#515: Embryo Adoption and our Moral Imaginations

What should America do with society's 'surplus embryos'?

MLA: Mere Orthodoxy is aiming to raise the largest amount of money it has ever raised. And it needs it. Jake Meador has done excellent work as the EIC since taking over. I know there are many good causes to which you can give at this time of year, but please consider helping Mere-O meet its goal. Every little bit helps. Now, on to it…

Imagine this: somewhere, there are rows upon rows of pods containing adult human beings trapped in the sub-zero temperatures of cryogenic storage. Unlike the fantasies of science fiction, these human beings did not elect their fate—they are not being held until a discrete date in which they will reawaken and go about their lives. They are wholly ignorant of their condition, but we are also wholly uncertain about their fate: until someone comes and rescues them, they will simply remain suspended in the false stasis of being frozen, slowly and imperceptibly degenerating until life is no longer viable for them. 

There are differences between embryos and adults, to be sure. As both are (for Christians) human beings who deserve our honor and respect, though, I can see no substantive differences between the above scenario and the reality of how our country currently regards frozen embryos. As Kara Bettis Carvalho notes in her new Christianity Today essay on the subject, in America alone there might be 1.5 million spare embryos currently being stored. And more are being added daily. Many couples who pursue IVF are reluctant to ‘give them up’ for adoption, and equally reluctant to—terminate them? Let them die? Whatever the appropriate description might be, couples creating embryos that they hope will become their children understandably see them as, if nothing else, seeds for the hope of new life. As embryos are paralyzed in storage, parents’ wills are “paralyzed” by indecision. 

How Christians describe this situation matters, I think, for how we respond to it. In Bettis Carvalho’s essay, John Strege suggests that “embryo adoption is trying to solve a problem of excess embryos.” This seems too benign, though: how we improve public transportation in our cities is a problem, but a million human beings suspended in ice seems like something else entirely. 

This was the thought beneath my own comments in the essay, namely, that surplus embryos are not a “problem” but a “grave moral crisis.” Taking the embryo’s personhood seriously means seeing them as fellow members of our moral community and, in a sense, learning how to imagine the world from their point of view. What does being denied a future as an organism mean for a human being? We owe embryos an answer to the question-mark we have put over their lives by virtue of creating them outside of a home and without an obvious or compelling plan to give them one. 

Which is why everyone should ‘adopt’ an embryo, the advocates Christianity Today spoke to would say. 

Now: I am not here going to take up the ethics of embryo adoption. I have been asked repeatedly what I think about it, so I need to at some point. It is high time that I come to my own mind about the matter anyway, so the exercise would be salutary for me. I have some instinctive ambivalence about the practice, for reasons that have to do with our potential complicity in a broader framework of thought that has separated conception from sex. CT quoted my anxiety to this end in the story, which I intentionally gave as a conditional (“If embryo adoption…”). 

Even if embryo adoption were completely innocuous, though, it is not even close to a meaningful answer to our great crisis of spare embryos. And to present it as such is, candidly, the worst kind of wishful thinking. I mean, look at these numbers that Bettis Cavalho gave: 

Increasingly, evangelicals are adopting these embryos and giving birth to them as their own children. In December 2022, the Snowflakes embryo adoption program, a division of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, logged its 1,000th birth since its founding in 1997. Director Kimberly Tyson said the program is growing 20 percent year over year and in 2023 they served more than a hundred new adoptive families. Another faith-based nonprofit, the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) in Knoxville, Tennessee, marked its 1,400th birth from embryo adoption this year.

There are efforts that are a ‘drop in the bucket,’ and then there are efforts that are a drop in an ocean. This is the latter. Even if Nightlight did 1000 embryo adoptions this year alone (1000 since 1997!) and were growing at 20% a year, it will be decades before they performed enough embryo “adoptions” to catch up to our current rate of creation. We do not know exactly how many embryos are being stored every year, but one study suggests that between 2004 and 2013, we added 16,000 new embryos every year. That was for 411,000 IVF cycles total over the ten year period. In 2020 alone, over 200,000 cycles happened (and 160,000+ transferred an embryo). Each year we add exponentially more embryos to storage than have ever been adopted. To position embryo adoption as a meaningful social “solution” to this “problem” is fantastical, at best. It is not, and it never will be. 

