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Lucas Holtvluwer
In the spirit of real talk, I need to let you know that this episode may be very challenging and even offensive for some. For couples facing infertility, IVF can seem like a source of hope, but behind the promise of having a child are serious questions about what IVF actually involves, what happens to embryos, and how we understand the rights of children. Today, we want to slow down and look honestly at those questions: What is IVF really? What happens to the embryos that are created, and where are the ethical lines? What happens when the desire of adults to have children comes into conflict with the interests and the rights of the children themselves? We know Christians have come to different conclusions about IVF, but we also believe that this is too important of an issue to avoid altogether. When human life is being created and often graded, frozen, tested, and discarded, we need to recognize the weight of what is happening. So today, we’re joined by Josh Wood from Them Before Us to have a real conversation about IVF, its promises, its risks, its ethical problems, and how Christians should think about infertility and the desire for children in light of God’s word.
Well, Josh, thanks for joining us here on Real Talk. Pleasure to have you. We’ll be chatting about all things IVF today. So you’re a very jolly guy, nice to have you here in the studio, but IVF, obviously, a bit of a touchier topic. So we’ll dive into that shortly. But can you tell us a little bit about Them Before Us, the organization, and kind of how you got involved with them, and what your kind of journey into this space was?
Josh Wood
Well, first off, thanks for having me, and also talking about this. I know this is not something that a lot of organizations want to dive into, and I think that’s what attracted me to Them Before Us in the first place. Was I wouldn’t say that they fall on one side of the political spectrum or even in one particular denominational camp. It really is putting the child in the middle, and then asking everything we do to bend to what makes or what is best for the child. And so I was in outreach or missions at a church and was trying to care for kids, was trying to care for my community, trying to see kids flourish, share the gospel. What I kept coming back to, though, was that so much of the downstream effects of broken society has to do with the family, and specifically, if we don’t form families in a way that that allow kids to thrive, we’re going to deal with so many problems later. And so, when I ran into Katie, and Them Before Us, and everything she was sharing about was talking about how we have to orient society around the child. We have to ask the adults to sacrifice for the kids. We can’t possibly expect the kids to be all right if the adults are getting what they want at the expense of children. So I said, “How can I help? How do we make this huge? This message is needed in a culture today that is so selfish and so self focused.” And so I joined maybe three years ago now to help essentially train and equip people to think differently about all the different social issues that are coming, you know, and that families are facing today.
LH
Okay, and yeah, that’s a real like mindset shift to get into as well in terms of so easy to get sucked into the culture and to think, especially in the case of IVF, like, hey, this seems like a good and right thing to do. Even to say, like, we want to bring a child into this world, and it seems it’s always labeled or often labeled as pro life, more broadly speaking, in politics, and it can be easy to kind of go along with that and be sucked into that. But maybe before we get into the whole moral debate around this and whatnot, I think it’s important just to understand what it is in general. So, can you kind of give us the ins and outs of what IVF that process actually involves, and then we’ll kind of delve in from there?
JW
Yeah, you’d be surprised just how few people know at all what IVF is. It is essentially taking the act of procreation, where egg and sperm are going to meet, and it’s moving it into a laboratory setting where a doctor will oversee the process. Now, we can talk about its origins, where this was essentially being experimented. They have to take that egg and sperm and they fertilize the egg, and then you will have over a period of 3, 5, 7 days growth of the embryo. But what the embryo grows in is essentially a proprietary solution in lab conditions. Meaning, every single clinic – if we went to the 10 fertility clinics here in Toronto, you may get 10 different labs with 10 different settings for temperature and 10 different oxygen levels and 10 different… I mean, you go down the list, and they will all be different, and they will all produce different rates of death with the embryos over seven days. So, in the early days, our rates were horrendous, literally 10s of 1000s of embryos were sacrificed. And again, we’re using the term embryo. It’s a human life. Usually, in the embryos, in the embryonic stage, you’re going to see these little lives getting judged at day 3, 5, or 7. But 10s of 1000s of these children were sacrificed to even get us to a point where the rates were something that normal human beings could stomach.
LH
And this is like early 2000s, or how long?
JW
This was 1980. I believe the first one in the United States was 1981. I think the first successful baby, I think, was in the UK in 1978, but to get there, it’s awful, awful, scary history. But the doctors even use some of their own material. I’ll like let you figure that out, and they actually lost again so many lives trying to test their way into to figure it out because we’ve seen rates increase over time. What does that mean? That initially the conditions weren’t good, and they’re still not great, but over time they’ve improved, which means how many lives did we lose unnecessarily because we took the procreative act outside of the womb?
LH
Right.
JW
So at now we can go on with the process. At day 3 or 5, they’ll take a snapshot, okay, and they’ll see how well has this embryo developed. Now, what you’re trying to do in when you’re dealing with infertility and a couple struggling, they may go through you know 8 or 10 pregnancies and they continue to miscarry, and there might be a variety of reasons for that. But those 8 or 10 pregnancies may take them 10 years, right? And so, what does IVF do? They’ll harvest from the woman that’s struggling using these hormones that cause her to ovulate, they may harvest 20 or 25 eggs. They’re going to fertilize all of them, so they’re essentially going to simulate all of these pregnancies. Except it’s not really a simulation; they’re occurring. They’re going to simulate all of these lives all at once, right? And then they’re going to try to decide which one are the winners, yeah. And they’re going to segment them between desirables and undesirables. Then the ones that have grown, they’re also going to biopsy them to try to determine which ones may have – they have a prediction model to see which ones may have developmental abnormalities. They can even start to look at which ones are boys and girls. This is crazy to say, but they can actually start to say which one might have this eye color, so they’re going to start to judge on superficial characteristics. There’s even some embryo optimization organizations in Silicon Valley that have started to say we’re actually going to help you develop risk profiles. So this one’s more adventurous. This one’s more likely to have schizophrenia. This one might have an addiction, and they just play these averages. A lot of them using artificial intelligence to try to give you essentially a portfolio on your embryos that judges each one of them.
LH
Wow, that’s so creepy.
JW
It is. And so, what you essentially get out of your 30 eggs, 25 were successful fertilizations. Then you biopsy them. You got, you know, 15 that made it past the genetic abnormality stage, which, by the way, even some that have genetic abnormalities have false positives. There’s some things that say as many as 14% of those that are discarded would have been a live birth, which again is a shocking statistic. But you take that 20 left or 25 left, however many is left, they’re going to put them in these categories, almost like a report card: A, B, C, D, and they’re going to tell the parents, “Here’s the one A left. This is who you need to implant,” and they’ll try. And a lot of couples, they wanted one child, they got their A plus, they implanted, they had the kid, and they walk away. But what people don’t realize is there may be 24 other children that they will now freeze, or discard, or donate to research to be ripped apart in search of you know, actually, they’ll donate them to research so that embryologists who need practice doing different procedures will practice on these young lives. I mean, there’s some incredibly barbaric practices that occur, but people don’t realize the cost then for you to get pregnant to have a child came at the expense of almost 24 lives.
