Beware victorious political movements. Winning brings out the zealots, and zealots devour their friends. Consider the Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia, which, at the peak of its power, was known to kill people for wearing glasses on the theory that glasses signified the elite intellectual class. As though anyone other than an elite intellectual could digest the turgid tomes of the communist canon.
It is thus with the antiabortion movement in the United States. Aflame with their success in overturning Roe v. Wade, the zealots of the movement have turned their energies against the suite of medical procedures known generally as IVF. In various state legislatures as well as the Southern Baptist Convention, the perverse result is that the supposed champions of families and babies are targeting the very families that want babies the most.
I doubt very seriously that many of the Baptists who voted last week to anathematize IVF have any experience with it. Let me tell them a little about it. No doubt it would be better for them to hear from a woman, because the process is even more excruciating for women than for men, but antiabortion zealots don’t find women to be reliable sources on the topic of reproduction. So I will have to do.
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My wife and I arrived at the office of a renowned ART specialist — assisted reproductive technology, that is, of which in vitro fertilization is one example — as many couples do: at the end of a long trail of shredded assumptions, dashed hopes and near-death experiences. Having paid close attention to our P.E. teachers during the one awkward week of the school year when sex education was taught, we believed that making a baby was as simple as toasting bread and a lot more fun.
Three miscarriages, a molar pregnancy and an emergency surgery to stem the hemorrhaging from a ruptured fallopian tube later, we were candidates for IVF. I’ll share a brief overview of that process, which I would not wish on my worst enemy, but let me say first that it involves a lot of sitting around and waiting nervously. We shared that time with couples whose path to the waiting room was every bit as scary and sad as ours — and in many cases worse. The vibe in an IVF waiting room is analogous to the stool in the corner of a boxing ring: The women (and their partners) have been beaten up emotionally and physically, and now they are steeling themselves to get beaten some more.
First, they become pin cushions. IVF requires frequent blood tests and daily hormone injections to stimulate overproduction of eggs by the ovaries. In many cases — in my wife’s, certainly — the ovarian swelling is quite painful, and the assault of hormones fuels emotional tempests. If all goes well, the patient will be sedated for the invasive procedure to “harvest” the eggs, the healthiest of which are combined with sperm in the lab.
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There is waiting to learn whether any of the eggs have been fertilized, more waiting to learn whether normal cell division is taking place, another invasive procedure to introduce one or more of the microscopic embryos into the uterus — then more waiting, more injections, more fears and a little hope.
Why just a little? Because despite the high cost of IVF (including the drugs and genetic testing, a single cycle can run to $30,000), most IVF cycles are unsuccessful. Results vary according to a woman’s age and other health markers, but overall, the chance of welcoming a baby at the end of this painful roller coaster is 25 to 30 percent. The waiting rooms are full of veterans on their second, third, fifth attempts. We met a couple once on Round 10. A large study in Britain found that couples with the means and endurance to last through six awful rounds had slightly less than a two-thirds chance of a live birth.
We bailed after three. Ultimately, a different surgical intervention gave us two miracle babies to join their fiercely treasured adopted brother and sister. “Stranger things have happened,” one of our many doctors said, in a tone that told us that he had not seen many.
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I don’t think any people alive care more about the miracle of conception, the viability of a fetus and the gift of life than IVF patients. No one suffers more acutely or weeps more bitterly over unborn babies; they are, after all, holes at the centers of our lives. How can a person of faith fail to see the creative power of God in the intelligence that makes such reproductive technology possible? What crabbed theology sees God at work in sperm and eggs and reproductive organs, yet finds only sin in the brains of scientists and doctors? Lord save us from the zealots.
