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IVF and surrogacy are often hailed as miraculous tools that offer hope for having children and building a family. While these practices may be well-intended, behind their promises lie serious ethical concerns. As these technologies become more common, now is the time to ask the hard questions, reflect deeply, and respond with conviction and compassion.
The harsh reality is this: Our acceptance of building families in this manner results in an industry and culture that commodifies children for personal gain.
These profit-driven industries place technological advancements and adult-driven desires over the rights and well-being of innocent children. The Dear Jane Podcast tackles this subject with one of its April episodes, “We’re Engineering Orphans in the Name of Progress.”
Keep reading to learn more about the hidden costs of IVF and surrogacy—and why we must carefully scrutinize the popular, prevailing narratives surrounding these practices.
A “Modern Miracle” or Humanitarian Crisis?
Though IVF and surrogacy may seem like miracles of modern medicine, children’s rights are routinely sacrificed. These practices intrude into once-sacred spaces and have become a humanitarian crisis hidden in plain sight.
IVF: Prioritizing Profit Over Protection
At face value, IVF appears to be a compassionate response to those facing infertility and desiring parenthood. However, a disturbing truth lies beyond the laboratory doors: most embryos created will never be born.
Once a cycle of IVF is successful and a pregnancy begins, you may think the journey is over. However, the leftover embryos’ future—whether they will be discarded, frozen indefinitely, used for additional cycles, or experimented on—is left on shaky ground.
As Katy Faust of Them Before Us said in a recent Dear Jane episode, “The first way that children are victimized is, overwhelmingly, those children will lose their right to life… By our best estimates, a safe guess is only 2-7% of babies that are created in a laboratory will be born alive.”
In our rush to create life, are we becoming too comfortable destroying it?
What’s more, newer practices like sex selection—implanting only embryos with the desired sex—raise additional concerns about which children are “desirable” enough to be allowed a chance at life. These practices aren’t limited to IVF; embryos vetted for specific sex or health traits can also be implanted in a surrogate. Are we promoting medical care, or a rapidly evolving eugenic practice?
Surrogacy: Casting Children’s Rights Aside for “Progress”
Surrogacy may seem like an act of generosity or hope, yet it separates the child from the only environment they’ve ever known–-before they’ve even taken their first breath.
While surrogacy agreements are designed to protect adults—biological parents and surrogates alike—where are the protections for the child? Children can form bonds with surrogate mothers because they will feel attached to the environment they’ve spent the past nine months in. Even pro-surrogacy groups note that removing a baby from familiar voices and smells can be “jarring.”
And yet, the long-term psychological impact of surrogacy on children remains largely unstudied. That in itself should give us pause. In a society eager to push boundaries, are we conducting experiments on the most voiceless among us?
Ultimately, surrogacy operates more like a business, commodifying lives for the sake of profit and adults’ desires. It treats children as products to be manufactured, selected, or discarded based on adults’ preferences—an unconscionable violation of the most basic human rights.
Consider how this “brave new world” impacts the most vulnerable among us. Protecting children must be at the heart of everything we do. “In a just society,” Faust said, “it is the adults who do hard things on behalf of children.”
It’s Time to Speak Up
This conversation isn’t about casting judgment. It’s about pulling back the curtain on systems that have gone unquestioned for far too long. It’s about placing children’s well-being, not profit or progress, at the heart of every decision.
The pain of infertility is real and should be met with compassion. But we can’t allow even our good desires for children and family to push us into ethically dangerous practices.
If you care about defending life from conception until natural death, you can’t afford to stay silent.
At Dear Jane, we believe in telling the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. Our podcast will inspire and equip you to boldly defend life at all stages, challenging the status quo and educating you on issues with big impacts.
Let the powerful topics in every episode help you challenge the cultural script. Subscribe to Dear Jane today. Learn the truth. Speak it boldly. And build a world that places children, not profit, first.
