American Experience

Acceptance of IVF and Ongoing Debates

Arthur Caplan: I’ve always been fascinated about the fact that no one, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated, picketed, chained themselves to the doorway of an in vitro fertilization clinic. And it’s not because there have not been condemnations from important religious leaders about the immorality of test tube baby technology. It’s not because critics haven’t worked themselves up to worry about where this is all going. We’ve even had a Nobel Prize sperm bank that operated in the United States for many, many years, and no one tried to do anything to stop its function.

Test tube baby technology is seen by almost every American as pro-life technology. Normally those who worry about this technology say: Is this the right way to make a baby? Is this an acceptable way to make a baby? I think most Americans say: Who cares? If you get babies, and infertile couples want them, and they’re the biological offspring of those couples, and those couples don’t have many other options (adoption being something that’s relatively difficult to do), then this is a great technology. There’s no reason at all to try and chain yourself to the door of the infertility clinic. If you did so, people would walk around you. You’d get no sympathy, you’d have no interest, because this technology is just seen as so pro-life that even if it involves embryo destruction or weird things like using a surrogate mother, there is no way you’re going to build a movement against it.

And we can see that even today. The president in 2001 said, “I’m against embryo destruction, and we’re not going to have any more stem cell research paid for by government money.” But the President of the United States has never lifted a finger to stop embryo destruction in infertility clinics. He can’t. He would become persona non grata all over the country if he stepped in and said, “I’m sorry, infertile people, you can’t destroy embryos in the process of trying to have children.” That’s not just a politically viable point of view.

Robert George: We cannot simply lay aside the debate over in vitro fertilization, because after all, in vitro fertilization has made it possible for some couples who would otherwise not have children to have children. Even knowing that it has made that possible for couples, and applauding the happiness that couples have because of the children who were born to them in that way, we still must have the debate. Questions of human dignity and questions of human health are implicated. Those questions have not been answered, and we need to answer them. That can only be done in a democratic society by civil, respectful, if intense, democratic debate.