The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Ethically speaking, does the end always justify the means?  Does a seemingly good end (having healthy babies free of all genetic disorders) justify the means (in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, etc.)?  Reproductive and Genetic Technologies have empowered humans to a degree unimaginable only a few years ago. These technologies are also empowering parents to decide what kinds of children they want. Therefore, these technologies raise profound ethical questions, including ethical questions about the human embryo.

Over the last few weeks, two examples of ethical confusion on the innate value of the human embryo have surfaced.  Permit me to examine these with you and then I will draw several conclusions.

First, if a couple has utilized in vitro fertilization to produce an embryo and then they split, who controls the fate of the embryo? This was the case of  Erin Millender, who longed to be a mother. Caroline Kitchner of the New York Times tells her story: “She already had a day care picked out, a Pack ’n Play stashed in her basement. She’d tried Chinese pregnancy teas and midnight fertility ceremonies under a full moon in the Caribbean Sea. Whatever it took to have a child. Now in her mid-40s, Millender knew she was running out of time. She had already spent several years attempting in vitro fertilization, with no luck. She’d decided to give I.V.F. one more try. ‘What’s a good day to come in?’ Millender asked when she called the clinic in July 2023, hoping to have an embryo placed inside her uterus within a few weeks. The doctor then delivered the news that would upend Millender’s entire future. Her husband had revoked his consent. She could no longer make a baby with his DNA. ‘We can’t move forward,’ she recalled the doctor saying. ‘Our hands are tied.’”

Millender’s situation illustrates a contentious new debate dividing courts and couples across the country. As more women turn to in vitro fertilization to build their families—sometimes delaying motherhood into their 40s—some are wrestling with an unfamiliar set of moral and legal questions that arise when children are created in a lab. Among the most contentious: Who has custody of those children before they exist?

• Kitchener goes on: “Millender knew the biological facts: Women over 35 have a harder time getting pregnant. They experience more miscarriages and still births. They’re more likely to develop dangerous pregnancy conditions, while their babies are more likely to be born with fetal abnormalities. The older you get, the greater those risks become. At 41, Millender received a diagnosis of infertility. Her doctor urged her to start I.V.F. as soon as possible, she said.”  She then met and married a man named Adam Rubin; her desire for children was coming together. “But as they continued to struggle to conceive, [Rubin] wrote in his affidavit, Millender grew distant and hostile, moving into a different bedroom and backing out of couples counseling. Eventually, she asked him to stop attending their I.V.F. appointments so she could better focus on the procreative task at hand . . . Rubin told her he would rather have a healthy marriage than a baby, she said—

which seemed to her like a false dichotomy. She wanted both. But one was time-sensitive, she recalled thinking. The other was not. ‘I was like, ‘We have the rest of our lives to work on the marriage,’ Millender said. But for a baby, she told him, ‘we are in the 11th hour.’ They had two viable embryos, and she urgently had to get at least one of them inside her.”

• Rubin visited the I.V.F. clinic two weeks later to ask how to revoke his consent for the procedure. By that point, he had already spoken with a divorce lawyer. He knew he could not raise a child with his wife, he wrote in his affidavit, accusing Millender of “emotional manipulation.” And he did not want to have a child who would never know its father. “I did not endure the I.V.F. process, assist with medical appointments and injections,” Rubin wrote, “with the intention of being reduced to an anonymous donor.” That arrangement would “erase my role as a father,” he added, and, by extension, violate his Jewish faith. The Torah instructs Jews to impress its teachings upon their offspring, he wrote—a task he would not be able to complete if his child was a stranger.
• Before Millender and Rubin started their latest round of I.V.F., their clinic had given them a contract to determine what would happen to the embryos if they ever got divorced. As is standard in many I.V.F. clinics across the country, their contract offered three options. The embryos could be given to one party or the other, donated or discarded. Millender and Rubin had chosen option No. 1.

Kitchener reports on the legal complexity of this case:  “Who got the embryos in the event of a breakup would be an issue for a New York divorce court. If a woman is already pregnant when she divorces, there is no legal doubt that the mother may carry the pregnancy to term if she wants to. The divorced parents would work out a custody agreement for the child, just as they would for any other child they already had. But the legal question of who should have custody of frozen embryos is far more complicated—and still largely unsettled in American law. Only about one-third of states have considered the issue in an appeals court, where precedent is set, according to Ben Carpenter, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who analyzed rulings on embryo disputes from 129 judges. That means courts in the vast majority of states have no established legal framework to use to make these decisions.  Absent any precedent, individual judges are left to decide what outcome is most fair. One judge might care most about what each partner plans to do with the embryos; another may value each partner’s relative ability to have a child in other ways. While lower courts tend to side with the person seeking to use the embryos—typically the woman—appellate courts have almost always sided with the person who wants to donate or discard them, according to Carpenter’s analysis.”

