Americans are big on choice. We can choose restaurants, automobiles, our clothing, and even where to live. We can make good choices and bad choices. Our prisons are packed with those who’ve chosen the wrong path. Leaders in government often make us wonder, “What were they thinking?”

One of the saddest of choices millions of Americans have made is the decision to terminate a human life through abortion. In bizarre fashion, we even call this a “pro-choice” decision. Frightening.

The progressive “choice” crowd is always looking for an out—a way to justify the gruesomeness of killing a baby. But there is a secondary issue at play in the discussion: the term “unwanted pregnancy.” This raises the question, what if there were a way for a woman to end her pregnancy without ending the life of the child?

Sound a bit twisted? I recently came across an article describing the growing interest in ectogenesis. It was in an April 2023 edition of Wired magazine and titled, “Artificial Wombs will Change Abortion Rights Forever.” Now THAT caught my attention.

To get a better grasp on the subject, I contacted Dr. Matthew Eppinette, director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (CBHD) at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. He graciously provided helpful answers to several of my questions.

Before we discuss “artificial wombs,” you should know a bit about the CBHD’s work. Dr. Eppinette explains,

CBHD addresses a full range of bioethics issues—what to pursue and what not pursue when it comes to matters of life and health. Said simply, issues involved in Taking Life, Making Life, Sustaining Life, and Faking Life.

Obviously, “Making Life” issues include questions arising from reproductive technologies that allow for the creation of human life in laboratory settings. Thus this issue of artificial wombs (ectogenesis) is in their wheelhouse.

Dr. Eppinette explains,

Ectogenesis is the process of gestating a baby outside the body of a woman. To some degree, a version of ectogenesis occurs in IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), where eggs are fertilized in Petri dishes and allowed to develop briefly before being transferred into a woman’s uterus, placed into frozen storage, or discarded. In general, though, ectogenesis has to do with bringing a child toward full term in some technological device, outside of a womb.

Stages of this are currently being done. Most labs hold to the “14-day rule,” which forbids keeping human embryos alive in laboratories for more than 14 days.” Dr. Eppinette notes, however, there is increasing pressure “to extend the 14-day rule to 21 or even 28 or more days.”

Some of the experimenting has been done on lambs showing that a developing lamb fetus can be removed from the ewe’s uterus and gestated in an artificial womb until ready for birth. A gap exists between 14 or so days and several weeks in humans. So, to Dr. Eppinette’s knowledge, this line has not yet been crossed. Thus, no successful removal from an animal embryo from conception to birth has taken place entirely in an external womb. That, by defintion, is ectogenesis.

But wait…there must be some positive, real-life value to this “technology.” And there is. Dr. Eppinette offers this scenario. Consider a child being born very prematurely. (No child has survived in under 21 weeks of gestation). In this case, the baby spends weeks to months undergoing very intensive care. This child often faces significant developmental delays and even continued challenges throughout life.

However, a child reaching 18-24 weeks gestation could be transferred into an artificial womb. This would allow the baby to continue to develop for several more weeks before being fully delivered. Dr. Eppinette terms this “partial ectogenesis” and would be the most likely scenario in which this will be used.

But like any emerging technology, there are downsides. Among them, as Dr. Eppinette explains,

are all of the unknowns that go on between the body of the mother and the body of the child during pregnancy. We are only at the beginning of understanding the interplay between the two bodies and perhaps even more, between the mother’s body and the child’s mental and emotional development.

There’s more to be said on this. My next blog will include Dr. Eppinette’s answer on “will artificial wombs change abortion rights forever.”

For now, let’s ponder in amazement what King David wrote in Psalm 139, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  Verse 14 (ESV)

For more information, contact The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.

A British man now living in Florida who freely chooses to be in a type of erotic union that is by design sterile believes it is his right to create children who will have no connection to their mothers and no certainty about who their father is. Here is his morally repugnant, convoluted story.

In 1999, then-30-year-old Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and his then-35-year-old partner whom he later “married,” Tony Drewitt-Barlow, purchased eggs from Tracie McCune and rented the womb of Rosalind Bellamy to acquire their first two children: a boy named Aspen and a girl named Saffron.

The fertilized egg that became Aspen split, so they froze Aspen’s identical twin, defrosted him four years later, and implanted him in the rented womb of another woman, Donna Calabrese. Aspen now has an identical twin brother Orlando who is four years younger than he is.

About nine years later, the millionaire Drewitt-Barlow fathers purchased yet more eggs, rented Calabrese’s womb again, and had two more boys, Dallas and Jasper, born in 2010. The biological mother is a “Brazilian model whom Barrie spotted on the catwalk and paid £35,000 for the privilege” of donating her eggs.

