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Amy Laura Hall is assistant professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School and a dedicated mother of two girls who often accompany Mom on business trips. It is not unusual for Hall to check her blouse for toddler goop as she begins a lecture.

Her audiences are often left both disturbed and grateful for this ordained Methodist's insights into the way our society tends to see children as an inconvenience. Hall is a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology (2004-2005), and she is using this grant to write a book titled Conceiving Parenthood. Associate editor Agnieszka Tennant spoke with Hall recently.

Throughout history, conservative Christians have believed that personhood begins at conception. As technology began to present us with new choices, have you noticed a shift in the way we think about personhood?

This question is tricky, given our history. Even Christians committed to biblical truth and salvation through Christ have been tempted to bend, stretch, and evade God's unequivocal call to "choose life." When land, money, health, or status has been at stake, Christians have reshaped their imaginations to see some humans as subhuman, as not quite children of the heavenly Father. There are obvious, blatant examples—from slavery to selectively aborting fetuses with disabilities. But there are also more subtle examples—from exploiting cheap human labor to using "excess" embryos for medical research.

A consistent life ethic, whereby we think of all human life as gathered safely in the bosom of God, requires a radically nonutilitarian way of life. Evangelical Christians still struggle with this call. Biotechnology offers a new set of temptations. But it also grants a new opportunity to witness to life.

In the lead story, Bob Smietana describes your pro-life friend's reaction to an embryo under the microscope. Why do you think she decided it wasn't a human being?

I think her desire for the gift of a child of her own collided with her conviction that each incipient human life is a gift cherished by God. In that collision, her previous conviction had to fall away.

This has occurred to a segment of evangelical and mainline Christians. As we have become privy to the prayers of infertile couples, as we have watched embryos chosen under the microscope, as we have rightly cherished and baptized children born through in vitro fertilization (IVF), we have been wooed to put aside our sense of the incalculable worth of early embryonic life.

Perhaps our wonder at the way biotechnology can so masterfully create has overtaken our wonder at the relatively unpredictable ways the God of Jesus Christ creates families of blessing. Consider Matthew's genealogy. Now there is a mysterious, even mystifying, process that should evoke awe.

Some Christians say the ethical way to do IVF is to freeze the fertilized egg before the DNA strands of the sperm and egg combine. Do you agree?

How did we come to the point where Christians are trying to sort through the logistics of joining DNA to DNA? What kind of trajectory gave this generation the task of timing the exact, precise moment when IVF is licit or illicit? Why were we so very intent to solve the problem of infertility that we have mastered the exact timing of when sperm and egg become incipient human life?

There are evangelicals who argue that it is natural to want to have our own children so badly that we will expend tremendous time, effort, and expertise to pursue them. It is a God-given drive, some say, and it should come as no surprise that Christians have used all our scientific advances to drive toward parenthood.

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July 2004, Vol. 48, No. 7