Tiny, lifeless children on a lab floor: Did they die from the force of the impact, or when they came to room temperature? Either way, they never knew the warmth of a womb. 

When several couples sued a fertility clinic in Alabama claiming the wrongful death of their frozen embryos in December 2020, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualify as children. The Feb. 16 decision exposed the ways even pro-life Christians and conservatives lack a united front on third-party reproduction. 

We all want to see couples who’ve struggled with infertility finally achieve healthy pregnancies, and modern science has created ways to make that possible. To many of the one in eight American couples suffering infertility, in vitro fertilization seems like science’s answer to their prayers. 

Its proponents have secured broad approval for the procedure by manipulating our compassion. In reality, IVF is founded upon principles antithetical to the pro-life position, which dictate that everything is permitted if the result is a child. IVF commodifies human life, keeps unborn children in limbo, and contributes to our country’s practice of throwing away inconvenient lives. 

I have several friends conceived through IVF. I’m so glad they exist. While I don’t think their parents were justified in choosing IVF, their lives have as much dignity as people conceived naturally. 

But IVF needs to end. Pro-lifers must see through the facade and enact real compassion toward people at every stage of life. 

Developed in the 1970s, IVF entails extracting a woman’s egg, fertilizing it with sperm in a lab, and implanting it back into her body. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as much as 3% of the American population was conceived through IVF. 

It seems contradictory for pro-lifers to oppose such a popular means of creating life. But IVF plays a dangerous game. It treats children as commodities: something capable of being bought and frozen and implanted for the sake of deserving adults. In the majority of states, IVF embryos qualify under the law as property, not persons. But in the logic of false compassion, the ends justify the means. 

And they are chilling means indeed. Stories in the media usually glaze over the grim details of in vitro fertilization.

For $10,000 to $25,000 per treatment round of IVF, fertility clinics typically create two to four embryos for every implantation attempt. 

Clinic workers and parents select only the genetically strongest embryos to implant, discarding or freezing all those deemed “poor quality.” Because of the delicate nature of the procedure, most women take two to three embryo transfers to become pregnant. This means, for an average woman who conceives through IVF, about eight embryos go unused. 

These embryos may be thawed out and discarded as medical waste, sold as research material, or preserved for the future through cryopreservation. Embryos can be used for future rounds of IVF, but most linger indefinitely in the freezers of fertility labs or storage facilities. 

Most never know anything beyond the minus 70 chill of a freezer. Couples put the lives of these children on hold for the sake of a sibling they may never meet.

The data vary widely, but the National Embryo Donation Center estimates close to a million embryos have been frozen since the 1970s.

Allowing couples — no matter how well-intentioned — to buy human beings and then deprive them of the chance to grow to full term is anything but pro-life. A truly compassionate response to infertility means acknowledging the good desire of couples trying to conceive, while seeking an ethical means to parenthood.

Many infertility medicines and therapies exist to help couples conceive. Nor are infertility treatments the only path to parenthood. According to AdoptUSKids, “Of the 400,000 children in foster care, approximately 117,000 are waiting to be adopted.”

The siren song of IVF draws the money and focus of prospective parents away from children who already exist and desperately need permanent families. 

We can both call out IVF for what it is — a practice antithetical to compassion — while honoring the goodness of the lives created through IVF. If anything, these people deserve greater empathy for the complex circumstances of their conception and the reality of their frozen siblings. 

It’s not too late to reverse course. In a culture devoted to pursuing easy solutions at the cost of inconvenient lives, the movement against IVF will be arduous.

Fertility clinics have every reason to continue IVF despite ethical quandaries, for the practice is lucrative. The IVF industry represented a $5 billion market share in 2022 and is projected to increase by 7% yearly, according to Allied Market Research.

But the cost is a million voiceless children in dry ice.