Both men contributed sperm to the selfish, dystopian reproductive project, and while they know which biological child each sired, they’re not telling the children. Apparently, the two men are entitled to children, but their children aren’t entitled to know who their biological fathers are.

In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2015, Tony, the older Drewitt-Barlow, proclaimed that their lifelong commitment was ironclad:

Barrie and I will never split up. We’re soulmates. But also we’d never do that to our children because of the pain it would cause.

Last October, Barrie and Tony split up.

The now-50-year-old Barrie began an erotic relationship with his daughter’s 25-year-old bisexual ex-boyfriend, Scott Hutchison. Barrie and Scott then bought eggs and rented a womb for the purpose of gestating their triplets who are due in October. Barrie announced,

Our family has too many boys and too much testosterone! So we used sex selection to even things out. We know we are having girls. … We found a beautiful, young, educated egg donor. … We met 15 egg donors at the Beverly Wiltshire hotel, the hotel in the film Pretty Woman. We decided that would make the perfect setting to find the woman who would add the part of the DNA for our baby girl. Once we found our surrogate we transferred three blastocysts (embryos), two girls fertilised by Scott and one girl fertilised by me.

Barrie, his young paramour Scott, his ex Tony, Aspen, Saffron, Orlando, Dallas, Jasper, and the triplets will all be sharing the same home—just one big, strange family created to satisfy the desires of selfish adults.

Barrie isn’t done yet with his profligate inseminating. He donated sperm to a lesbian couple in the U.K. who will be giving birth one month before his and Scott’s triplets are born here in the United States.

Barrie writes about the nature of the homoerotic relationship into which he’s bringing three babies:

I know people will think Scott is only after my money and all that — he is, after all, 25 years younger than me — but I don’t care. I’m going to enjoy every moment that I can, while I can. After all, you only have one life.

This is the toxic fruit of the sexual revolution that began the erosion of cultural taboos regarding sexual activity. Sexual revolutionaries severed sexual acts from procreation, sexual acts from marriage, and then sexual acts from sexual differentiation. The only purpose for sex became carnal gratification. Sex lost all meaning. While children gained sexual autonomy—the right to erotic gratification—they lost the right to be raised by both a mother and a father, preferably their own biological parents.

The damage done to children’s rights and needs by the sexual revolution—from the denial of family through divorce and sperm and egg donation to the “trans”-cultic destruction of their hearts, minds, and bodies to their extermination in the womb—constitutes the justice issue of our time. How many presidential candidates who claim to care about social justice will address it?

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/The-rise-of-homosexual-family-madness_audio_01.mp3

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“Official statistics show that almost half of embryos used to help a woman conceive through in vitro fertilization were thrown away during or after the process. The embryos are created from female eggs and male sperm during the IVF process, with some introduced into the womb, put into storage, discarded as unwanted, or used in scientific experiments.” ~Andrew Hough, The Telegraph

Translation: “60 000 RM is what this person suffering from hereditary illness costs the community in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read Neues Volk. The monthly magazine of the Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP.”

A Perfect Race of Humans

But history is no stranger to this evil concept. During Hitler’s reign, Nazi eugenics deemed certain people “unworthy of life.” This included prisoners, dissidents, and “unclean” races, but it also included those with learning disabilities, mental illnesses, physical deformities, and those with handicaps.

Nazis didn’t kill only Jews and rebellious foreigners, they killed their own “flawed” countrymen! Today, we have our own eugenics (meaning “well born”) philosophies going on. And, for many, it involves their own children!

I have a shocking revelation for you. Are you ready? Today’s leaders who support the bloody atrocity of abortion on demand, even to the point of promoting the cold-blooded whim-killing of a perfectly healthy infant moments before birth, go beyond what even Hitler promoted! Yes, today’s abortion practices are even worse than those of the Nazis!

While Hitler would have preferred me dead (and possibly required it), he would have condemned the abortion of babies he viewed as physically and mentally fit. His insane obsession with a pure and unblemished race indeed led him to the killing of innocents, but his murder spree was limited to his own warped perception of the worthy vs. the unworthy (“unclean races,” “deformed children,” “physically disabled,” and “feeble-minded”).

“The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.” ~Adolf Hitler (Social Darwinism in European and American Thought by Mike Hawkins)

“In view of the large families of the Slav native population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many abortions as possible. We are not interested in seeing the non-German population multiply…We must use every means to instill in the population the idea that it is harmful to have several children, the expenses that they cause and the dangerous effect on woman’s health… It will be necessary to open special institutions for abortions and doctors must be able to help out there in case there is any question of this being a breach of their professional ethics.”

“For by a single offering
He has perfected for all time
those who are being sanctified.”
~Hebrews 10:14

Ever notice how the media has a knack for pulling on our heart-strings in an attempt to divert us from the real facts of the matter? In logic, this fallacy is called, “A red herring.”