LH
Yeah.
JW
Now, what happens if they don’t have that level of embryonic death. Well, if they don’t have that, then the success, the percentage of success, is no longer much higher than if they would have gone to a doctor and tried to heal the underlying fertility conditions. So, if they had just spent time with a doctor, charted cycles, worked on whether is this the male’s fault, is this the female’s fault, you know, work on diets and other things like that, and kept trying. Their success rate would be about or a little bit higher, actually, than if IVF had just said, “We’re going to take one egg. We’re going to take one, you know, we’re going to fertilize it. We’re going to implant one at a time. We’re not going to screen. You’re not going to get a grade.” You know, all of that. Their success rates, the IVF, actually goes down below then the actual like healing process of restorative medicine.
LH
What is that rate exactly?
JW
So right now they will tell you that that, well every clinic’s different for their success rates on IVF, but you will see that even just a couple just normally trying may have a 14% or 17% chance of getting pregnant, even if they’ve been struggling with infertility, well, you can get with IVF through that you know terrible process. You may get to 40%….
LH
With the 24 other lives?
JW
With a huge loss and unfortunately, so much of it is dependent on how old you are.
LH
Of course.
JW
A lot of the people going into IVF have done it because they’ve delayed having children.
LH
Yep.
JW
Maybe they put it off for a career or whatever, but it’s going to be a huge hindrance for them as they try. They’re going to be at the very low end of that, and again, the process is going to really victimize children too.
LH
Yep, right. But if you did just the solo one, that is at that 14% range.
JW
If you just no intervention at all, it’s going to be four. I think it’s 14 to 17% in that range. But you’re going to get up into 25%-30%. You’re going to be able to actually potentially very few after going through the restorative medicine process will have unexplained infertility. So they’re actually going to find what’s wrong and actually try to treat you. But the thing is, it does take time. Yeah. And a lot of couples, when you’re 38 or 39, and this is where we have to be honest. Why do people choose this? At 39 years old, when you’re trying to have a kid, it’s scary. Yep, I can’t wait two years to track my cycle and figure out what’s wrong with me. You’re telling me IVF will work, and it’s brutal, but I don’t need to hear about that. You’ll do it in the lab, and it’ll get me a kid by 41. Okay, that the mindset, and I understand that. Yeah, to want a child really badly is a natural, you know, the natural feeling. What we try to bring up though is that in the pursuit of our what can sometimes be a good desire, we can’t allow the child to pay for us to get what we want.
LH
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay, so that’s helpful for understanding what IVF is exactly. And yeah, that’s a that’s a real tragic picture when you put it like that. All the lives that can go to waste in pursuit of again what seems like a morally good goal of yeah producing a life and having a child, but I guess the issue that we really need to struggle with here and to understand is in that yeah I think I would use the word marketplace really in that marketplace the children are being treated as a commodity in that and the adults’ desires are just fulfilled, and they achieve the commodity. And it sounds very gross and kind of capitalistic, or just market-based to say it like that. But fundamentally, that’s kind of the trade that’s going on there. So, how do we, as Christians, kind of like wrap our minds around that to go like, okay, like there’s all this life being lost, and if you look at that honestly, you can go like, okay, that’s not a good thing, clearly, and that’s something we would be against. And if we took the other measures, which would be going down the fertility treatment route, you’re saying that that compares evenly to like a one for one sort of situation where you wouldn’t be wasting the other lives. How do we even in that one for one kind of situation look at that as Christians and say like is this a choice we can make or not? Are there some fundamental underlying assumptions there, just baked into the IVF process in general that we should be aware of that we should consider before trying to go down a road like that?
JW
Well, what most people will respond with is, “Oh, but we’re only going to do three eggs. We’re gonna implant all of them. We wouldn’t leave 25 in a freezer, and we would never discard because of Down syndrome or….” and a lot of Christians have been told there is this ethical way to do it, but I think it’s important to point out to them because it’s important for the comparison between two processes that when we talk about you have to stomach and contend with the amount of risk you are putting your child under, even if you intend to or you agree to implant every single one. So, a) some clinics have written to their agreements, and a lot of parents don’t realize this until after the process that they can actually reject your embryos for transfer. So, there’s clinics where you’ll sign because you’re not reading the paperwork. Where if this child has an abnormality or a disability, we will not implant, and so your embryo…
LH
Would they tell you in that situation?
JW
They’ll tell you that after, they’ll put it in the paperwork. Yeah, but again, a lot of these couples are like, “Where do I sign? I just want to get this over with.” Yeah, and so that’s factor one. Additionally, 98% of all cycles involve freezing the excess embryos. Okay, 98%. I mean, you’re almost never seeing a family just have one or two embryos, and that’s usually the older couple who could, they didn’t really get any eggs when they fertilize or when they retrieved them. Not many fertilize, so they’re just like, “Oh my, I’ve got one. I’m just implanting. I hope to God it works.” For most couples, the reality is 10-15 are going into the freezer. Well, that alone has a 2-5% chance of causing death to the embryo.
LH
Just freezing.
JW
Yeah. So we were talking about our kids earlier. Just taking that, it would be like putting one of our children through an open heart surgery. That’s the relative death ratio. So you’re talking about that kid unnecessarily – this freezing is a completely unnecessary process. It does nothing for the IVF process, it’s more convenient for the adults. They don’t have to do another retrieval. It’s not as hard on the woman’s body. It’s not as expensive, but that putting your embryos through that, you will lose 2-5%, and that’s just a recent innovation pre-2005, which a lot of your listeners may have family or have gone through it before. Pre-2005, that was closer to 40 or 50%.
LH
Wow.
JW
There were couples who would have 25 in the freezer, and when they thawed them, all of them died. Yeah, that and that’s again, unfortunately, as parents, we have to contend with the fact that that was our fault. We put our children in this risky situation. Again, you hear this. You hear the stories about the couples who had 3 or 4 embryos and they were intending to implant all of them, and then they the woman had to have a hysterectomy when she gave birth, and so now she can’t implant them, and they don’t know what to do. Or tragically, the mother got cancer and lost her life, and we’ve seen cases of the father getting remarried and the woman saying, “I don’t want anything to do with your embryos.”
LH
Right.
