[James C. Bennett]

Would you treat a child born through an IVF treatment, any differently than one conceived naturally? If not, then hasn’t the procedure helped the parents achieve what they initially sought, overcoming a natural obstacle?

[Mrs. Don-o]

"Would you treat a child born through an IVF treatment, any differently than one conceived naturally?"

Yes; no; not exactly. I'm not sure what you're getting at, here. I happen to have two sons, one born to me and one adopted, and I love them both and treat them differently (that would be to say, I treat theam "individually") as their different talents, temperaments, and circumstances warrant. It does not, I hope, involve invidious discrimination: they're just strikingly different.

"...and if not, then hasn’t the procedure helped the parents achieve what they initially sought, overcoming a natural obstacle?"

But I do treat them differently. I hope I will not confuse the issue if I try to get at your point in a different way: IVF helped the couple get a child, as pursuing adoption helped my husband and me a get a child. It's the same in that sense.

It's different, though, for other reasons, which I will try to untangle here.

IVF is commonly a matter of just one of the couple contributing genetic material: the wife's ova, with donor (more accurate to say: vendor) sperm; or egg-vendor ova, with the husband's sperm. Or it could be vendor all the way: Couple A+B getting ova from Woman X and sperm from Man Y, and then having an embryo generated in vitro and implanted which is "theirs" as paying customers, but not related to either of them genetically.

As child-getting, it succeeds (they get a child) but as fertility-treatment, it fails. IVF is no more a fertility tretment than adoption is. The underlying fertility problem, as a therapeutic matter, is not addressed.

But IVF is also morally distinguishable from adoption, and morally objectionable, for these reasons:

• Adoption is responding to the needs of a child who is for whatever reason bereft of the attachment and care of his natural mother and father. The adoptive parents didn't cause the child to be born bereft of his natural birthright: they didn't arrange for the natural parents to beget him and then turn him over; on the contrary, they are responding to what everyone sees as an unfortunate circumstance which has already happened: he has no mother and father, and he needs them.

• Adoption doesn't violate the strictly interpersonal nature of human procreation. IVF does. It turns procreation from a personal event we have in common with the whole human race, which constitues part of our human dignity, to a laboratory procedure by which we become a kind of property.

I refer you to the 1992 Tennessee Frozen Human Embryo Case so you can contemplate the probably unforseen, but inevitable result.

Not wanting to turn this into a full-fledged essay, let me just summarize here: One more step in the humanization of the human race.