There is only one way out, I think, for our society to come to terms with the tragedy we have created: own it. The grave moral wrongs we have inflicted by creating life in laboratories cannot be remedied by our own hands. Abandoned embryos are not homeless, after all: they belong to God, and we ought face up to the reality of our complicity in evil by placing them in the ground and letting them return to Him, to be comforted by the inscrutable mystery of His grace. Of course we cannot forget the dead, though we know not what their names might be. Like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, America ought someday erect a memorial to the hidden, invisible persons whose lives were spent encased by liquid nitrogen and antifreeze. Maintaining the memory of the deaths we have caused is not atonement, but it would at least show we recognize our need for mercy.

Called into Questions

Here’s a gratuitous link to the book on Amazon. Buy a copy for the teenager in your life for Christmas and leave a review.

Drunk Tears on a Barren Sea

Speaking of Mere-O, I published an essay earlier this year that I never sent along here on desire, the TikTok algorithm, and the role of tears in Augustine’s Confessions.

I think, candidly, it is one of my better and more important essays I have written—though it is not at all the sort of work that will ever go viral (ironically, given the subject). Here’s a snapshot:

Desires can be opaque. Their true objects are often hidden from us, covered over by a darkness impenetrable to the light of reason. This is one lesson from Augustine’s inquiry into his theft of the pears in Book 2 of the Confessions, which he leaves unresolved. Alone he would not have done it, he says, for the act itself had no intrinsic value, no good that the mind can conclusively settle on as an explanation. Under conditions of sin, the will turns away from the truth of being and embraces the deception and unreality of nothingness—and as Shakespeare will remind us in King Lear, “Nothing comes from nothing.” Reason cannot settle on a source of the evil it desires, for, properly speaking, there is none: “Nothing will be found” in the search for an explanation of Augustine’s theft, Paul Griffiths writes, “because nothing is sought.”

In a world dominated by sin, our wills are unstable, unmoored, incapable of finding rest because they lack the stability and permanence of God: they cannot rest until they find the real, but are trapped within the unreality and nothingness of sin. They float upon the sea, and are tossed hither and thither by waves of pleasure that are no more permanent than the fading trends of Tik-Tok. Trapped in the vicissitudes of time, the will attaches itself to one good—only to see it, too, fade away into impermanence. Augustine’s search in Confessions is an attempt to escape a world of intense and potent pleasures that lacks deep and permanent goods. “If Adam had not fallen from you,” Augustine writes in Book XIII, “there would not have flowed from his womb that salty sea-water, the human race—curious, like a sea in a stormy swell, unsteady and lax.” The sea is marked by the barren faithlessness of a world that has renounced God, which cuts us off from the fruitful generativity and solidity of land. The bitterness of the waters has made them undrinkable, leaving us within what is effectively an unstable desert, void of the resources we need to live. “For the sea is a figure of this present age,” Augustine writes in his exposition of Psalm 69, “bitterness being signified by salt and turbulence by storms.”

Around the Web

I have been seriously rethinking whether I should be on social media at all, thanks in part to reading this haunting book. Caleb Wait essay on how anxiety is a feature of digital media, not a bug, also makes me want to check out.

I think these stories are often more complicated than we realize, but pro-lifers need to be attentive to the ways in which ‘fetal personhood’ laws can create unjust punishments on pregnant women.

The Penultimate Word

“Let human voices fall silent and human thoughts be still. Let them not stretch out toward what is incomprehensible as though they could comprehend, but only as seeking to participate in it. For we shall indeed participate. We Shall not ourselves be that reality which we attempt to grasp, nor shall we grasp it totally, but we shall be participants in it.'“ — Augustine