JW
Those are your ex-wives, not mine. So we have to understand when we create life in the lab, outside of the womb, outside of God’s intention, His design, we are putting our children in incredibly risky situations, and yet even in the best circumstances, that’s where I’m like, I’m not discarding, I’m not grading, I’m going to implant everyone. You’re still risking, again, dramatically the lives of your children. And look, if that’s the decision you make, great. But we have to really push on that word ethical, ethical IVF. This is a good way to do IVF and go. Whoa, whoa! No matter what you enter that arena, you are facing life and death situations, and you have to work out the fact that it might be your fault that this child meets its end.
LH
Yeah, it’s a it’s a very serious series of trade offs if you go down that road for sure.
JW
Yeah, because they’re all unnatural. There’s a total difference between you did everything in your power to conceive naturally, and you miscarried. That the natural human body. That’s a natural process. All of these are unnatural interventions.
LH
Indeed, indeed. Okay. So then, given kind of all that we had here on the outline to talk about kind of IVF as the other extreme of abortion. Now that seems on its face to be like, oh, how does that make sense? But like, there’s a kind of a clear line that you can draw between the two. Do you want to unpack that a little bit for myself, for our listeners, so we can understand like how that thought process works?
JW
Well, fundamentally, does it really matter if someone is ending the life of a child at an abortion clinic at 20 weeks, or you’re tossing away 10 embryos at day seven of their life in a laboratory called fertility? Both of these are individuals or adults seeking to exert full control over the lives of their children, and deciding I pick when you come into the world. I decide whether you live or die. That it’s really the other side of the coin. One often happens in the pursuit of a healthy child. The other the other obviously doesn’t. But what’s striking is, you know, you do sometimes hear cases of a woman that’s had, you know, 4 or 5 abortions at an abortion clinic, and you’re like, oh my gosh, that is that’s on just unthink- that seems like so much, but then it’s pretty, I mean, you scroll through Instagram, you will find women who will joke, couples that will joke about having 20 embryos on ice. They’ll have discarded 7 today. Or hey, I got tired of paying the storage fee, so I’m sending my 10 to research. That the scale is not even close. The fertility industry will victimize and end the lives of more children than the abortion industry across the world. And again, the just that doesn’t even take into account the frozen embryos, of which there are millions in North America right now, and probably 10 million around the world frozen, many of them abandoned by their parents.
LH
Yeah, what is going to happen to all of those? Like, do they still get stored? Do they just get like thrown in the trash? Like, what typically happens there?
JW
I mean, there was a case in Tennessee where a clinic shut down. They told all the parents to come get their embryos. They couldn’t find many of them, and the clinic owners had a dispute over who had to continue to take care of the children because they all feared a lawsuit, right? “I destroy all these embryos. I tried to contact them,” and then some parent comes back and sues you for property damage, right. They’re considered property.
LH
Which is crazy.
JW
It is, yeah. So what ended up happening is one doctor got so fed up he dumped a cool, basically a cooler of these on the doorstep of the other doctor’s new clinic and drove away.
LH
Oh wow!
JW
And these are this is so sad, but the even the containers for these were written in such a way that many of them over time years have now lost their identification. They don’t even know who is in the tubes anymore.
LH
Oh wow, yeah, that’s shocking. So there’s millions just in storage, and we don’t know, do we even know what happens if they get taken out like years and years later? Like, has that actually happened?
JW
What we believe is that many of them are going to have, because it’s been so long, and this was not designed, people, we started this process with no regulation.
LH
Yeah, of course.
JW
And the, and I know that for a fact in the United States, I’m not totally sure what Canada’s laws are on this, but we did not prepare for what would become all of this excess, what the industry would call inventory, these extra lives, and so we essentially have been trying now to put this genie back in the bottle and regulate it. But unfortunately, there are so many, you know, frozen lives scattered all around the world in completely different clinics under different conditions with different rules because we don’t have any regulation right now.
LH
That’s crazy. That’s so sad. What, so you’ve kind of described the process so far. We’ve kind of talked about how it happens most of the time, 98% of the time. Even if you go down this road and you try to be as ethical, quote unquote, as you can, there’s still challenges there. Is there any way through this at all to do this in some sort of ethical manner or are there just like too many red lines where like hey you just look at this you’re like yeah you can’t really cross that biblically like is there any path through this at all for a Christian or maybe even like speak to like people have gone down this road to be like you can understand how people get there, but yeah, what is that’s kind of a two-parter. So maybe just start with what’s the path to go down there. Is there an ethical way to do this? And then, if not, how would you speak to people who have kind of gone through this already and are looking back on it?
JW
Well, I think first of all, as with most new technology, parents got into this many of them without fully understanding the consequences. We get letters, I can recall one from a couple in California who was basically told, “Hey, we need to fertilize all 12 of your eggs.” She’s like, “I don’t want that. No.” They said, “No, this is the way this works. You’re never gonna have 12 take. I mean, never gonna happen.” All 12 took. And they’re like, okay, well, we’ll start implanting, but the implantation transfers you’re gonna miscarry. Trust us. Well, she went four for four.
LH
Oh wow.
JW
Well, okay. Now she’s got eight children left in a freezer, and this was a couple, a Christian couple that got into this trying to be ethical. Told by her doctor that this is the way it has to be done, and trust me, these gods in white lab coats often make you feel like you can’t ask questions, you can’t push back on the orthodoxy, and so she goes along with their plans, and she told us like I stare up at my ceiling fan at night, wondering like, “Dear God, what have I done?” So I, when people tell me it’s offensive to talk about this, or you know, you don’t realize the people’s feelings you’re going to hurt who tried their best or didn’t know, you know, I think we do run the risk of offending some adults. Couples like that give me a lot of courage to still have the conversation because if we’re preventing just one of these couples who will ask more questions, who will consider alternate routes, you’re talking about 8 little lives that may never see the outside of a tube in a freezer stashed away in some fertility clinic. Why? Because we didn’t have the courage to stand up and talk about the massive human rights abuses that are occurring through this industry? So, when you talk about a pathway through, we do have red lines. Like, because it’s funny, everything we’ve talked about so far has been the best case scenario. We haven’t talked about what all this industry made possible. So, first of all, some of the red lines are you cannot freeze. We discussed why. You cannot grade. There’s no reason to grade if you are going to implant every single embryo that you create, there’s no reason to grade. Grading is for discarding.
LH
Yep.
JW
There’s now you can’t sex select. It goes along with grading. You shouldn’t be sex selecting. You shouldn’t be screening out for diseases. We receive children. We don’t manufacture them.
LH
Correct.
JW
We don’t we don’t custom design our babies. These are each one is made in the image of God, and it’s not our job to weed out the undesirables.
LH
Yep.
