This week’s awarding of the Nobel Prize in medicine to Robert Edwards for his role in developing in vitro fertilization has thrown a spotlight on the religious right’s deeply offensive stance on this amazing advance in medical science.
Since it was developed, in vitro fertilization has been responsible for the births of over 4 million children. That’s 4 million children that would otherwise not have been born to desperate parents robbed by nature of the ability to have children on their own.
The Vatican continues to speak out against this miracle technology based on anti-scientific delusions about the spiritual properties of a blob of cells and something about IVF separating conception from the “conjugal act.”
Now in USA Today’s Faith and Reason section, Cathy Lynn Grossman takes this thinking to an offensive extreme asking:
“Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes — or mind or hands, depending on your theology/philosophy — of God? Does the science behind this merit the Nobel Prize for Medicine or condemnation in the realm of faith and ethics?”
and:
“Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God? Does the science behind this merit a Nobel Prize, or ethical condemnation? And what about the parents? Is their IVF choice selfish or loving? Are they creators — or merely shoppers?”
It is incredibly offensive and disturbing that somebody would consider questioning a child’s status as a human being because of how they were conceived. What, because my parents did it the old fashioned way, I am granted a soul while a child born of IVF is less of a person in the eyes of god? What a horribly offensive proposition.