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I was listening to Focus on the Family a couple years ago and there was a couple who were using IVF. They had the extras frozen, called them "snowflake babies", and they were to be given to other couple who had fertility issues (if I remember right).

You are right! Many issues come into play with this. Many times there are more than one implanted in hopes that one of the several will take hold. Sometimes more than one takes hold and the parents or doctor then have to decide which one(s) to "abort"! WHOA! Many facets to the issue. I am not fully prepared to say I have thought it all through enough...I have friends with fertility issues who would make great parents, and desparately want children. I have seen the pain and agony they have gone through. I struggle with this one!!

I went through secondary infertility myself and checked into the drugs. When I saw the statistics for the birth defects, I didn't see them as "low" in percentages and chances....instead, I saw that I had one child already. With the birth defects, I saw those were lives that they were making a number....each of those numbers were families that were having to deal with a baby with a major birth defect. I was fortunate/ blessed that I had one child already. I was sad for the hopes that I thought would be lost, but turned it over to God and walked away from the medical intervention with drugs. God blessed us with 2 more living children a few years later.

I struggle with this one, I really do! If they are going the IVF way, I believe that all that implant and take should be kept. I am pro-life! (understatement for an activist) But you are right, Spirit, it is easy to answer quickly. Where should the line be drawn? What does scripture say? How does it translate? What about my friends who want desparately to have children? (rhetorical) Thought provoking, Spirit and LJ. This will take some wrestling, prayer, and digging in the Word.

As you know, one way that IVF is seriously morally objectionable is that there are always "spares" or "surplus embryos" or "leftovers" who you have to decide what to do with. The offspring that you leave frozen at the lab; and the "surplus" ones that the bio-genetic researchers want to experiment on; and even the "extras" who are implanted in your womb with the expectation (hope?) that some of them will fail to implant and die off "naturally." As if any of that is "natural."

Society, the IVF industry, and the law, all see the newly-begotten as mere material, as property. The can be legally brought into being, bought, sold, given away, donated to "science," disposed of with all the funeral honors of a piece of sh--.

More and more people see that that's a disgraceful way to treat your begotten children.

It's indignity.

God never authorized any way to bring babies into this world, except the one-flesh union of husband and wife. I think artificial insemination, IVF and the other new reproductive technologies are OK for livestock breeders. But I think using veterinary methods for human beings inevitably degrades our children and makes them akin to mere biological "material."