JW
So that’s another red line for us. And then also we’re gonna say this seems obvious. Never involve a third party. So the marketplace that you mentioned extends into sperm and egg, so people will… well, you’ll find out. I saw a couple on Instagram actually the other day who said I was the problem. The guy said I was the problem, so we just had to go to a catalog and buy a vial of sperm. So we picked a guy that’s an Ivy League swimmer, and you know it costs us a little more, but you know we want our baby to be good at you know da da da, and then he goes, “People were telling me congratulations when my wife finally got pregnant, but it was honestly a little weird for me. I didn’t do anything,.” And he goes, then I have to fight back the feelings to tell me that I’m not the dad, but I’m the dad. Like a child, not actually right. A child has a mother and a father. You may be raised by a different man. That child doesn’t call you sperm donor. He’s going to call you dad. We know from studies that children are going to be incredibly harmed by being bought and sold in this manner when they have to sit there and consider, you know, this is the privilege of normalcy. When I think about my origins, my parents, you know, conceiving me in love in marriage, like totally normal, boring. This guy is gonna sit back, this kid in 20 years is gonna go, “Wait a second. He went to a clinic. Was he looking at pornography? How much did you pay him? That was how I came into the world?” You can’t put a, I mean, we can’t properly understand the trauma from a child’s perspective of knowing you had a price tag, and that you were one click or one page or one from being non-existent, yeah, right. So we have these red lines that you don’t involve a third party. You’re not freezing. You’re not screening, and also that you’re never another third party element would be using a surrogate. Yeah, and so it’s funny we just had a letter come the other day, where a woman was telling us that someone in her small group at church, oddly enough, kind of announced to the group, “Hey, we’re having a baby,” and they all thought she was pregnant, but in reality, she had hired a surrogate, someone she had found online, like through social media. Well, one of the gifts from God about even the gestation process is that you develop a really intimate bond. You know, we both have kids, you probably know. Your wife had a bond through that nine month period. Well, when you don’t have that, when you’ve hired a surrogate, when you’ve outsourced that, you know, critical piece of gestation, well, she didn’t develop a bond with the child. And so for the first six months of their life, she didn’t have a name for the baby.
LH
Oh, wow!
JW
Because she wasn’t connected, and she felt bad for what she had done. And the woman that wrote to us said, “I wish I had had more courage.”. To speak up through the process, you know, I had known she was experiencing infertility. I had known she was considering some options like that, but I had worried too much about her feelings to speak up. And again, that’s what the root of a lot of this is: is that an adult desire trumped the potential impacts that it would have on the child. And so, those are some red lines, but then you have to layer on the risks. Freezing is another example of risk. The clinic you choose, again, the air, the solution they’re put in, the amount of light they’re exposed to, all of these things vary clinic to clinic, and you have to be comfortable as a couple that the clinic you pick may have a significant impact on whether the child lives or dies. That’s something that you’re entering into the equation and you’re choosing. Now, pregnancy does involve risk, and there are miscarriages, and so it’s really hard to know how much of this was me, or how…? But what we hear consistently is, I can’t help but think I had something to do with that, and I wonder, did I play God? Did I take it into my hands? And so, certainly there are red lines, but if you venture into this arena, even if you avoid those lines, you’re still taking on massive amounts of risk that that no one can protect you from.
LH
No. Yeah. Well, that’s a lot to stomach, to think about, to consider. Of course, there’s always these considerations to a lesser degree if you’re just you know looking to have your next child in the family or your first child or whatnot, and just in a natural manner, of course. But yeah, that much more. Obviously, when you go down this road too. So maybe we can kind of speak to some of the other alternatives that are available for couples who be going through this. So if they’re if they’re listening this or they’ve done their own research and they’ve come to the conclusion that yeah, you know what? I don’t think I can justify this road, and there’s too many red lines I would have to cross and you thought about it, prayed about it, whatnot. What are some other alternatives that people can look at in a situation like that?
JW
Well, it’s good. This is this is great because even in our when we talk about this on Instagram, you can follow us at Them Before Us, there’s oftentimes comments saying, “Well, just adopt,” like it’s just adopt, like that’s basically the same, right? It’s important to remember adoption is stepping into the tragedy a child’s experiencing. Yeah, adoption is a child who has lost their biological parents through neglect or tragedy, and now that kid has to reckon with that loss the rest of his life. It’s not a fun family building activity. It’s a difficult calling that God calls us into, a burden we get to bear on behalf of a child, which, by the way, is why it is so different from this whole fertility industry. In the fertility industry, when you involve surrogates and you buy egg and sperm, I mean, you’ll see the instances of it can be a heterosexual couple, can be a homosexual couple. You’ll see them acquiring children this way that they are not related to, and that requires loss. When you buy sperm or egg, you’re taking that father or mother out of that child’s life completely. And the difference between that and adoption, because we often hear them kind of conflated, is that in adoption, no one planned for this to occur.
LH
Yeah, way different.
JW
No one is saying this is good.
LH
No.
JW
But on the other hand, we see the media culture in these other instances where a child’s handed to two unrelated adults. That was all planned. All the contracts in place cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone celebrates it. It’s progress. We need to be happy about this. I mean, we’ve had letters from kids in those situations who will say to us, you know, when I complained about my father hunger, or when I asked to know where my mother came from, or to know if I look like my mother, the response back was, “Do you know how expensive you were? That’s such a diff… The two people you have to process through your grief with are the two people who financed it. In the other instance with adoption, the two people who you’re working this through with will say, “Yeah, it’s a tragedy that that happened. That’s an injustice. I wish you never had to have that occur. And we’re incredibly glad that you’re ours. You complete our family, but also your grief is real.”
LH
Yeah.
JW
So it’s a massive difference. So I think you know honestly, if you’re facing infertility. There are no easy answers. You know whether it’s embryo adoption, you’re going to face some of the same challenges. You’re still going to have to go through the IVF process, which is very hard on your body. But it is rescuing children who are trapped in these kind of frozen hellscapes. You’re actually trying to do something good for them. Although even then, that’s not the best outcome for that child. The best outcome for that child is that the mother and father come back and raise their kids that they abandoned in these freezers. But if you do find a child that’s truly been abandoned, yes, rescuing them and implanting them and adopting them through embryo adoption is a very good thing. It is good, but one even one concern there. The embryo adoption industry, which is trying to do a great thing for kids and does do amazing things for many kids trapped in that environment, if it’s not paired, if we if we got all the churches in Canada to step up and adopt every single child out of embryo adoption, that would also be a massive blank check to the fertility industry. One of the big black marks on the fertility industry right now is how irresponsible they’ve been in the creation of life in a total consumeristic mindset to produce as many children as possible to keep the highest success rates possible because they got to get so many kids to get their A pluses. If we bail them out tomorrow, then they lose that thing that we’re all pointing to, right? So what’s the answer? Because it’s not to keep the kids locked up in the freezer.
