Replies

"You, Lord, created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you
because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together intricately
in the depths of the Eretz.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts,
O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

Psalm 139

You will not find in vitro fertilization in your Biblical concordance, for obvious reasons--- the same reasons you won't find BDSM, online porn addiction, party drugs, fisting, post-op transsexuals, cloning, embryonic stem cell research, artificial insemination, and Queer Studies Majors. These things are either technically or culturally unknown in Biblical times.

However there are Biblical principles which apply here, because although the Bible doesn't say anything explicitly about these perversions, it does say a lot about the wisdom of Divine Providence in the design of human nature.

In other words, God wrote both the "Book of Scripture" and the "Book of Nature." By this I mean, He is the Author of both: the Creation which He made, and the Scriptures He has given us to show forth His will.

Based on Genesis, we can see that God's original plan for us, "In the divine image He created him, male and female He created them" --- was very good. We know that our embodied maleness and femaleness, and the way we make love and make life, reflects His will and His wisdom.

Therefore when things go wrong for us bodily, for instance, the tragedy of infertility, the true ethical aim of medical practice, is simply to restore the original good natural design. We must aim to restore natural fertility, which means, the ability to conceive and bear children through natural marital intercourse.

Medical intervention is good when it heals injuries, cures diseases, strengthens functions that have been weakened or disabled. The whole key is to repair and restore back to normal.

Thee is nothing normal or natural about masturbating into a jar or a plastic baggie, handing your sperm over to a lab tech, meanwhile some woman's body (maybe your wife's) is forced into hyperovulation --- a pathological condition --- with injected hormones; then the ova are harvested, and the ova and sperm are mixed in a laboratory procedure which is not intimately personal and certainly not lovemaking; then the resulting offspring, in their vulnerable embryonic state, are scrutinized and any that are disfavored are culled and destroyed.

The whole procedure in intentionally the very opposite of normal physiological function; the results of procreation are treated like lab materials, not like nascent creations of God Who is the Lord and Giver of Life. There is no innate sense that human procreation is sacred, or that we are to "image" God --- the Creator God, Who made love and made life in the same sacred instant. Rather we force a technological process like the veterinary breeding of pedigreed dogs and race-horses, or the brewing of batches of bacteria.

In ther words, what was designed by Divine Wisdom to be intimate, veiled from public gaze, grounded in interpersonal love, beautiful in its intertwined meanings -- re-read Psalm 139 --- becomes instead a manufacturing process and a crass commercial transaction.

It confuses the categories of "person" and "product." Even legally, it degrades "child" into "property."

It does not restore natural fertility; in fact, it doesn't even try. It does not heal sexual intercourse as the natural source of life: it replaces it. It does not honor the conceived child: it treats the embryonic child as a thing to be bred or to be discarded, or even to be experimented on, sold, or flushed down the sewer as medical waste.

This fails to restore natural sexual health and disrespects sanctity of the beginnings of life.