Ivf Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

A new article at NBC News completely flips reality about the recent bombing at a California fertility clinic, comparing the assault to attacks on abortion facilities.

Titled “Bombing at IVF clinic should be a security wake-up call for fertility centers, experts say,” the story by Elizabeth Chuck ignores the fact that the Palm Springs atrocity, in which the bomber died and four bystanders were injured, was perpetrated by a self-proclaimed anti-humanist who believed that bringing children into the world is wrong. The bomber, Guy Edward Bartkus, left behind a manifesto proclaiming his goal was to “sterilize this planet of the disease of life.” He was, in short, not a pro-lifer by any measurement, but the radical opposite.

Media reports like this one illustrate the now, near-ubiquitous challenge of what-aboutism, where what should be a sustainable consensus against violence from any quarter is converted into a tit-for-tat about one side or the other of public debates seeming to excuse such actions by its allies. The truth is that there is violence today on both sides of many hotly contested issues, and it is also true that most proponents of various causes reject such tactics as extreme. Maintaining this moral consistency has proven to be very difficult, but the facts about the prevalence of violence remind us of the urgent need for balance and self-restraint in what has become an aggravating blame game.

Take some of the most notorious criminal acts of the last several years. Besides the attack by Bartkus, as Wesley Smith notes in a must-read article at National Review, there has been a wave of antipathy to human existence in both the intellectual press and on the street. Smith cites an incident in 2010 where an assailant at the Discovery Channel demanded that the television service stop “encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants.”

Smith goes on to recap articles from the last few years in prestigious publications like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Medical Ethics that cast a relentlessly bleak picture of human existence and call for the end not only of policies that encourage childbearing but for any childbearing at all. In 2012, a planned mass shooting at Family Research Council was thwarted by the heroic action of building operations manager Leo Johnson, who sustained a serious wound when a man angered by FRC’s stances on sexual conduct invaded the FRC headquarters.

Far from isolated incidents, these kinds of crimes can become commonplace as a result of news events extremists label intolerable. Last month, a California man bent on killing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh pleaded guilty to attempted assassination, blaming his actions on the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion on abortion and other judicial actions he believed were responsible for the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. In the wake of the high court’s June 2022 ruling in the Dobbs case, attacks were launched against nonprofit pregnancy help centers across the United States. Varying in severity, and with fortunately no loss of life, an estimated total of more than 100 assaults occurred on centers and churches across the United States. Apprehensions and prosecution of individuals responsible were rare under the Biden administration but did occur under the federal FACE Act.

None of this is to say that opponents of abortion and objectors to other public policies have been immune from committing similar deeds. The individuals imprisoned for peacefully blocking access to abortion facilities may have been selectively prosecuted and disproportionately punished, but there is little question they violated the same federal law that protects pregnancy help centers and churches from illegal acts. Over the long history of the abortion debate, the killing of abortionists has occurred in Colorado, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, and several other states. Director-actor Clint Eastwood made the film “Richard Jewell” about a security cop who was wrongly prosecuted after he foiled a bomb attack on the Olympic Village in Atlanta. The actual perpetrator, one Eric Rudolph, was identified and convicted in 2005 for his role in the bombing of a gay nightclub and an abortion facility in Birmingham, Alabama, years earlier. He is serving multiple terms of life imprisonment for these actions.

Understanding why individuals resort to violence, and why more individuals now justify that resort, including when actions occur on the scale of the Black Lives Matter riots and the January 6, 2021 incursion into the U.S. Capitol, is a vital question of our time. It is a sad condition when one hears the first reports of a violent incident, a Tesla exploding outside a Las Vegas hotel or a car bomb outside an IVF facility, and immediately waits for news whether the perpetrator was “one of ours.” Because the truth is, people who abandon the law and resort to these actions, whatever their motive, are never one of ours, whether they are anti-natalists or militant pro-lifers or race partisans or election deniers. The temptation to which NBC News succumbed with trying to tie Bartkus to opponents of various IVF practices is another chapter of the continuing tragedy of what-aboutism.

It is vital that debates about ethical matters, especially those as potent as abortion and test tube babies, proceed without the injection of point-scoring masquerading as insight. On the eve of the release of expected policy recommendations on IVF from the Trump administration, the choice is not merely between massive public funding of this practice or endorsement of the Guy Bartkuses of the world. The choice is between rational, principled, public debate and a collapse into governing by fear, intimidation, or neglect.

It does little to defend democracy when smaller numbers than ever turn out to exercise it at the ballot box. The more passionate and portentous the issue, the more essential this commitment to peaceful change becomes. Add to the brew the fact, obvious from recent elections, that the United States is a sharply divided country on some of the most fundamental questions: what is a man or woman, who is a human being, are the disabled equally valuable, what is marriage? The side of these questions that not only makes the better argument but also appeals to our better nature, that eschews violence of action or rhetoric, that moves with compassion and clarity, is the side that can, and will deserve to, prevail.

Meanwhile, as Wesley Smith so persuasively demonstrates, the strain of nihilism running through today’s intellectual culture is far deeper than that of one madman who was bereft of fatherly presence or civil guidance. Today’s isolated and violent souls are increasingly fed by isolating ideologies for whom human doom is always just around the corner. Our most prominent journals would do well to do some couples therapy over their attraction to such thinking and stop publishing so much rancor, not because they do not have the right to do so but because it isn’t right to do so. The human future is only as bleak or bright as we are willing to make it.

