Humans have used language to belittle their enemies and strip them of their humanity for centuries. Yet in America today, many on the left believe that liberal culture has summited the mountain of progress and demonized all words that tear down.
But if the left really wants to be the rhetorical protector of the innocent, then it should stop whitewashing IVF as a scientific procedure that only affects mindless cells, and start calling IVF embryos what they really are: human children.
However, that is exactly what the Huff Post did not do.
The radically liberal news site smeared the Trump Administration last week for changing the language in the federal Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services (EAA) program to refer to frozen embryos as children in need of homes.
“The grant has seemingly transformed into a vehicle for anti-abortion rhetoric and fetal personhood ideology,” the Huff Post claimed, and quoted the leftist, pro-abortion director of the National Women’s Law Center calling the grant “a Trojan horse” that the Trump Administration used to “insert something that is incredibly harmful,” namely, recognizing embryos as humans.
The EAA grant program operates the federal “frozen embryo adoption public awareness campaign,” and promotes adopting already created, frozen embryonic children instead of creating more. Grant recipients must refuse to engage in “embryo-destructive research … discarding or destroying human embryos,” or “create new human embryos.” The Huff Post claims that the program previously focused on helping “LGBTQIA+ couples looking to adopt embryos.” Now, it emphasizes faith-based organizations that recognize embryos as humans as the primary recipients of the grant.
The Huff Post’s greatest fear from the language changes is not even about IVF. They believe that accurately calling embryos children will promote the “long-held conservative belief that fetuses — or even fertilized eggs or embryos — should have the same rights and protected class status as any other child.” This logically will “pass personhood laws that would reinterpret when life legally begins and instantly criminalize abortion at all stages of pregnancy.”
In other words, the Huff Post and the left are afraid of logic. Now that even legal language exposes the reality of personhood even at the embryonic level, the left cannot use “it’s only a clump of cells” rhetoric to justify abortion, because if life starts at conception, then both the embryo in a mother or frozen in time is human life.
A secondary fear of the left exposed in the Huff Post piece is that the massive “build and buy your own baby” IVF corporations will cease to exist now that embryos are reframed as human beings. Most IVF companies create 10 embryos per customer, but only implant one to three. The rest are frozen with an uncertain future or destroyed. That means for every 100 customers, 700 to 900 children are indefinitely frozen or murdered. As the president of Them Before Us Katy Faust wrote, “the baby-making fertility industry destroys more little lives annually than the baby-taking abortion industry.”
A far less profitable but ethical form of IVF only creates and implants one embryo at a time. This is the type of IVF the EAA program supports by restricting federal funding to organizations that do not discard “left-over” children.
The Alabama Supreme Court already took a similar stance on IVF two years ago. It ruled that all unborn children, including embryos created through IVF, are humans under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The ruling was based on fundamentally Christian principles that everyone is made in the image of God and each person’s worth exceeds what humans can calculate at any stage in life. Alabama still allows IVF in the state, but it must be done ethically, not commoditizing or throwing out “undesirable” or “unnecessary” children.
However, many pro-lifers reject IVF altogether in its current unregulated state because it promotes eugenics, makes humans customizable products, and rips children away from their biological parents to place them with homosexual adults.
The world’s first adopted frozen embryo, Hannah Strege, holds this view. Strege’s biological parents created 32 embryos through IVF and froze 20, including Strege. Strege’s adoptive parents reached out to the now deceased Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family, looking for advice on adopting embryos. At the same time, Hannah’s biological parents reached out to Dobson, asking for help getting their frozen children adopted. Dobson connected the two, leading to Hannah’s adoption three years after she was frozen. She was the only one of the 20 embryos to survive the thaw and implantation.
To Strege, IVF can be done ethically if embryos are treated as the humans they are. “I believe that life begins at conception … I don’t have to look at, like, my faith or religion to know that fact, that’s a scientific fact … a new human being doesn’t come into play at any other part in the developmental process,” she said.
Ethical IVF means that the fertility industry and the federal government regulate the IVF market so that there is no donor egg or sperm, which creates children who will never know their biological parents, no surrogacy that leads to homosexual couples purchasing children, and no “creating more embryos than you’re willing to implant, and then no freezing or discarding of embryos,” Strege said.
However, Strege mentioned that “I haven’t seen even one place do it that way.”
One of the best and easiest ways to fix that is for the Trump Administration to do more than change a few words in a grant program. Strege told the Federalist:
What [Trump] did with changing the wording was kind of like a footnote or an asterisk … he’s [still] supporting IVF in its entirety. He thinks by just adding the embryo adoption aspect, he’s done his part, when that’s not the case. We can’t keep practicing IVF the way that it currently stands, because we’re not going to save babies that way.
“We need people to adopt embryos and give embryos a chance at life … while also regulating the system, so more lives don’t end up in freezers,” she concluded.