LH
Oh, that’s tough.
JW
The answer is we have to, on one hand, fight for regulation. Fight to honestly to end the practice and the irresponsible nature in which they’re victimizing children, and also fight to get every one of those kids out of the freezer. And they have to occur at the same time. Otherwise, this industry will feed on that, and will say, “Look, it’s not that bad. Look at all these happy new kids and these happy new families.” And they’ll use that too to lessen the appearance of victimization, which will help their marketing.
LH
So, if a couple proceeds with embryo adoption and it’s successful, that will impact the rates of the giving clinic in a positive sense. And the more people do that and it’s successful, the more higher the rates go, which helps their marketing. It’s more
JW
It’s more just that they’re going to be able to point to that and say, “Look, we’re not abandoning kids. Look how many excess. Look at all these couples that we completed their family as a result.”
LH
Yeah, it’s like we help people and these people.
JW
It’s like we stepped in to help you, and we wish we never had to. But again, we can’t make the kids the political football. We’ve got to, we have to step in and help. But people. That’s why I love them before us. Is at the same time that we’re advocating for, you know, that we have to do something about these, which first and foremost is their biological parents going back to raise them. At the same time, we have to get a hold of what the fertility industry is doing and bring them to heel.
LH
Totally, yeah. If you if you get that flip backwards, and it’s just about the adult desire before the kids, like you said off the hop, everything goes just goes backwards from there. And it’s just it’s yeah, you end up in these very difficult scenarios where you’re faced with these impossible almost situations of even if yeah people go ahead and do that, which on its own isolated is a very good thing. It’s like the way you described it there. It’s pretty much analogous with adoption. Obviously, if you could get the adopted, you know, if the kid was three and the parents could come back, you wouldn’t want that to be the situation. And same thing for an embryo as well. I guess yeah, we’ve kind of danced around this a little bit, explaining the whole thing and talking about the different red lines. But ultimately, you do end up in a situation where it seems like, yeah, for better for worse, you’re playing God in a way because you’re making these children in a lab environment. Would you say that’s overstating it, or like is that a fair description to say yeah, you’re kind of playing God in this situation?
JW
Well, yeah, I think God in the sense that we want total control, and that control comes at a massive cost. And the one that bears the risk is the child. And I guarantee you that this practice would not have survived if we could see the victims.
LH
Totally.
JW
It is only because it has lived in the dark, and most clinics don’t have to report how many they’re discarding. Most clinics don’t have to report how many they put in the freezer. It’s only because of that that they can keep these essentially the bodies stacked very far from the public eye that this has continued. And so yeah, it’s a, I think, natural to want a child. This is an unnatural process that has a huge victim count. Now, that doesn’t mean that we do nothing. We don’t have any answers. The truth is, if we had pumped the amount of money into IVF that we have, if we had taken that and reallocated that into researching the human body and trying to fix our underlying causes for infertility, whether it’s our diet, exercise, or actual things that need surgery and need to be corrected. If we had done that, we would know so much more about these causes. And also, we can’t get away from the fact that that would have also made us contend with how this push to have kids later and later, in our 30s and 40s, is not good. No. Now, for some people, that’s a reality for a variety of reasons. But your fertility will fall off a cliff in your 30s, and you will have a, you will have a very low likelihood of natural pregnancy, even if nothing’s wrong with you. It’s the way the human body works. So instead of our response as a culture being to invest in a process that will victimize kids and will cost many lives. We could shift our cultural messaging and maybe even the way we do life to say we need to get we need to be having families earlier. This is incredibly important. But that’s honestly convenience and control. We don’t do it because we set up our economies in certain ways. Culture has pushed this narrative of freedom. Don’t have kids till you’re established. Don’t get married till you’ve got a great job and a house. Like we’ve oriented society in a way that people are starting at 30 or 35. Well, then you’re always going to be having a very low chance, and you’re going to turn to these processes like IVF, even if it just increases you by a little bit. But at what cost? I had a there’s an embryologist that we work with in the states who said we need to get to a point where IVF is not necessary. Like, have we developed the technology to make it unnecessary. To where we’ve gotten so good at diagnosing, and we we’ve adapted to not have children so late. We’re actually making it something where it’s not an either or. It’s a I’m not sure why you would do that.
LH
So yeah, there’s definitely a technological aspect to that, but probably fair to say the broader issue is just the cultural reticence to have children that young.
JW
It certainly hurts. I mean, your chances go way, way down. Yeah, but your desires don’t necessarily. And so people, we get into space, we go, well, are you telling me that I am not supposed to have kids then? And it’s hard. The truth is, we can’t allow our desire to have children to force us down a path. We want you to have children. We want you to do everything in your power to have children, except this one thing: children can’t be sacrificed on the altar of that desire.
LH
Yep.
JW
So it’s not really that we don’t, it’s just that IVF can’t, if it’s going to cost the children lives. It can’t be an option for us.
LH
Yeah. You can’t because a lot of people are making the trade of like I’d like to have my 20s to live it up and do what I want, blah blah blah, and then I’ll worry about it later on. And that’s the implicit trade that so many people make, but they don’t think about it.
JW
Well, I think culture is not telling them.
LH
Well, for sure, culture hides it.
JW
Right. Really, they’re distracting. Pushing birth control, and they’re pushing again this delayed lifestyle. You know, party all through your 20s. Don’t get married. Marriage is awful. It’s going to weigh you down. Yes, all of that has a huge cost. We’ve just used things like IVF to almost hide the cost. You could still have a kid.
LH
Yeah, it’s a demonic lie.
JW
Just use IVF. Right? Oh, and if you happen to accidentally get pregnant during your 20s, just get an abortion. They’re all these same things. It’s helping you to be able to do what you want when you want and control your fertility around it to stop your child coming into the world at 20 to make it happen at 35. All of it is when we as adults have adapted and pushed the, you know the lives of our children to bend around our current will and desire.
LH
100%. Is there any sort of positive case or like positive spin on it where I know that’s a bad way to ask that question… What are the eggs used for when they go into scientific research. Is there anything positive there? Or is that all, there’s nothing good there?
JW
Oh, so when embryos are donated, yes, always bad. I mean what’s interesting is that even sometimes when you’ll see celebrities or politicians talk about freezing their eggs. Well, a lot of women don’t go back for them, but in the clinic agreements, they’ll even say things like, “You know, donate it to couples. Give it away. Don’t I’ll donate them if I don’t come back.”
LH
Yeah, sounds good.
