IVF at Christmas Time

"Be it unto me according to thy word."

If you are here reading this because of IVF or surrogacy, please know that I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you exist. If your kids are here because of IVF or surrogacy, I’m glad they’re here, too. What follows, though a critique of our modern use of technology, is not an attack on you or your beautiful children.

Last week, I had a last-minute opportunity to jump in the car and hear Michael Knowles give a speech at Clemson University. The speech was titled, “Kids are not Commodities: Surrogacy and IVF.” It was very good and my mind has been swirling with many thoughts and offshoots of thoughts ever since.

This is a topic I have pondered, long and hard, for many years. A good fifteen or more, honestly. Surrogacy is the inciting event of my novel, 27, which I began around that time, several years before I came to the slow and painful realization that the chances of my husband and I conceiving children were slim to none.

Cutting straight to the chase, I agree with everything Knowles had to say on the subject, which might explain to anyone who has wondered, why my husband and I have not sought help from fertility specialists and likely never will. (Apart from the most basic and unobtrusive diagnostics…maybe.) Simply put, I believe much in the fertility industry is arrogant and high-handed meddling in the sphere reserved for God alone. Though I consider myself a fairly wise person in the grand scheme of things, I would make a poor sovereign over the life of anyone else much less my own. I am not God, and I am happy to take my place underneath Him in trusting, humble, and patient obedience.

You can watch the full speech here:

Kids are Not Commodities

It is a surreal experience, spending Christmas after Christmas with the knowledge that I may not ever have a child for whom I hang stockings over the fireplace with care. There have been tears over this in the past. There will likely be more. But now, eight years into my marriage, the experience is…different. I might dare even say, beautiful.

The passages we read every year at Christmastime take on such a new significance for me. After all, they revolve around conception. Two miraculous conceptions are a part of the Christmas story, and they demonstrate God’s total sovereignty over the microscopic.

What is most beautiful to me is the absolute humility of Mary. Most humorous—Zacharias arguing with an angel of the Lord in the Holy of Holies, of all places and being pronounced mute on the spot for his troubles.

One accepted the Word of the Lord without protest, even though she had everything to lose being found pregnant before marriage: her future husband, her reputation, and possibly her very life.

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy Word,” was all she said.

Zacharias, on the other hand, had everything to gain and nothing to lose when the angel told him his elderly wife would conceive and bear a child. But instead of Mary’s humble obedience, he argued in prideful unbelief.

God is the Lord over life and how it begins. We can either accept that in faith or doubt it in unbelief.

Or take part in the third option—usurping the power over life for ourselves.

Surrogacy, after all, is not new. It’s been a part of humanity’s sin since nearly the beginning. It’s just more high-tech now. Back then, the rich and powerful just made the slave girl go to bed with the mistresses’ husband. Now we eliminate that icky sex part and pay poor girls to carry embryos conceived in test tubes. Wombs for rent. Slave girls for free.

High tech or not, what a world of suffering it brings!

After all, the account of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar is by no means a success story. It’s pretty clear from the text that God wasn’t pleased with Sarah’s meddling nor Abraham’s acquiescence. We know how Isaac and Ishmael turned out. Their descendants are warring to this day. October 7 was a glaring enough illustration of that.

There was another sickening repeat of this story with Jacob and his two wives, Leah and Rachel. So overcome with their own personal heartaches and disappointments, it didn’t take much to forget the humanity of their servant girls and hand them over to Jacob, then claim the resulting babies as their own in sacrifice to their sad, desperate power play. Is it any wonder the sons of Jacob were so lacking in personal virtue? The upheaval and trauma they endured, all of them. Only one—Joseph—was known for his piety. The rest…thieves, murderers, adulterers, incestuous, violent men.

Bad things happen when we try to play God. Our souls rot from the inside out and it infects everything we touch.

During the question and answer time after Knowles’ speech, a young man stood up and told the audience that prior to his birth, he spent the first seven years of his life in a freezer at a fertility clinic. I had forgotten about that bit momentarily. It boggled my mind. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of human beings in arrested development in freezers all over the world, because adult humans had desires that God wasn’t granting fast enough. So, they took matters into their own hands. With the aid of technology, they created more embryos than a woman can safely carry to term. They implanted some, aborted some, and then stored the rest away in the freezer…like extra loaves of bread. They might get one or two out one day, might not. Just depends on the adults’ feelings, desires, emotions.

Disordered.

What will happen to all of them? They won’t all make it out of the freezer. Some will be used later by their biological parents. Some will get adopted to go on and live life—possibly meet their siblings at random and never recognize their flesh and blood. But most of them will be destroyed. Human lives created and then thrown away like so much extra expired product.

This, and much worse, is what happens when we meddle in the work intended for God alone.

For this and many more reasons beside, I reject IVF and surrogacy without a backward glance. Because the other way, even if I never have my own child, is more beautiful. The way of humility is dazzling. And I don’t say that ironically.

As we approach Christmas Day, I think of Mary’s words often. It occurs to me that the only right response to a pregnancy or empty arms is summed up in the words God saw fit to preserve for us—the words of an obscure, Jewish girl from nowhere special:

“Behold, the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy word.”

I am not entitled to a child. Nor am I entitled to know the reasons God has withheld that gift from me. And the more I accept what He gives or doesn’t in trusting obedience, knowing that He loves me dearly and would only will my best, the more lovely and bright my life becomes. I choose to reject resentment, bitterness and anger and get busy doing the next thing directly in front of me.

If God gives me and Jonathon a baby, I will be delighted. But if He doesn’t, I will not wallow in self-pity, nor will I allow myself to take matters into my own hands to get what I want at any cost. That is the path to misery. Misery that doesn’t just end with me but with every other human I interact with.

And God does not want misery for me or you. He wants us full of joy and gladness. I can honestly say that even childless, I can join Mary’s magnificat:

“For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.”

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

P.S. Don’t forget to become a paid subscriber before January 1st if you want a chance to read a preview copy of 27 before it’s published! Just switch from free to paid, I’ll email you for your mailing address, and send you a copy!