At 11:47 p.m., on July 25, 1978, a five-pound 12-ounce baby girl was born. But this baby, Louise Joy Brown, the daughter of Lesley and John Brown from Bristol, England made medical history. She was the first baby born successfully from a process called in vitro fertilization (IVF). Since then millions of babies have been born using IVF, blessing families that had struggled with the heartache of infertility, sometimes for years. But IVF has a dark side.

IVF is a procedure in which a woman is given fertility drugs to cause her to produce multiple eggs that are then extracted and fertilized in a laboratory dish by mixing them with sperm. To increase the chances of pregnancy and due to the cost of IVF several eggs are removed from the woman’s ovaries during one operation. After they have been fertilized typically three or four are implanted in the woman’s womb. Implanting more than one embryo at a time increases the odds of a successful pregnancy. The remaining embryos are frozen in a process called cryopreservation and stored at IVF clinics, usually for a period of five years after which the genetic parents decide their fate. It is this decision that reveals IVF’s dark side.

After keeping the frozen embryos in cold storage for five years the IVF clinics offer the genetic parents the option of extending their storage for an annual fee, implanting them, terminating them, or donating them. Such options imply that embryos are nothing more than property on the level of land or animals that can be sold, donated, or disposed of at the whim of the owner. The dark side of in vitro fertilization is that human beings – which are what embryos are – can become a commodity to meet the needs, wants, or desires of another human being. And that is wrong, immoral, and unethical.

That is not to say that IVF is wrong, immoral, and unethical per se. But if life begins at conception (whether that conception occurs in the womb or a laboratory dish), and it does, it becomes so when the desire to have a child outweighs the rights of the other embryos created to enhance the chances of a successful pregnancy. Of course, we grieve and agonize with couples that long to have a child and who endure the heartache of infertility. But that grief and agony cannot justify the indiscriminate creation of human life in a laboratory (which number in the hundreds of thousands today) whose sacredness is so casually disregarded.

Embryos are not mere property. They are human beings created in the image of God whose lives are as sacred as our own. One does not attain sacredness a little at a time as if age produces sacredness. The image of God is reflected equally in a two-cell embryo and a middle-aged woman. Why? Because the humanity of a person is not dependent upon age, sex, race, physical or intellectual abilities, or size. An eighty-year-old is not more human than a ten-year-old; a man is not more human than a woman; whites are not more human than blacks; an Olympic gold medalist is not more human than a quadriplegic; a person with an IQ of 200 is not more human than a person whose mental capacity is severely limited; and a person six feet tall is not more human than a person four feet tall. Just because an embryo does not look like you or I, is microscopic in size, is dependent upon others to survive, and cannot speak does not lessen his humanity.

Unfortunately, few seem to recognize this fact. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa once likened embryos to the period at the end of a sentence. Actress Mary Tyler Moore referred to them as little more than goldfish. But one group emphatically does recognize the humanness of embryos.

Nightlight Christian Adoptions out of Fullerton, California had been involved in domestic adoptions since 1959 and international adoptions since 1992. But in 1997 they expanded their services into an area never before entered.

They became aware of the need to protect as many frozen embryos from death as they could after a law was passed in Britain in 1991 requiring the destruction of all frozen embryos unclaimed after five years and the explosion of a lucrative (hundreds of millions of dollars annually) IVF industry in America. Thus was born The Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. The name came from the idea that snowflakes like human embryos are frozen, unique, and cannot be recreated.

Creating a program that gave prospective adoptive parents an alternative to traditional adoption that at the same time had the potential to save a segment of the human population that few were even aware existed seemed like a win/win situation.

JoAnn L. Davidson, former program director for Snowflakes, testified before Congress on July 17, 2001 concerning the organization’s desire to save these embryos. She said that for some people “child adoption is less attractive because it does not involve pregnancy, prenatal bonding, or childbirth. In contrast, embryo adoption involves all of these benefits, includes the satisfaction of parenting a waiting child, and is far less expensive than IVF treatment.” Sounds noble but not everyone found such an altruistic alternative to these “snowflakes” something to celebrate.

The dark side of IVF, and human nature, soon revealed itself when the Bush administration gave a one million dollar grant to Nightlight Christian Adoptions to promote the Snowflakes program in 2003. Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, blasted Nightlight during a commentary he did on msnbc.com shortly after they received the federal grant. He said, “There is something very strange about extending the use of the term ‘adoption’ to embryos. Children get adopted, but…embryos?” Shortly after that he said, “All that Snowflakes has done is brought the rhetoric of adoption into the process.” He then very bluntly says, “Using terms like ‘adoption’ encourages people to believe that frozen embryos are the equivalent of children. But they are not the same.” Heaven forbid we should think of embryos as people! It is much easier to justify their destruction for the purposes of stem cell research if they are thought of only as excess medical by-products.

He takes another shot at the Snowflakes program by saying, “The group has no medical background.” So? One need not be a doctor to understand the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. In fact it seems some can be educated into moral oblivion. “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22 ESV). They proudly hang their degrees upon their walls for all to see so that mere mortals may be duly impressed. But they are nothing more than pieces of paper that reveal only the content of their minds when it is the content of their hearts that God looks upon.

Unfortunately, the content of too many hearts is devoid of truth. In its place is darkness. Not because they do not know the truth, but because they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18 NASU). And it is because man has this propensity to embrace evil when it serves his purpose that IVF has a dark side.

In vitro fertilization can do much good, but only if one keeps in mind these words of Jesus: “Treat others the same way you want them to treat you” (Luke 6:31 NASU). The dark side of IVF will only be overcome when we realize that the “others” include two-celled human beings created in the image of God – just like you.