JW
And sometimes, actually, young women are kind of preyed upon. They’ll tell them you’re about to go into your MBA, so they’ll do this on college campuses where women are starting an MBA or they’re starting a JD, a law degree, and they’ll say, “Hey, you should freeze your eggs. And I know you can’t think about that right now, but if you give us half of them, we’ll cover all the costs for 20 years.” And they’ll actually split the eggs, so we keep 10, you keep 10, and we’ll give the 10 to these couples. They’ll sell, they’ll resell the eggs to other people, and they will cover your storage fees till you’re 35 or 40.
LH
Wow.
JW
So that’s what donation, whether it’s an embryo, which is a living person on day 1, 3, 5, 7 of life, getting donated to research where they’re going to get tested on or practiced, they’re going to be, your little kid is going to be practice for a new embryologist. Or it’s an egg, which is just the female gamete, and they’re going to essentially resell it in an open market to other people. It’s all bad. But it’s all a predatory marketplace.
LH
That’s wow, yeah, that’s crazy, and that’s, I’m sure that’s happening all the time now with women, kind of in that circumstance. And you can, again, you can see like just sympathizing them, you can see why people say yes to that on the surface because it feels like, oh yeah, I’m keeping my options open, I’m donating. It feels very ethically good, really.
JW
Oh, if you’re the right race and the right hair color, and you’re athletic and smart, there’s there are there are surrogate or surrogate agencies or egg agencies that will pay you $45,000, $50,000, $60,000 a cycle.
LH
Really?
JW
Yeah. So you can make over the course of your college career $300,000 or $400,000 selling, you know, 200 of your children to buyers around the world.
LH
Oh wow, that’s crazy! What is an IVF? I don’t actually know it, what does an IVF process like cost people to do that?
JW
So if you’re going to do enough rounds to get pregnant, you’re typically looking, it could be $25,000 if it’s really easy and goes super well. Could be $75,000 or $100,000 if it’s complicated or you’re using a really advanced clinic. To buy a surrogate and rent their womb, you’re talking about anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 to buy the egg. You know, again, you’re talking about $10,000 or $15,000. Sperm is not that expensive because there’s a lot more of it out in the marketplace. But I mean, all told, there are couples who will invest $200,000 or $250,000 all told in this process, which is why we’ve seen, there was a case not too long ago with two men who had a surrogate, they went in for their ultrasound at 20 weeks, and when that happened, the baby had a cleft lip. This is a relatively minor surgery to fix your lip, and they said, “No, no, no, no. You know how much money we’re paying? We want a perfect product.” And they have in these contracts, these surrogate contracts, a provision for termination, which is forced abortion. So this whole bodily autonomy, my body, my choice. Except when you have a surrogate contract, and they will sue the pants off you unless you get an abortion on their demand.
LH
So the two like gay men in this case told the woman that…
JW
She went into hiding. Said I’m not doing that. Because gestation’s a funny thing you develop a bond with your child even if it’s not genetically yours so she went into hiding and had the child, they sued, got the child back and then sued her for emotional damages for the damage it caused them for her refusing to kill their child.
LH
Oh my! Wow.
JW
We just had another case in Canada or in Alaska. An Alaskan surrogate, a California couple, a man and a woman, who implanted their embryo in this Alaskan woman, and they found out that it had a heart defect that would need surgery. Yeah, complicated surgery, but 97% of the surgeries in that this particular hospital had done on this particular issue had been successful. They said, “Nope, forced abortion. We don’t want the child. You need to go right away.” So she flew to Texas, where they gave her essentially protection, for her to have the kid. She had the kid. They immediately filed a restraining order against the surrogate. So, a woman that was carrying the baby, who is the only person in the baby’s life who wanted them alive, was granted a restraining order against her from the child by the two people who tried to kill the child.
LH
That’s so messed up.
JW
So now they’re in an absolute dogfight right now to try to figure out who retains custody. Should it matter that the people who just tried to kill or end this kid’s life are trying to be the parents to take them home now?
LH
Oh boy.
JW
That’s I mean really, it’s like well, in a lot of cases, if we thought a parent was trying to end the life of their child, we wouldn’t let them go home with them.
LH
No, no.
JW
So, why are we doing it now?
LH
Yeah. Yeah, that’s insane. So have the courts ruled on that particular case?
JW
We think that it’s going to go to the United States Supreme Court.
LH
Supreme. Oh, that’ll be a big one. Has there been any other cases like that, or this is kind of…?
JW
Well, we’re definitely seeing more and more of it at this whole marketplace, and what technology has allowed is essentially proliferating the horrors. The like the things that we have made possible have now, you know, we are seeing IVF clinics that put the wrong embryo in the wrong mother, so she’ll take home a child who isn’t the same race when she ends up giving birth, and they had no idea. So, there’s, that’s happened several times: Florida, California, complete IVF mix-up. There was a surrogate in Mexico who was implanted with an embryo, but she was still having sex, which you’re not supposed to do when you’re a surrogate. And she got pregnant naturally, but then she miscarried. This is like a science fiction. She miscarried the embryo that she was implanted with, so they thought she was pregnant with their baby. She gave them the baby, and it was a Mexican baby. They were not a Mexican couple, and so they’re like, “Wait, what’s happened?” Well, the woman wouldn’t take the baby back. The Mexican government wouldn’t recognize her as Mexican. The couple that had commissioned the baby or bought the baby didn’t want to take the baby either, and that country wouldn’t recognize the baby citizenship either. So the baby was essentially a refugee, as they had a custody dispute over her.
LH
Wow! Horrible.
JW
Again, all of this stuff is when we take… What’s funny? Number one, none of this would be possible without IVF.
LH
Well, for sure.
JW
IVF has for anybody who wants to talk about what it has done ethically or how we could do it, this and that and the other thing, IVF has been a massive door to injustice that so many people have walked through to do absolutely terrible things. That is an undeniable truth, and so that that’s like part one. Part two is any time we’ve taken, you know, conception out of the womb and this, and even outside of marriage, what have we found? Everything falls apart. Like human beings, like we have no limit to our imagination on how to victimize children. Like the things we will do. The Chinese billionaire who enlisted over 100 surrogates in California to have an army of children, all with American passports, so he could take them all back when they’re done. He sends nannies over to pick them up once they’re born. He doesn’t even go. Like these are the things that are now possible that would have never been possible before.
LH
That’s horrific.
JW
That’s when we go outside of God’s design. Yeah,
LH
Yeah, yeah. When you take that whole process out and out of the bedroom and into the lab, so to speak. That’s where you get into trouble for sure. Okay, that’s yeah, that’s a lot to take in. To be honest, it’s pretty heavy subject here. Again, I just you feel for the people who’ve gone through it and maybe not knowingly understood everything that’s encompassed inside of that, of course. Yeah, I mean, I kind of asked you earlier, but yeah, for those, I guess, what can we do about this as Christians? Maybe whether we’ve gone through it or not. Like, what are you guys doing about it as an organization, and what I guess maybe for folks in the U.S. because we do have some American listeners, but also here in Canada, what can kind of be done about this practice on a practical level, maybe.