AUTHOR

Chuck Donovan

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

“This whole kerfuffle in Alabama has revealed … the worldview of the Left, which is a worldview of death. And they’re really running with this like they ran after the Dobbs decision,” David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, said on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “This is not like a one-off,” agreed FRC President Tony Perkins. “The worldview has been revealed. And I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer.”

Enraged by an Alabama Supreme Court decision recognizing the value of all unborn human life, the left-wing media has attempted to carefully curate camera angles of the controversy, so as to portray a hamster as a hippo. First, they launched a scaremongering campaign falsely alleging that Republicans are targeting in vitro fertilization (IVF). Then, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) opportunistically promoted a bill that wouldn’t so much protect IVF as it would legalize other anti-human practices, such as human cloning, human-animal chimeras, designer babies, and commercial gestational surrogacy.

To browbeat timid opponents into playing along with the charade, the Left trumped up fears of “theocracy” based on a non-binding concurring opinion. “The hand-wringing on the Left … isn’t actually on the majority decision,” Closson noted, but on “a concurring opinion that the chief justice wrote.”

Fear prevents people from thinking clearly, and that’s exactly what the Left is hoping for. If legislators had a moment to sit back and reflect, they would likely realize that “there are moral and spiritual, theological implications here,” said Perkins.

In fact, “There’s a long history within Christian ethics of looking at IVF and saying that … it’s morally fraught,” said Closson. IVF is a process designed for helping infertile couples conceive a child by combining egg and sperm in a laboratory, and then implanting the newly created human life back into the mother’s womb. “As Christians, we believe that at conception, when that sperm and egg come together, you have a human being.”

However, many IVF practitioners create far more embryos than would ever be gestated. “Usually it’s a dozen, maybe even more embryos” that are created, explained Closson. “They selectively choose which ones to implant in the woman.” Of these, all but one will likely be aborted. “Then the others are stored in freezer,” added Closson, resulting today in “millions of frozen embryos in freezers all over the country.” Many are never used and ultimately destroyed.

Despite the moral and ethical pitfalls of IVF, the Alabama Supreme Court did not prohibit the practice, nor even regulate it. All they said was a law protecting children from harm applied to all children, including embryos conceived via IVF. And, in a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker added his commentary on the Alabama Constitution’s recognition of the “sanctity of unborn life.”

“That phrase, ‘sanctity of [unborn] life,’ appears in the Alabama Constitution. So, just being a good lawyer, [Parker] said, ‘Where did these words come from? What do these words mean?’ And so, he explored the Christian tradition of understanding sanctity of life, image of God,” Closson summarized.

Closson found it humorous that mainstream media accounts made the mistake of sneering at Parker’s opinion for “quoting 16th-century dead theologians like John Calvin and whatnot.” All their derision proved is that “Christians have been thinking about these issues for a very long time,” he pointed out. “It’s not that we just thought of these in a right-wing think tank last week. We’ve been thinking deeply about these issues for centuries.”

This is humorous because the Left doesn’t realize how far outclassed they are by centuries of brilliant minds. They don’t realize it because they never had to engage with that ancient tradition. Their thinking descends from Karl Marx, and while they might engage with some of his immediate intellectual forebearers (Rousseau, Darwin, Mill), they have little use for a tradition that had already grown wizened before those men were born. “The problem we’re seeing today is the absence of moral truth,” said Perkins. “There are no ethics that are standard and steadfast. It’s a Wild, Wild West.”

One implication of this ethical anarchy is the absence of any limits on what science should do. Just as researchers for the Chinese Communist Party continue to bioengineer deadlier coronaviruses and chimerical monkeys, so the American Left displays an apparent preference for pedantic, utilitarian reasoning over fundamental human rights. Duckworth’s bill would be a go-ahead signal to a lot of ethically dubious research.

“Just because science enables us to do something doesn’t mean we should do it,” argued Perkins. “We should be concerned about both the means and the ends of where this would lead us. And it needs to be guided by biblical truth, by morality … [and by] ethics.”

The fundamental reason why Christians believe all human life is valuable is that “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). To every human being, this reality imparts “transcendent value,” insisted Perkins. “It’s not value assigned to it. It is value that is inherent in it because it is created in the image of God.”

The road to pushing for designer babies, chimeras, cloning, and surrogacy begins by denying the fundamental reality that all human beings have inherent value because they bear God’s image.

“We need to start calling out a lie for what it is. It is a lie,” Perkins insisted. “Understanding is the first step, but having the confidence of that understanding gives us the ability to push back and say, ‘No, this is not true. It is not right, it is false.’”

Conservatives “playing defense” over the sanctity of unborn life don’t seem to realize that ours is the inherently stronger position. For centuries, Western civilization’s brightest minds have helped develop the implications of this doctrine, which is absolute truth. What does rootless, groundless, post-modern Marxism have to offer in comparison?

The current circumstances are as if the presidential motorcade was suddenly set upon by a gang of youths throwing pea gravel. Exiting the vehicle would be foolish, and waving a white flag would be irresponsible. If conservatives recognize and exploit the advantages of our position, the smear campaign against those standing up for the lives of unborn babies — including those conceived via IVF — can accomplish nothing.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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Chuck Donovan

Joshua Arnold