Millender field for divorce and a Brooklyn civil court judge ruled in her favor when it came to getting pregnant with the embryo implant. The judge, Theresa Ciccotto, dismissed Rubin’s arguments about his religious objections as a Jew. “Millender began taking her I.V.F. medications right away, preparing her body for the embryo.” The transfer occurred and she was pregnant.  Her former husband could basically do nothing.  As of this writing, she is, at age 47, awaiting the delivery of her baby.

Second, my wife and I have four grandchildren, one of whom is a four-year-old Down Syndrome boy named Luca, who is also deaf. A horrifying tendency is emerging in our culture which views such children as of no value. Consider this horrific example: “For more than a decade, Jesse Ridgway has made a living posting YouTube videos, some personal, to millions of followers. It seemed natural, then, he said, to share that he and his wife, Ashley, had decided to terminate her pregnancy after a test revealed the presence of Trisomy 21, a form of Down syndrome. ‘This choice was not made lightly,’ Mr. Ridgway, 33, wrote in a lengthy post on X. . . , two days after his wife underwent an abortion. ‘We made a difficult decision that we believe in the long-run will be beneficial for our family,’ he added.” His post was viewed 22.1 million times.

Pooja Salhotra of the New York Times reports that, “The Ridgway’s decision was not unusual. Among pregnant women in the United States who receive a Down syndrome diagnosis, about 74 percent choose to terminate the pregnancy, research shows. That figure is even higher in some other countries, such as Iceland, where almost all such pregnancies are aborted.” Furthermore, “every year, about 6,000 babies are born in the United States with Down syndrome, according to the National Institutes of Health. Some people with Down syndrome have other medical problems, such as congenital heart defects, hearing loss or sleep apnea. Over the past 25 years, the average life span of people with Down syndrome has doubled, from 30 years to 60, but people with the condition still face significant health challenges.”

When it comes to the logic of their abortion, these two facts demonstrate the short-sightedness and error of the Ridgway’s decision:

• A 2011 study by Harvard University researchers found that rather than leading lives of suffering, people with Down syndrome have unusually high rates of happiness. Columnist Mark Thiessen summarizes that “an amazing 99% said they were happy with their lives, 97% like who they are, and 96% like how they look.”  The research concluded that “Overall, the overwhelming majority of people with Down syndrome surveyed indicate they live happy and fulfilling lives.”
• Surveys from Boston’s Children’s Hospital found that far from being a burden on their families, children with Down syndrome bring enormous joy to their loved ones.  Indeed, 94% of siblings expressed feelings of pride about their brother or sister with Down syndrome, and 88% said they were better people because of them.  Anecdotally, in all my years of teaching, I have had countless students who expressed the same sentiment and pride about their Down Syndrome sibling.  They were proud of them, loved them deeply and, to a student, affirmed that God had richly blessed them as a family because of their sibling!

For the Ridgways, the right of the mother trumped and was sovereign over any right of their unborn baby. Intentionally aborting a Down syndrome life is a sad metaphor on what has happened to America—and to western civilization as a whole. To use abortion as a tool to eliminate an entire category of human beings (i.e., Down syndrome people) is indeed genocide, comparable to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. No matter how this civilization tries to sanitize this intentional destruction of an entire category of humanity, that is what it is.

In conclusion, issues and practices associated with reproductive and genetic technologies fall under the stewardship responsibility of humanity to God.  In Genesis 1:26ff, God created humans—male and female—in His image and then gave them the responsibility to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth (1:28).”  Verse 29 extends this dominion to plants, trees and seeds.  God affirms this dominion status, although affected by human sin and rebellion, to Noah in Genesis 9:1-2.  Because God is sovereign and humans have dominion status, human accountability is a necessary corollary.  This matter of accountability has powerful implications when it comes to reproductive and genetic technologies.  These technologies give humans power never realized before in history.  But because of human depravity, it is difficult to be optimistic about the ultimate use of some of these technologies.  In His common grace, God has permitted the human race to develop these technologies—but we must always remember that we are accountable to Him as to how we use them.  The sobering fact of human depravity looms over its use.  Therefore, let me posit several inferences:

1. Freezing sperm and eggs does not jeopardize the life of a human being, because before fertilization there is no human being.
2. However, embryo freezing is problematic if, as is most likely the case, in vitro fertilization (IVF) was used to produce the embryo in the first place. Normally, IVF involves multiple fertilizations and thereby multiple embryos, with those not implanted in the womb being destroyed or frozen. What happens to the remaining embryos that are not implanted or frozen is an ethical problem. Psalm 139:16 makes it quite clear that God values even embryonic life.
3. Embryonic life must be protected.  Since the embryo is a person in God’s eyes (see Psalm 139:16), the embryo has the right to protection from harm.
4. Permitting women to be rigorously selective in the sperm they choose to ensure that they the “right child” is getting close to the ugly specter of eugenics.
5. Intentionally aborting a Down Syndrome child also borders on eugenics and is ethically repulsive.

See Caroline Kitchener in the New York Times (29 May 2026); Pooja Salhotra in the New York Times (6 June 2026); George Will in the Washington Post (14 March 2018 and 2 December 2016); and Marc A. Thiessen in the Washington Post (8 March 2018);.