Earlier this week, British biologist Robert G. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology. Edwards and his late research partner, Patrick Steptoe, pioneered the process by which the first so-called “test tube” baby was born in 1978. Since that time, it is estimated that four million babies worldwide have been born via IVF technology.
Much of the news coverage of Edwards’s prize, tends to dismiss moral and ethical concerns as passé. In an NPR interview with bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn, host Robert Siegel began by asking, “[H]ave four million births through IVF trumped all the moral and ethical questions that were posed by the procedure?” It’s an odd question, like asking whether Americans’ continued reliance on fossil fuels trumps the moral questions raised by global warming. To his credit, Kahn responded by naming ethical concerns that remain, such as how scientists should handle millions of leftover frozen embryos.
Other news stories, however, fail to address ongoing ethical questions at all, portraying Edwards as a brave pioneer who fought back against uptight alarmists. A New York Times article, for example, states that the following:
Advances in human reproductive technology arouse people’s deepest concerns and often go through a cycle, first of outrage and charges of playing God, then of acceptance. In vitro fertilization proved no exception. ‘We know that I.V.F. was a great leap because Edwards and Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely trinity—the press, the pope, and prominent Nobel laureates,’ said the biochemist Joseph Goldstein in presenting the Lasker Award to Dr. Edwards in 2001.
The same article goes on to say that, “The objections [to IVF] gradually died away—except on the part of the Roman Catholic Church—as it became clear that the babies born by in vitro fertilization were healthy and that their parents were overjoyed to be able to start a family.”
However, Roman Catholics are not the only ones concerned about the ethics of reproductive technology, and parental joy does not negate complex moral issues. If anything, the questions raised by IVF have grown rather than diminished, as the technology has become more sophisticated and ubiquitous. Edwards himself famously crystallized one major concern in a 1999 newspaper interview, in which he said, “Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”
Edwards was referring to a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is IVF with the added step of screening embryos for particular genetic mutations, usually those causing genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs, although it can also be used for sex selection, adult-onset diseases such as breast cancer, and even certain physical traits. In naming the “quality” of children as a reasonable concern, Edwards, intentionally or not, was advocating for a reproductive process that treats babies as products, manufactured to parental and cultural expectations, and subjected to quality control. When genetic disorders are transformed from an unexpected turn of fate into a parental “sin”—when disabled children are entirely their parents’ fault—there is great potential for children with disabilities to lose the increased access, inclusion, and support they have gained in recent decades.
The potential eugenic use of IVF and PGD is only one area of concern.
Other moral issues raised by IVF and related technologies include:
the manipulation and disposal of human embryos;
whether parenthood is a right, vocation, or choice;
the effect of reproductive technology on orphans and adoption;
how the use of PGD for sex selection reinforces oppressive gender roles;
the increase in “reproductive tourism,” whereby citizens of wealthy nations travel to places like India for less expensive fertility treatment, including hiring poor women to serve as surrogates; and
how our increasingly perfectionist parenting culture, in which parents are expected to do everything and more to ensure their children’s ultimate success, might influence the use of reproductive technology, and vice versa.
Most aspiring parents who use IVF, with or without PGD, do not want “designer” babies. My husband and I used IVF with PGD to try to conceive a baby who would not inherit my disabling genetic bone disorder. We didn’t care about our child’s “quality,” but we did hope to have a child who would be spared the pain and disability of frequent broken bones. Our PGD cycle failed and we now have three naturally conceived children, one of whom inherited the disorder, all of whom are gifts. We know from experience that the longing of parents for healthy babies is not merely understandable; it is utterly human.
But the ethical concerns raised by IVF are far from passé. Reproductive technology has progressed faster than our capacity to consider the ethical questions it raises. Even as we celebrate Robert Edwards’s scientific accomplishments, let’s give the moral implications of IVF the attention they deserve.
Eight years ago, I interviewed Katy Hudson for a cover story for our sister publication Campus Life, our now defunct magazine for teenagers. The story, titled “The New Girls of Christian Music,” also featured Stacie Orrico, Rachael Lampa, Paige Lewis, and Joy Williams, all of whom went on to enjoy more successful careers in Christian music than Hudson. But today, all four could well be featured in a story titled, “Where Are They Now?”
Not so for Katy Hudson, who has since gone on to change her name to Katy Perry, becoming one of the biggest female pop stars in the world. I could hardly imagine, talking to the then 17-year-old Hudson, that she’d someday be an international music idol, in a sense. But even back then, she seemed to be seeking craving attention in unique ways. After a concert at a local church, she met people at her merch table with the words “I’m Katy” written on her forehead with a black Sharpie. She had also put a black star around a big zit on her chin (today, ironically, she’s a pitchwoman for Proactiv acne treatment), and she’d blackened out a tooth.
“How long am I to remain in this relationship?” This is the haunting question 65-year-old Glenda Crosley asks in the documentary Sin by Silence about the abusive husband she killed in 1986. She has been in prison for as long as she was married—24 years—and wonders when her ordeal will be over.
In the film, shot almost entirely inside the California Institution for Women, Crosley says the first time her husband, Sam, “truly got physical” was when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. He shoved her into a wall. Eventually she came to believe that the violence wouldn’t end until one of them was dead. According to The Bakersfield Californian, at the time of Sam’s murder, the couple was separated and having an argument in a parking lot. When Sam walked away from her car to the trunk of his, she believed he was going to get the tire iron he had threatened her with the week before. She rammed him once, drove away, then turned her car and hit him again. He died at the scene.