JW
Well, there certainly are legal things, and we have to do those. And organizations like ours go to Parliament, go to the legislatures in the state, and we advocate strongly for legislation that will reform and educate the individuals to stop at a broad scale the victimization of children to protect the child’s right to their mother and father. That when a child comes into the world, they are not an asset to be assigned. They belong with their mother and father, and from the moment of conception, they can’t be separated. They shouldn’t be taken into a lab. They shouldn’t be frozen indefinitely. They shouldn’t be discarded. We have to protect their life all the way to the womb, and then beyond to their mother and father. So there’s a policy angle for sure. We have to do that. But where this battle is really fought is in the small group in church. It’s in the pews. It’s with your sister or your family. And I get it. Like you may have 3 or 4 kids. Your sister’s struggling to have any children, and she tells you she’s going to do IVF, and you, with your happy bunch of kiddos causing havoc in the house, are going to tell her she shouldn’t do that? I mean, there’s a massive social cost. But the whole mission of our organization is to equip moms and dads, everyday people, to present this in a way that that reframes the issue to what might this cost the child? Do you know about this process? Do you know what your body’s going to go through? Do you know the risks that you’re going to put your child under. Yeah, like do you know the alternatives? And begging couples, it might be the couple at 22 who says we’re not having kids till way later. It’s it may be talking to them and intervening then. Yeah, that’s true. Do you have any idea how difficult it may be? And then when you look back, your decision now to have to use IVF, and maybe something terrible happens. Maybe one of these risks comes true, and you now feel like, man, did I did I play a part in the victimization of this child? Well, if you could have avoided that by getting pregnant at 22, man, and you could have said something to encourage them towards that, but we stayed silent because what we were afraid that they would be offended trying to prescribe a lifestyle to them. Like it’s important, I think, for us to pause and remember that the gospel that Christ preached was not met with applause. It was met with resistance. Right, through the ages there have been different elements that culture has fought over. The people aren’t spilling blood over the divinity of Christ today. People aren’t fighting over whether there’s a Trinity. We work through a lot of those things. The battles that are raging today are the redefinition of human beings. What does it mean to be a child? What does it mean to be mother? What does it mean to be father? Does a child, I mean, Seattle, Washington just passed a law that says we’re going to recognize polyamorous couples. I believe in Canada, there’s actually…
LH
I was just going to say Ontario’s had that for a while, four up to four parents.
JW
There you go. So that is that is fundamentally saying no, there can be three fathers or two mothers or yeah.
LH
It’s ludicrous.
JW
That’s a denial of biological reality, a denial of a truth, of a reality. Well, okay, that’s what we have to deal with right now. People wanting to change when life begins. What makes you a man? What makes you a woman? What it means to be a child? A child has had a definition for 1000s of years that they come into the world and they belong with their mother and father, which is the two people that created them. We’ve now launched into this brand brave new world that says a child is belongs with any two people, maybe four?
LH
Whoever paid for them?
JW
That contracted them? That’s a new definition that we’ve never recognized. Well, okay. Well, we have to now as adults we have to fight back against that, and we have to recognize the culture is not going to like that.
LH
No, not at all.
JW
But that’s in alignment with history. I think we as Christians believe that the gospel we preach shouldn’t have anything to do with that. That that we’re not going to get the pushback. That that you’re being divisive or you’re being political. Well, newsflash: politics used to be about national defense, building roads, and ag policy. And well, now it’s no, we’re the politicians. We tell you when life begins. We tell you who can get married. We tell you what a man is. We tell you what a woman is. Politics got theological, whether you like it or not. We aren’t getting political by talking about these topics. Politics veered into our lane, and so how are we as Christians prepared to go into that public sphere, which will often look like our living rooms, as our sister tells us about her infertility, or her decision to delay her fertility. Well, she’s 35, wants to travel the world. How are we willing as Christians to risk to have a good theology of risk and understand the presentation of the gospel, the protection of human lives, the protection of the most vulnerable requires me to talk about the tremendous harms and damages of IVF. It requires me to talk about the risks of infertility by delaying having kids for 10 or 15 years. The one that wants to use a surrogate to talk about the primal wound the child will experience by being abandoned by the one person they’ve ever heard from in their entire life at nine months in one day, like that will cost us something. And as Christians, are we willing to pay that cost?
LH
Yeah, I mean it, it already does. That’s the sad part today. Yeah, and it’s you’re right. You got to start wrestling with it locally in your church, in your family, in the people in your life. And I think that was a good point you made too about how it’s not just the people in their you know mid to late 30s who would be wrestling with this, right? A lot of those decisions to delay things get made much earlier in life, and I think that’s just a, I mean, I guess on the one hand a message of hope, but also it’s a weighty message too of the choices that you make very early on in your life can have a large impact on obviously on your children or potential children that kind of thing, and yeah, it’s just it’s incumbent on us as you know speaking as a younger person, like you do have to take that really seriously and consider that before you’re maker of some of these choices that you make because it seems so light and easy to say, hey, I’m just gonna, I’ll take it easy. I won’t think about that now. And you know, we’re getting we’re already getting married. Like most people don’t get married this young, right? Like say if you’re in the church and you get married, you know, 25 or 23 or something like that. But yeah, the clocks the clock is ticking, and you are God gives us a calling as well, right? Gives us a beautiful calling to be fruitful and to multiply, and I think that’s again. This is always one of those tough issues with infertility, but we don’t have a right to children, as tough as that is. We have a calling to go ahead and to multiply if we’re given that ability. But it’s not a right that we have, and I think that’s really challenging, probably to deal with, and that’s something I have not had to do on a personal level. But I do, I really sympathize with those people, and I’m sure you probably get communication. I’m sure in your organization from those folks as well. How do you kind of deal with that when those people reach out? And there’s obviously some real hurt and real pain there, and it’s, I’m sure it can be heartbreaking and lonely at times too, because it’s probably very tough to talk about that. But how do you guys interact with those folks, and how do you kind of give them some comfort and share the gospel with them as well?
JW
Well, I do think some of it is helping them even just reframe the argument. A lot of the people that reach out to us, so you’re speaking out against infertility, or you’re speaking out against IVF. So you don’t want me to have a kid. Well, we that’s not even our, we’re talking about something that’s victimizing kids, and pointing that out has nothing to do with your infertility. What should our energy go to when we see couples struggling? Let’s find a solution. Let’s invest. Let’s find ways to heal the human body. I don’t accept the false choice that it’s IVF or bust.