A great example of this is the news coverage surrounding an amendment proposed by U.S. Representative Andy Harris (R-MD) regarding the protection of embryonic stem cells. But before we discuss the current legislation, let’s get a running start, and get some background on the issues behind it.

The Christian, pro-life position is that human life begin at conception. A normal human embryo has all 46 chromosomes innate to human development, and is already pre-programmed with the biological data needed to grow to a fully-formed adult. Every human embryo contains an eternal soul that must be protected.

The Ethics of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)

When an infertile couple is seeking to conceive, one method they may pursue is IVF. In this process, it is common for multiple embryos to be created. The ensuing problem is that some of these embryos are not used by the hopeful parents, leading to the dilemma of what to do with the frozen embryos that are left over from this procedure. Storing the embryos indefinitely can be costly, and often the parents have no practical way to bring them to full-term.

People choose different approaches to dealing with these embryos, including:

1. Donating them to another infertile couple who “adopts” their embryo and attempts a successful pregnancy and delivery (this option is rarely chosen).
2. Donating the embryos for stem-cell research.
3. Thawing without donating (thus terminating the life of the unborn embryo).

From a Christian worldview, clearly only one of these choices is viable (adopted embryos), as the other choices destroy human life.

Stem Cell Research

We must be careful in our discussion of these topics with others, that we have the issues clear in our mind. Christians are NOT opposed to stem cell research. There are different sources for stem cells, including adult stem cells derived from human fat. These stem cells offer the promise to potentially cure all sorts of physical maladies. We encourage this kind of research and hope for medical breakthroughs along with everyone else.

What we oppose, is the practice of conducting stem cell research on human embryos, because of the fact that a human life is destroyed in the process.

The Harris Amendment

So back to the current legislative situation. Military personnel who serve in our armed forces are sometimes injured in their line of duty in a way that causes permanent reproductive harm to their bodies. Our government has decided to fund IVF options for those veterans who wish to grow their families through this means.

Representative Harris has presented an amendment that specifies that any federal funding provided in any act of law may only be used to provide IVF treatments if such treatments do not result in the destruction of viable human embryos before embryo transfer. His amendment was adopted by a U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee by a vote of 29-21.

There has been an immediate push-back on this, because it would eliminate the immediate thawing, or research options, leaving only continued freezing (at a cost) or donation for embryo adoption. The argument is that this bill is not practical. It is inconvenient and will make this process more difficult for those who want to choose IVF.

The “red herring” in this story is that this involves our wounded military veterans. The media is choosing to portray this as showing a lack of support and compassion for those who have given so much (even potentially their hopes for a future family), in defense of our nation. Anyone who supports the Harris Amendment could be portrayed as unpatriotic, or unsympathetic to our troops.

What Is the Right Choice?

In any situation, we must avoid the tug of emotion and always ask ourselves, “What is the right thing to do?” Pragmatism is the view that “Whatever works is right.” The end justifies the means. It doesn’t matter what approach or method you choose, as long as you get the desired outcome. The problem with that view is that it isn’t wise or safe. Pragmatism has been behind many human atrocities in the past century, including eugenics.

As much as we want to see our veterans receive proper care and medical services, we cannot do so at the cost of human life. They put their life on the line to defend U.S. citizens, and that defense should be extended to unborn Americans as well.

A friend of mine recently put the matter as concisely and clearly as I believe it can be expressed:

“Any legislation that ends with,
‘And then the baby dies…’
is bad legislation.”

Opponents of the Harris Amendment suggest that an embryo isn’t truly human life because it is too small (size), or the embryo doesn’t have cognition (level of development), or it isn’t in the mother’s uterus (environment), or because it can’t sustain life on it’s own if unfrozen (degree of dependency).

Christian apologist, and pro-life advocate, Scott Klusendorf, has created an acronym (SLED) from these arguments that can help us to remember them, and be able to articulate a consistent and rational position on the defense of human life. None of these elements define human life. If you argue on that basis of any of them, you can easily also argue for infanticide or euthanasia.

The worth of a human life can never be equal to convenience on the scale of justice. Once intrinsic human life is devalued, on any level, it is only a matter of time until the taking of more lives will be justified by the same extended arguments.

Let us pray that efforts like Congressman Harris’ will find a hearing and that those in our nation’s leadership will seek to defend the most basic tenet of our inalienable rights: the immutable right to life.

IFI Faith, Family & Freedom Banquet

We are excited to have as our keynote speaker this year, former Congresswoman and Tea Party Caucus Leader, Michele Bachmann!  She distinguished herself by not only forming and chairing the Tea Party Caucus in 2010 in the U.S. House but also through her courageous and outspoken pro-life leadership as attested to by her rating of zero from NARAL.

Please register today before the early bird special expires.