#578: Southern Baptists Against IVF

Reading the proposed resolution and other news.

MLA: I am in Oxford at the moment for an event on my big academic book on procreation. Details below. If you can make it, do let me know.

News broke yesterday that Southern Baptists will consider two resolutions touching on in vitro fertilization at their annual convention next month, which will make the first such effort in the forty-five years since Louise Brown was born. Andrew Walker and Al Mohler’s proposal has garnered the most attention, but Dusty Deevers has apparently sent one through as well (along with a resolution encouraging Baptists to endorse criminalizing women who seek abortions). The resolution seems like a broader effort among Southern Baptists to (at last) give due attention to such questions: two weeks ago, the ERLC released a long analysis of IVF that was sharply critical of it. 

If the Mohler/Walker resolution passes, I will have to quit my occasional trolling of Southern Baptists about it, which makes me a little sad—but only a little. The silence from Southern Baptists has been scandalous, and it is far past time for it to end. So long as they manage to say the right thing, mind you. I am not Southern Baptist and do not know the politics, but I would wager the effort has at least a puncher’s chance: my impression is that Deevers-types have been far more politically active in the convention over the past few years and many of the pro-IVF evangelicals are upper-middle class housewives who have been through the process themselves or vicariously with a friend. It can be hard for the latter type to make an event like the convention—which means the anti-IVF camp is likely to be overrepresented relative to where the average SBCer is at. 

It is also unfortunate that this process seems to have been animated by the debacle in Alabama, which has politicized discussions about IVF in ways that I think are unhelpful for the ongoing formation of evangelicals’ moral imaginations. The NYT report makes the link between the effort and the post-Roe environment explicit, which I think not entirely unfair given the way it has developed. In the middle of the Alabama maelstrom, Andrew Walker floated a poll to determine whether this was the year for such a resolution. The political horse seems to be driving the ethical cart here, which I worry will mean the resolution will be of more limited influence than it might otherwise be. 

That political emphasis is written into the resolution itself. In its normative claims, it moves immediately from the notion that humans have a right to life (citing Exodus 20:13) to the claim that governments are ordained by God for its protection. While the document’s practical resolutions say “we grieve alongside” infertile couples and encourages Southern Baptists to promote adoption, their invocation of theological resources to animate those claims does not mention the church at all. Such a truncated view does not simply leave such practical encouragement with less theological heft than it might otherwise have—it fails to properly locate infertility itself within the economy of the kingdom of God and to explain why and, more importantly, how infertile couples may grieve as Christians. (The final exhortation to pray with those couples who are infertile comes nearest this, and is a nice touch.) 

The document’s practical critiques of IVF are solid, so far as they go—but they only go as far as (I suspect) Walker/Mohler thought possible to win the document to a consensus among Southern Baptists. The prohibitions are all under-specified: the assertion that “not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified” is true, but raises the question of which ones are. The corresponding resolution is similarly underdeveloped: they exhort Southern Baptists “to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation.” The document encourages couples “to consider the ethical implications of assisted reproductive technologies,” but does not identify what those implications might be.

The most substantive critiques of the practice have to do with what evangelicals always emphasize in their approach to the moral question: the life and death of the embryos who have been created through it. The arguments there, though, are similarly hedged: IVF “most often” involves the “destruction of human life” and “increasingly engages” in dehumanizing embryos through eugenic practices. From what I can tell, the way the resolutions are written, there is no problem with single-cycle IVF that opts out of genetic screening. (I think IVF is inherently eugenic so long as embryos are given grades, but that’s me.) 

Again: there is only so much that can be said and done in such a resolution, and this one has to win support from a coalition of people who I think are likely to be fully sympathetic with IVF. So the strategic decisions should be interpreted in that light. The ERLC’s new substantive guidance on IVF is very strong, I think—perhaps the best such statement on the matter by an evangelical organization that I know of. It very clearly underscores the importance of keeping sex and procreation together and ends up much more conclusively opposed to IVF: “Again, while possible to remove the most egregious ethical concerns, it is impossible to carry out the procedure in such a way as to totally remove all moral concerns.” 

It is worth noting that both documents eagerly endorse embryo adoption. As I have written about that before, I will not repeat the arguments here. But it is worth noting that a process that leads to ‘destruction’ is not necessarily the same as a process that leads to ‘death.’ The indefinite storage of embryos is unjust, but the adoption of every embryo is impossible. Many of those embryos created will die—but their death is not, I think, on the same plane morally as the destruction of embryos that happens when they are used for research. The resolution’s failure to make this distinction and to acknowledge the limitations of embryo adoptions is, I think, its most significant weakness in terms of what it explicitly endorses.

It is clear from both documents that the Baptists are making progress on these questions, though, which I find encouraging. Now we wait to see how the convention will react.

Oxford, June 13th

This is happening on June 13th. If you make it, let me know.

GOSSIP

I went on the ‘That’ll Preach’ podcast to talk about gossip and Christian speech norms. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and was able to develop some of my thinking in directions I have not done so yet. So give it a listen.

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AROUND THE WEB

I first heard the term ‘metamodern’ about 15 years ago. I am amused that The Gospel Coalition is picking up on it now given that the central outlet of thinkers who were trying to make it happen folded in 2016. I suspect the real story here is how intellectuals have lost an appetite for periodization: there’s modernism, post-modernism, and then….nothing.

I think the Trump charges and conviction were an egregious miscarriage of justice. Bonnie Kristian is sympathetic to that view, but also thinks we should not turn Trump into an “embattled hero worth defending.” There are other options, though: miscarriages of justice are abhorrent regardless of who suffers them. The paradox of the Trump case is that they tried to demonstrate that no President is above the law, but they had to bend the law to do it.

THE PENULTIMATE WORD

“Jesus Christ is man in a different way from what we are. That is why He is our Mediator with God. But He is so in a complete equality of His manhood with ours. To say man is to say creature and sin, and this means limitation and suffering. Both these have to be said of Jesus Christ. Not, however, according to the standard of general concepts, but only with reference to Him, only in correspondence with His true manhood. As in relation to His Godhead, so also in relation to His manhood, we must not allow any necessary idea of the human situation and its need to intervene. What His manhood is, and therefore true manhood, we cannot read into Him from elsewhere, but must be told by Him. But then we find that it is a matter of the manhood of the eternal Son of God.” — Karl Barth