Immortal Souls and First Principles

In vitro fertilization policy is quickly becoming one of the more divisive issues occupying the Trump administration: sweeping policy changes around the procedure are presently under discussion at the White House, policy changes that could include the passage of a law requiring private insurance companies to cover I.V.F. procedures.

Proponents and opponents of the procedure both have their reasons for their positions, and they run across a wide spectrum. The former sometimes talk about rights and autonomy – the right of a couple to have a child, to have the burden of suffering childlessness lifted – or they dip into the current population growth problem, the fact that birth rates around the world have hit something of a crisis point for sustaining an adequate population size for the size of the economy. Thus, we should support childbearing efforts in every way we can. The latter suggest otherwise – I.V.F. is a relatively new procedure, they argue, and its risks and side effects for both mother and child haven’t been adequately researched to justify medical professionals and policymakers throwing open the doors to it. There’s also the massive, massive number of embryos that are discarded as a byproduct of the procedure, which, they suggest, is an evil that should make us blanch.

When it comes to an issue like this, addressing these layers of concern can begin to feel like playing a game of political Whack-a-Mole. There are lots of areas one could wade into debate over, lots of issues one could take a “whack” at first. Where does one begin?

For a Christian, there’s a clear order to follow: we start, always, in first principles. Here, the fundamental question is over whether we’re dealing with immortal souls – when it comes to these embryos, to the lives of the parents conceiving them, to the individuals handling the care and well-being of both. If we are dealing with immortal souls, then life and death have to be handled in a certain way, because those souls come from and will return to God and be made answerable to him. Human lives, then, have a meaning beyond utility, beyond an economically stable society, beyond even the psychological consequences that may come from an infertility diagnosis. Our lives are the Lord’s – full stop. We, as a result, don’t have the authority to artificially start and end them.

Lots of us know these things, of course. But insisting on this kind of a point – a point rooted in first principles – is a practice we can draw from this debate and apply to lots of other political and social issues. The layers of economic, political, or social concern that otherwise get piled on top of such topics are not immaterial to Christians. But the problem is that planting one’s flag too firmly in (for instance) the lacking I.V.F. research camp is that those tables can too easily turn: someday there may be lots of research available on the procedure’s long-term health effects, for good or for ill, and then we’ll be made to shuffle our position.

So the key is to keep in view those most fundamental realities, those most fundamental truths, and what they immediately demand of us. We are eternal beings headed for an eternal life, and so the decisions we make have consequences not just in the here and now but for the life after death we’re making our way toward. That’s a truth that will never change, and one to which we don’t have to hesitate to stake a firm, clear, insistent claim.