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Weiss also quoted David Hoffman, a fertility doctor and past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology: "None of us really want to hang on to those embryos in perpetuity."

Would it be too blunt to remind the research community that all human beings start their lives as embryos? Have we so reduced all human life before birth to so much raw material, to be mass processed into whatever product best suits our needs at any given moment?

Protestant Christians have, to date, sometimes made their peace with IVF. Indeed, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations' House of Delegates decided in 1983 that IVF "may be morally justified when such a pregnancy takes place in the context of the marital bond."

We appreciate that CMDA stresses the marital bond, and it further says that "amniocentesis with possible abortion should not be an expected part of the clinical protocol."

Nevertheless, we feel more concern than ever that IVF too often sets couples on a course of parenthood at all costs—not only financially, but also ethically and spiritually. While the desire for children is God-given and a moral good, conceiving a child of one's own is not something we are all due. Life in a fallen world deprives people of many good and worthy things, including their own lives or the lives of their children (or would-be children).

Those of us who cannot know the joy of children must think with increasing precision and honesty about whether God has set appropriate limits to our desire for childbearing. Medical science has progressed to the point of offering us many ways to bring a child into the world, whether using our own bodies or those of complete strangers. But what threats might this Promethean offer pose to our very souls—or, just as important, to the bodies and souls created in vitro?

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See also today's news report on this topic: "400,000 and Counting | Christians recoil at the explosive growth of frozen human embryos."

The RAND Corporation's report and the May 8 Washington Post article that broke the story are both available online.

Christianity Today's Life Ethics archive and the Science Pages of our sister publication Books & Culture have more perspective on bioethics. For current news on Fertility and Pregnancy, see Yahoo full coverage.

CT's earlier coverage of frozen embryos and fertility treatments includes:

Biotech Babies | How far should Christian couples go in the quest for a child of their own? (Dec. 7, 1988)

No Room in the Womb? | Couples with high-risk pregnancies face the 'selective reduction' dilemma (Dec. 6, 1999)

Embryo 'Adoption' Matches Donors and Would-be Parents | 'Snowflake' program is only of its kind in dealing with leftover fertilized eggs (Nov. 2, 1999)

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July 2003, Vol. 47, No. 7