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Stanley J. Grenz
Methods of Technologically Assisted Conception
The battle against infertility has produced several technological means of
assisting in the process of procreation.8These offer to many otherwise child
less couples the hope of experiencing the joy of procreation and parenting. . . .
These various procedures [such as AID,IVF, and ET] open the door to
multiple parenting situations. Perhaps the most complicated arrangement
imaginable is the situation in which the sperm from a male donor fertilizes
an egg from a female donor, which is then placed in a surrogate mother, all
on behalf of a married couple consisting of a husband with a low sperm
count and a wife who has neither functioning ovaries nor uterus.
Ethical Considerations
In a sense, technological procedures . . . are blind to ethical consider
ations. The process of assisting in the combining of sperm and egg inside a
woman’s womb or in a laboratory, for example, is oblivious to the source of
the material being brought together and to the relationship between the
donors of that material. But the purported biological neutrality of such pro
cedures does not necessarily make them ethically neutral. Nor does a theo
retical openness to the efforts of modern medicine in assisting infertile cou
ples in these ways require that Christians conclude that all such techniques
are ethically acceptable.
The mere fact that medical research has made a process possible does not
mean that it is morally justifiable. Whereas medical technicians may on
occasion find ethical considerations irrelevant to their task, the Christian
does not. The methods put forth by the medical community must be tested
not only by whether they are able to assist in the process of conception, but
by whether or not they maintain Christian ethical standards.
a.
Technological procreation within the marriage bond.
For many, artifici
insemination and IVF/GIFT loom as the gateway to the strange world of
technological procreation. In a sense this perception is valid, for when
viewed from an ethical perspective, they stand on the border between tech
nological assistance that remains strictly within the bond of marriage and
that which moves beyond this bond.
The boundary characteristic of the process arises from the ethical impor
tance of the source of the sperm and egg brought together in these proce
dures. Viewed from the technical dimension, of course, the source of the ele
8. For a discussion of methods of technological assistance in procreation see William
Walters and Peter Singer, eds.,
Test Tube Babies: A Guide to Moral Questions, Present Techniques
and Future Possibilities
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), and Mary Warnack, ed.,
A Question of Life: The Warnack Report on Human Fertilization and Embryology
(New York: Basil
Blackwell, 1984).