Infertility Treatment

The most traditional route to parenthood is an easy conception as a result of sexual intercourse. In our broken world, it does not always work that way, yet advances in medicine and biotechnology have developed alternate routes to parenthood. When potential parents face challenges conceiving a child, many turn to reproductive specialists. The journey through infertility treatment raises a multitude of ethical questions and challenges, from treatment to allow the intended mother’s own body to carry the baby, to the need for a surrogate to carry the craved-for child.

Infertility treatment can include pharmaceutical intervention to help compensate for a missing hormone. It can introduce sperm directly into the uterus, or even the sperm and egg to one another inside of a lab before transferring the fertilized egg to the woman’s uterus. Surrogacy allows another woman to carry the child. People also choose to adopt or to live without children.

The ideal in the Bible is to respect life in all its forms. God values life. His very image (Gen. 1:26) is etched on our being. We are called to value it, whether that life is a perfect representation of the ideal, or carries marks of the world we live in. It is this understanding of the value of life itself that must direct the inner, prayerful conversation about becoming involved in reproductive medicine or to accept life without offspring. Acknowledging that a new life begins from the moment an egg and sperm fuse means that some practices connected with infertility treatments are unethical and immoral, such as embryo selection to respectively avoid either male or female babies.

The goal of a reproductive specialist is to help a couple realize the joy of parenthood. The road to parenthood or acceptance of child-free living must value life from its earliest stages to make decisions in harmony with Scripture.

For a deeper understanding of the issue involved, we suggest people go to the following link: https://www.adventist.org/en/information/official-statements/documents/article/go/-/considerations-on-assisted-human-reproduction/