LH
Two things can be true at the same time. Yeah,
JW
Yeah and so we should absolutely we, it’s not like we’re standing in our ivory tower saying, “Nope, no IVF. You guys just need to suck it up and deal with it.” No, no, no, no, no, no. We have to figure this out. We just have been so unwilling to because this industry is selling this as a golden ticket to children, but it is built on a cost that nobody sees. And so there is so much of it’s just helping people to see, we’re not against you. We’re not anti you having a child. We just we have an obligation to call out, you know, what this process is doing, and we know that no one will invest any dollars into anything else to actually start fixing this unless they see how harmful this one is, how much a society should be rejecting this one. But so long as they’re able to kind of bury the cost, externalize the cost. No one’s going to have any motivation to seek anything else. And yeah, people message us all the time with not always very nice notes. But again, the nature of our organization is that we are going to upset most adults when we talk about, you know, you need to stay together, even if it’s just for the children. You made a covenant before God, fulfill your oath. You know that’s divorce has become such a, you know, convenience issue that that you’re causing massive trauma to the children, and you guys need to work it out. Well, that’s not a popular opinion.
LH
No.
JW
And the church is very silent right now on that couple. At oh well, our kids are out of the house. They don’t need us anymore. You know, we’re finally getting a divorce. I just want a new girlfriend. No, we need to move back to preachers and pastors and everyday people saying, fulfill your oath. We won’t stand for that. Your word means something, and the children depend on you, and all the data proves it. Children absolutely suffer when families die, when they fall apart due to divorce. So, my point being, whether we’re talking about IVF, adoption, foster care, marriage, divorce, we’re bound to make adults mad.
LH
Oh, for sure.
JW
When you advocate for children and the most vulnerable, those in positions of power and authority who have previously been able to get their way and go unchallenged, they will feel threatened. But I go back to the gospel. If you expect anything less when preaching the gospel, then then you’re fooling yourself.
LH
Yeah, it’s going to confront you with your sin, right? And one of the primary sins is that pride and selfishness, right? And it’s in all of our hearts, mine, yours, everybody, right? And it’s yeah, there’s so many ways, so many evil ways that gets manifested in the world. And I mean, yeah, we’ve spent a lot of time today talking about one of those ways, and like the devil always does, it’s always masquerading as this virtuous thing, and it’s very easy to get on board at a surface level. And so, I appreciate you coming on and kind of painting the picture as dark as it is to understand what this process looks like and all the loss of life that that results from it. And also, you know, hopefully we can still offer some hope to like, okay, we can change this. There are practical ways we can deal with this, and it’s going to be a process for sure. It won’t be overnight, and it’s going to start with people speaking up to those in their in their lives in their circles. And you’re probably going to take some flak, probably a fair amount of flak for it. But yeah, if that’s not an example of real talk, I don’t know what it is. It’s a challenge, but it’s a calling that I think we have too. So I really appreciate you sharing that with us. It’s amazing.
JW
Yeah. Thanks for being willing to dive into the conversation.
LH
I guess I guess maybe just to leave our listeners, we always try to you know leave it on a good note of hope, right? And that ultimately, of course, even though we can talk about these real issues and the real, yeah that’s just the very horrible impact it can have yet of course our hope is in Christ and we know that ultimately He is victorious and we have that eternal hope in Him so just to kind of bring it full circle here and rest in the hope of the gospel if someone’s been listening to this and you know they’ve maybe they felt you know offended or they felt angered or maybe now they’ve you know they’re also feeling guilty. How do we kind of how would you speak to those people too? Because I’m sure you have that in your organization again on a regular basis of maybe some of those angry messages you get initially. Those people come back around and then you’re kind of able to have some good fruitful conversations, so yeah, what would you say to those folks who’ve heard this message today, they’ve been convicted, and now they’re like, “Okay, how do I, how can I feel about this? Or I feel so guilty. What can I do?”
JW
I think with all, I think with all conviction, anytime the Holy Spirit convicts our heart over decisions we would have made done differently, which we all have.
LH
Oh yeah.
JW
I think there is a responsibility to ask for forgiveness and to not allow shame and guilt to paralyze us, as hard as that may be. I have no doubt that some of the people listening may have unbearable situations that they’re facing currently, maybe life and death decisions with embryos. They may have some in the freezer currently that they pay the monthly bill, and it absolutely haunts them. Maybe they just stopped paying. I mean, those will be real situations. Those are real letters we’ve gotten. There is no condemnation in Christ. It, yes, that was that did victimize a child. Yes, it’s incredibly hard to stomach once you’ve been educated. And truthfully, you may not have asked the questions, you may not have been told the answers that you were supposed to, or maybe you feel deceived. I don’t know. I can’t speak to every situation that you’re going through. What I do know is that going to Christ with that and asking for forgiveness and asking to be, to have Him carry that burden for you, that that’s the only place we can go. When Christ turns around to the disciples after telling them, “You’ve got to, you know, drink my blood and eat my body”, and everybody’s like, “That’s weird. I’m out of here.” Yeah. He looks at his disciples and said, “What about you guys?” They’re like, “Where else we gonna go? Like, I don’t have any other options.” Yeah. This you really do hit the end of your rope, and I think that’s an appropriate place to be is to go Lord, I have nowhere else to go with this, and I would do things differently, and I’m asking for your forgiveness. Then, do not allow Satan to paralyze you in those feelings of guilt and shame, and take your story and choose to use the experiences you’ve had to prevent other couples from having to walk through what you’ve walked through. The most powerful testimonies we have are of people whose eyes have been opened to this process, have regret, and then mobilize that feeling to actually make change to stop other families from going through these things. To actually speak up and look, that’s hard. There’s for sure process of the shame where you don’t want to talk about what you what has occurred, what you’ve done, but man, there are so many couples, even on an individual basis, that if you reach out to them and say, “Hey, if you’re thinking about this, I’d love to share my experience. I’d love to share the situations you know me and my wife had to walk through.” That can be that can that can prevent so much of this from occurring, but you’ve got to have taken it to Christ and get to a place where you understand that you’re forgiven, and then allow Him to speak through you to prevent more of it from happening.
LH
Amen to that. It’s hard, but necessary. So, thank you, Josh. I really appreciate you making the time today, and yeah, I’m sure our listeners will have some feedback on this too so, feel free to send that in as always. And yeah, it’s an important issue. It’s one that is probably near and dear to many hearts. And we hope that you were edified by it and informed and hopefully challenged if needed as well. So with that, it’s been a pleasure. And keep having real talk, folks. We’ll catch you next time.