Injections, IVF, and Faith

I am terrified of needles. I have said several times to several people in the last few weeks that I would infinitely prefer squeezing a human being out of my vagina to taking the 20-some injections I have to endure throughout this process. I just was given my first Lupron injection by my husband tonight and found that it apparently is not a big deal. I didn’t even feel it. It helped that I had iced the area for a full 5 minutes, had a pillow over my face and a re-run of Gilmore Girls on TV, but still, I survived…and know I can survive the rest of them too.

Onto a totally different subject: faith and IVF. This is a subject that many Christians feel strongly about; many are glad that they don’t have to deal with it; others simply ignore the subject all together. I wanted to write about it for the simple reason that it is one of the first questions a Christian doing this will have to deal with.

There are places that will break down each denomination’s view of the practice. The only place I remember seeing a definitive list was in Gail Dutton’s book on gestational surrogacy, A Matter of Trust. Whatever the position of your particular denomination, however, it evidently has very little to do with the choices infertile couples make. I remember reading in several places that many Christian couples pursue reproductive technologies despite their denomination’s beliefs and don’t feel any guilt over it.

When we first began to look into assisted reproduction, what mattered to me was not a denominational view on the issue. Biblical principles mattered to me. Does anything in the Bible allow me to believe that I can make an argument for surrogacy—despite the fact that there were no antibiotics (let alone embryologists) back then? Are there Christians that are fertility doctors? Can I stand before God someday with a clear conscience having made the decisions I did?

First of all, surrogacy does date back to biblical times, despite what many might tell you. It was a common practice in eastern cultures for women to build a family line through their maids—check out the story of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar along with that of Jacob, Rachel, Leah (and the women’s maidservants Bilhah and Zilpah) in Genesis. God never condemned Jacob and his wives for their behavior. The issue in Abraham’s case was not Hagar; it was his continual mistrust in God’s promise to him, which was that he would have descendants through Sarah.

Secondly, there are fertility doctors who are Christians. As we scoured the internet while researching all of this, this was our favorite article: http://www.surrogacy.com/medres/article/christv.html . I will leave you to your own conclusions about it. I personally appreciated this author a lot.

Most of what I have said on the subject so far comes from research I did. Here are my personal beliefs:

While I know that the world is in a fallen state, there are things that God has not enabled scientists to do. They cannot create life. They can use the building blocks created by God, but they are unable to decide whether an embryo implants into the wall of a woman's uterus or not. That decision is made by God and God alone. I truly believe that if He did not want IVF to be an option available to people, He never would have allowed scientists to figure out how it works.

That said, I do not want to put myself in the position of deciding whether conception begins in a Petri dish or at implantation. Any embryos that my husband and I make, we will use in some way. We may have a bigger family than we expected or we may decide to donate unused embryos to another couple.

We also have chosen not to put ourselves in the position of having to perform a selective reduction. Indian policy is that a surrogate will carry no more than twins. We decided that meant we would only transfer two embryos at a time and freeze remaining embryos in individual straws. Some doctors say that this will lower the chances of success. Others disagree. Either way, we are comfortable with the choice we made.

Most posts won’t be quite so theologically centered or theory heavy. But I did want to address this issue as it is an essential one in the process that has to be dealt with.

9 days until we leave!