Transcript: Lesson 23 - What is ART?

Friends, welcome. In this video, we're going to think a little bit more in a little bit more detail  about assisted reproductive technologies and to think about them, especially from from an  ethical angle and try to understand why, why it is that that Christians might have questions  about these and might say, this is not really an avenue that that Christians should pursue.  Now, I just want to be really clear here, as with contraception, I realize that a lot of these  technologies are fairly popular, even within Christian circles that a lot of people even  Christians maybe have haven't thought about this before. And I want to be really clear, you  might be reading this and saying, Well, I'm, you know, I, I myself, my existence is because of  the reality of some of these forms of assisted reproductive technologies, like my parents use  this reproductive technologies, or, you know, I was the result of a sperm donation, and I have  maybe I don't know, my biological father, I want to be really clear here. God loves each and  every one of us as His image bearer. The fact that we bear the image of God is crucial here.  Scripture teaches that every person bears the image of God. And this is true in Scripture, we  see this, we see all kinds of people in Scripture, who are born from parents or from situations  that are, we might say, questionable, at best, or problematic or even sinful, at worst. But that  doesn't affect the fact that each and every person is made in the image of God. And so as we  we reflect on these things together, my point here is not to heap guilt or shame on anybody  or to have anybody, Oh, certainly, God forbid questions that their existence or whether God  loves them and cares for them deeply. But part of what we're trying to do is to think through  the different stories that are out there in our culture, especially the story of technology, the  story that says we're nothing but bodies, and so we can manipulate matter, we can  manipulate life, we can do whatever we want. And if we're going to embody the Gospel story,  if we're going to embody and point people to the fact that there is a Creator, there is a  redeemer, then part of that means acknowledging our limits as human beings and being  willing to live into a way of life that says, just because I, I can do something doesn't  necessarily mean that I should. So just a couple of forms of assisted reproductive technologies I want to mention here, one is artificial insemination. This again, is I mentioned a little bit  already is where a man functions as a sperm donor, and a woman's egg that is fertilized and  the pregnancy goes forward from there. In some of those cases, in some cases, that could be  a situation where it's husband and wife, but usually, in many cases, it's not, it's something  where a woman desires a child for, for whatever reason, and either her has either she's not  married, or her husband is himself in fertile, and so they make recourse to artificial  insemination. Another example of an ART is in vitro fertilization, where the fertilization really  happens. outside the womb, the sperm and the egg, are united, medically by doctors. But this does not happen in the context of sexual union. And it's not artificial insemination. It's, the  actual fertilization happens outside of the womb. And in some cases, this is connected to  surrogacy, as I mentioned in the last video, surrogacy is where for whatever reason, a woman  is not actually able to carry the child in her womb for the full length of the pregnancy, and so  the egg is fertilized outside the womb. And it's been put in the uterus of a surrogate mother,  who then bears this child full term and gives birth to this child who is not biologically, her  child. So what I had to do for the reading, part of the reading for this, for this particular unit,  was to read to this, this document the instruction on respect for human life, and admittedly it  is, it's philosophical, it can be tricky to totally wrap your mind around that. But I want to just  highlight a couple of things that it brings forth and make sure that we're clear on these points. The first thing or or one of the main things that it speaks to is the use of embryos of fertilized  eggs. That when we think about this from from a biblical perspective, where we understand  that a new life actually begins at conception when sperm and egg unite. We didn't have to  think carefully about the use of embryos because we're not Again, we're not just talking about matter, we're not just talking about a clump of cells, we're actually talking about a human  person. And so that's significant. And that's really the first point that's made here is that an  embryo is a person. And so because of that, the embryo deserves unconditional respect. In  the same way that my respect for you as a person, your respect for others, it is ultimately  rooted in the fact that other people are image bearers of God, it doesn't have to do with, you  know, this person has has this level of mental capacity or mental functioning, or, you know,  this person is this gender, or this ethnicity or this nationality, that a person is a person, and 