Elizabeth Leonard is the author of Convicted Survivors and a professor at Vanguard University, a Christian college in Costa Mesa, California. She says in the film that women who leave abusive relationships are often subject to “separation assault” and are 75 percent more likely to be murdered than before they left. So the answer to the question: Why didn’t she just leave? is not a simple one. In the same 2009 Bakersfield Californian article, Crosley’s daughter Stacy is quoted as saying she remembers her mother trying to leave several times and each of them ending with her father’s rage. She even blames herself for her father’s death because one of the times her mother returned was because a judge wouldn’t release her from a group home unless her parents were living together.
“We are offenders, but we’re victims,” says Brenda Clubine in another Sin by Silence scene. Clubine is founder of Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA), the support group at the heart of the film. Brenda’s tireless work helped change California law in 1992 to allow expert testimony on Battered Women’s Syndrome into court rooms and again in 2002 to allow women whose convictions predated the 1992 ruling the same right on appeal. Clubine tells viewers, “This group is not about staying in the victim role.” It starts there, helping women to recognize the process that led them to murder their spouses, but then its goals move to education about and eradication of domestic violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JgsgM6AApg
Twenty CWAA members have been released from prison in the nine years since director-producer and Vanguard professor Olivia Klaus first began attending its meetings. A desperate phone call from a friend started her on a journey to find out why abuse happens, why the one-in-four American women who experience it stay, and how they can get out. Klaus says, “Being from a Christian family, I never thought domestic violence would come into my circle …. It completely shattered my world.” Klaus turned to Leonard, a colleague at Vanguard. Leonard told her that if she really wanted to understand domestic violence and help her friend, she needed to go with her to prison to “learn from the experts.”
Klaus says, “From that first day, these women completely changed my life …. What society has labeled as murderers, I see as mothers, as grandmothers, or even myself. Domestic violence has no boundaries and it can happen to anyone, and it can happen to the point where you have to defend yourself.” The 32-year-old filmmaker adds, “Spiritually, this film has been the glue for my beliefs. Once my friend opened up to me about her relationship and once I met these women, I could no longer see the world with rose-colored glasses …. Domestic violence is something that we’ve overlooked for far too long. We have women in our churches who are in pain and need help.”
Klaus hopes that other women’s groups will do as the women of Newport Church in Newport Beach have done. The women not only gave generously to finance Sin By Silence, they also provide significant support and resources for CWAA women when they are released from prison.
Throughout October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Sin by Silence can be seen at Constellation.tv in virtual screenings that are hosted by key project participants. Among them is Brenda Clubine. Her heartbreaking and hope filled story provides this film with an ending so surprising that you will have to see it for yourself to believe it. I urge you to do so. But don’t stop there. How about turning your next church women’s social into an opportunity to respond to domestic violence?
At the time (that’s her one and only Christian CD cover, at left), I wrote, “Katy Hudson’s motto might well be, ‘What you see is what you get.’ And with Katy, you never know what you’ll see. Or get.” I described her as “a regular teen, trying to figure out faith and life and everything in between.” And she told me, “I just want to be real. I’ll never wear a mask.”
She’s not wearing much of anything in the brand-new cover story of Rolling Stone, an article titled, “Sex, God & Katy Perry.” (Caution: The cover photo and several inside photos are quite steamy.) And she’s not holding much back as she tells her story of growing up in a Christian home, of her brief dalliance with Christian music, her longing to be a pop star, her relationship with fiance Russell Brand, and her present-day beliefs.
RS writes that “one would think her religious past is behind her, but [Perry] still considers herself a Christian.” She tells the magazine, “God is very much still a part of my life. But the way the details are told in the Bible—that’s very fuzzy for me. And I want to throw up when I saw that. But that’s the truth. . . . I still believe that Jesus is the son of God. But I also believe in extraterrestrials, and that there are people sent from God to be messengers, and all sorts of crazy stuff.
“I look up into the sky and I’m just mindf–-ed — all those stars and planets, the neverendingness of the universe. I just can’t believe that we’re the only polluting population. Every time I look up, I know that I’m nothing and there’s something way beyond me. I don’t think it’s as simple as heaven and hell.”
Fascinating but also confused observations from a young woman (she’s now 25) who is still trying to figure things out, having come out of a childhood in a Christian home where both parents considered themselves pastors and where speaking in tongues was commonplace. “My mom and dad practice ‘tongues and interpretation’ together—my dad speaks in tongues, and my mom interprets it,” Perry told RS. “That’s their gift.” The three children, including Katy, spoke in tongues as well. “Speaking in tongues is as normal to me as ‘Pass the salt. A lot of religions use meditation or chanting as a subliminal prayer language, and speaking in tongues isn’t that different—it’s a secret, direct language to God. If I felt intuitively that I had to pray for some situation, but I didn’t rationally understand it, I just let my spirit pray for it.”
Perry said that after her Christian label shut down and that it was clear that “my gospel career was going nowhere,” she started writing love songs and pursuing a pop career – not rejecting her faith in the process, but not exactly fully letting it define her, either. “Letting go was a process,” she said. “Meeting gay people, or Jewish people, and realizing that they were fine was a big part of it. Once I stopped being chaperoned, and realized I had a choice in life, I was like, ‘Wow, there are a lot of choices.’ I began to become a sponge for all that I had missed—the music, the movies. I was as curious as the cat. But I’m not dead yet.”
