea of eugenics during his 2004 testimony to Parliament — except for its use by the Nazis, who, in his mind, “degraded” the practice. Obasogie points out Edwards' disturbing acceptance of the practice, stating:

​It is not simply that Edwards believed in the permissive implementation of reproductive and genetic technologies in a manner that happened to coincide with eugenic aspirations. Rather, he embraced eugenics as morally justifiable — save for the brief period when a presumably pure science was politicized by fanatics.

In other words, for Edwards, the mass genocide of human beings is acceptable when done quietly, in a scientific labs through IVF, or by abortions – but Nazis and their methods were a bridge too far.

Unethical Practices​

In a 2015 article in Reproductive and Biomedicine Society Online, “The Oldham Notebooks: an analysis of the development of IVF 1969–1978. IV. Ethical aspects,” authors Martin Johnson and Kay Elder reviewed recently discovered research notes by Steptoe and Edwards at the Oldham Hospital, where Louise Brown was born.

In the 1960s and 70s, much of the focus in the eugenic-based medical establishment was on efforts to minimize fertility rates through population control efforts like the expansion of abortion and birth control. Ironically, citing ethical concerns, the UK Medical Research Council refused to initially fund IVF research. Some of the council's ‘concerns’ included an increase in fetal abnormalities, overpopulation concerns, and a hesitation to use women for “purely experimental purposes.” However, they expressed little concern toward the human lives initiated and consequently destroyed through the process.

According to Johnson and Elder, documents revealed that 487 laparoscopic cycles were performed on up to 282 patients, from which only two healthy infants were born. Many of the procedures were done without informed consent.​

When this disregard for informed consent during Louise Brown's conception and birth was realized, Duke University physician and behavioral scientist Peter Ubel commented in Forbes, “It’s hard to fathom the level of … of arrogance? of ambition? … that would have blinded Steptoe to his moral duty to inform Brown about the enormous uncertainty surrounding the new procedure.”

But the breaches of ethics and informed consent didn’t end there. In 2024, Live Action News reported on a shocking discovery: DNA tests revealed that Steptoe used sperm collected from clinic staff to impregnate women without either the patients' or staff's knowledge.

Steptoe also disclosed in an interview that the requirement for patients undergoing IVF procedures was to agree to an amniocentesis and a subsequent forced abortion if fetal abnormalities were discovered.  ​

Political Allies: “Duty to Die”

The acceptance and advancement of IVF in the UK and abroad would not have been possible had it not been for the advocacy of philosopher and author Baroness Mary Warnock. Utilitarian in her ideology, Warnock helped to set the 'ethical’ guidelines for IVF and its expanding research, outlined in “The Warnock Report,” published in 1984.

​The report claimed, often using abortion as the example, that a human embryo had no legal status and therefore had no “right to life” according to the law. The report’s suggestions of “protections” for human embryos through the mere establishment of licensing and reporting requirements for IVF clinics to ensure “human embryos are frivolously or unnecessarily used in research” led to the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990.

Given the blatant disregard for human life in its earliest stages, Warnock's staunch, self-exposed support for human euthanasia would not be shocking to those in the pro-life movement.

In an interview with Philosophy Now Magazine, Warnock voiced her belief that premature babies should be denied life-saving treatments if the child’s parents didn’t want them, and suggested assisted suicide for those struggling with mental illness.

In 2008, The Telegraph published an interview with Warnock, in which she disturbingly claimed that dementia patients had a ‘duty to die’: “If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service,” she said. She also voiced her hopes that people would soon be “licensed to put others down” – a dystopian reality which has now become a leading cause of death in Canada and which is expanding around the world.

IVF Funded by Big Abortion

Prior to funding by the MRC after the birth of Louise Brown, Edwards and Steptoe relied on substantial funding from foundational big abortion donors and supporters.

The Ford Foundation, the World Health Organization, and others provided early funding for the IVF pioneers in hopes of advancing scientific progress towards “immunological approaches to fertility control” — otherwise known as the search for a “birth control vaccine.”​

The birth of Louise Brown provided the success needed, opening the door for additional funding by the MRC and other streams of revenue, allowing for the opening of the world’s first clinic dedicated to IVF, the Bourn Clinic, which came under fire in the 1990s when allegations arose that the clinic produced racially-motivated ‘designer babies.’    

Connecting Dots:

While conducting research at Johns Hopkins University in 1965, Robert Edwards met Howard and Georgeanna Jones. The Joneses spent the summer assisting Edwards with his IVF research on animals, gaining first-hand experience with the Edwards-Steptoe process.

Howard Jones went on to work at Johns Hopkins' 'Gender Identity Clinic,” where he performed ‘sex-reassignment’ surgeries on adults and children.

One of Jones’ most well-known patients was David Reimer. A tragic circumcision accident left Reimer's parents with an unthinkable decision. They allowed Jones to perform a surgical castration on their infant son; Jones attempted to construct something resembling female genitalia on the baby. David Reimer's parents and doctors treated him as a girl — but their efforts, including the life-altering surgery at the hands of Howard Jones, failed.

Tragically, David Reimer committed suicide as an adult. But after the successful birth of Louise Brown, Howard and Georgeanna established the first IVF clinic in the U.S. in 1980, which led to the birth of Elizabeth Carr.

The Dystopian Future:

​In 2011, Howard predicted that in the future, human surrogacy would no longer be required, as artificial wombs would be used instead — and that mere human genes would be used to produce human embryos, no longer requiring sperm or eggs.

So far, Live Action News has reported on at least one of Howard Jones' predictions that has come to fruition through IVG — a process that uses adult skin cells to create eggs and sperm, which are then fertilized through traditional IVF methods.

This process promises to allow couples unable to conceive naturally to become parents. It will also allow for the creation of biologically motherless or fatherless children — something that will intentionally mock the natural order and the God who created it.