they are made in the image of God. And so because of that, I respect them as an image  bearer of God, no other conditions applied, nothing else matters in this. And so the same way. We can't We can't say just because you know, an embryo is a person who, you know, hasn't  hasn't fully developed. An embryo is a person who hasn't existed for nine months. And so we  can kind of treat them in whatever way we like this documents, they know that that's false.  And I think, I think it's, it's correct to say that it's rooted in Scripture to say that, so we have to have this respect for embryos, just as we would say, it would be wrong to just medically  experiment on a person. Right. This is one of the things at least in our our day and age we  associate with, with things like Nazi Germany, where they did horrific experiments on on Jews  and others who were looked down upon by the Nazis who say, that's it's never legitimate to  use a person in that way to just use them as a tool for the advancement of medical  technology. So in a similar way, we can't just experiment on embryos, we can't say just  because they're powerless, or just because they're a certain stage of their their life and  growth, that we can then just experiment on them. And so we see that that's wrong. Similarly, embryos may not be trafficked, frozen, or destroyed. Because all of these things again, part of what's happening is that this, this treatment of embryos, then sees them as subhuman. And  again, when we think about part of what is so horrific part of what is so damaging, is when  human beings start to treat other humans as less than human. And so when you look, for  example, you look at American history. And you see the way that some white people talked  about African Americans as being subhuman. Or you look at again, the example of Nazi  Germany and how they treated Jews, essentially treat them as subhuman. We're trying to say  in our with all of our technological advances with all of our medical advances, we dare not  treat human beings as mere objects to be trafficked, to be frozen to be destroyed. Now, the  problem here is that, if you are familiar at all with the fertility industry, is that this is exactly  how embryos are treated, that they are experimented on that certainly they are frozen, that  many times they are destroyed, that, you know, if you want to think of it this way, they are  bought and sold, trafficked. And so part of that part of the problem here is that we have  already created this industry, where there are hundreds of 1000s of embryos that are that are frozen, that are essentially stuck in development, and really likely have have no hope for for  the future. And so this means that this is where we see that the story of naturalism has taken  us is to this place where we treat human beings as mere objects to be used to be bought and  sold to be experimented on. Partly under the worthy name of there are people who struggle  with infertility, so we want to help them. But at the end of the day, this is where we really  have to reflect on this if, if what we're doing is we are producing some embryos, who live and  grow, but then others who are not. Then on the whole, we have to recognize that this is not a  pattern. This is not a use of technology, that that fits with God's story of who we are as his  image bearers and the respect and dignity that each and every one of us has. And so, we  have to reflect on this very carefully. Because of this, the instruction on respect for human life  talks about this question, can we intervene in procreation? What kind of processes could we  possibly use. And the instruction says this, he uses this term heterologous. Hetero or hetera  just means other. And so heterologous processes are processes where the biological parents  are not married. So you could imagine, again, a woman who's unmarried or a woman who's  married to a husband who is infertile, who uses the sperm donation from another man, this is  part of what the instruction says is that that's not allowed. Because, again, a child is meant to be this one flesh seal of the union between parents. And so just like we would say, Well, if you I think most of us would say, if a woman can't have a child with her husband, but she knows  that there's another man that she could have a child within, well, she should just go sleep  with him and have a child to him, I think most people would say, well, that that's not  legitimate because it's, it's you having sex with somebody besides your spouse? Well, part of  the point here is that the child is meant to be a result of sexual union with your spouse. And  so to go outside that relationship, to produce a child is similar to going outside that  relationship to to have sexual union with with somebody else. The other processes it talks  about is homologous processes. This is where biological parents are married. And part of what the instruction says here is that this is only allowed if procreation is attained through sexual  union. In other words, the instruction would say that, that even something like in vitro 

fertilization where procreation happens, but But it happens outside of sexual union, so that  the egg is removed from the body of the mother and sperm is removed from the body of the  Father. And then united, the instruction would say, that's a problem because procreation is  actually meant to be joined to sexual union, that there's, there's something about the act of  sexual union that is significant for procreation, that those things go together. It's not  something that can just be attained in a medical lab. So next time, we'll we'll pick up on this a little bit more, we'll think about why this is. But just as we close this video, I again want to  emphasize, my point here is not to speak a word of condemnation or to heap shame or guilt  on on people if part of this is part of your story. But I just want us to recognize that, that our  culture as a whole has bought into the story of technology, because we bought into the story  of naturalism that really, our bodies and sexuality have no meaning. And so if we, as  Christians are going to say, our bodies do have meaning, sexual union and marriage, those do mean something, then we have to think about these things. We can't just go with the flow  with our culture, any more than we would with how our culture thinks about sex, then we will  do something like this. And so we really want to see how all of these things are interlinked.  And how living out God's story in our own sexuality in our own bodies, is really going to look  very different. It might bring us to this place where we question things that our culture just  takes for granted. And so in our next video, we're going to think a little bit more about the  nature of the child and how the child is linked to procreation, to sexual union and to marriage. So until next time, blessings