In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is the fertilisation of a woman’s egg outside the body in a petrie-dish (in vitro is Latin and means "in glass"). Most IVF is performed as fertility treatment, for couples who have problems conceiving. The newly fertilised egg (embryo) is incubated until his/her cells have multiplied and he/she has become a hollow ball of cells, known as a blastocyst¹. He/she is then transferred into a woman’s womb.

IVF was pioneered in Britain,² where Louise Brown, the first IVF (or test-tube) baby, was born on 25 July 1978. Since Louise was born, hundreds of thousands of babies have been born using IVF³. One per cent of the annual births in Britain are from IVF and donor insemination⁴.

Although IVF can lead to the birth of a child, many embryos die in the process. One expert ⁵ has estimated that only 1.7% of IVF conceptions lead to a live birth. The majority of human beings produced by IVF die before birth. Many die even before they are transferred to the womb. It has been estimated that over 70,000 human embryos were created, implanted and died in the course of in vitro fertilisation treatment in the UK during the year 1998/99. There were only 8,300 IVF babies born⁶.

The highest constitutional court in Costa Rica banned IVF in the year 2000 because of the loss of life involved. The court said "the human embryo is a person from the moment of conception ... not an object". The court decided that IVF threatened embryos with a "disproportionate risk of death"⁷.

Since one IVF embryo has little chance of surviving most IVF treatment produces lots of test-tube embryos. One, or more,⁸ are transferred to the womb hoping that one will successfully implant in the womb. Transferring lots of embryos and advances in medical technology mean that twin and multiple births are higher than they have ever been⁹. Multiple IVF pregnancies can lead to foetal reduction, this is when some of the babies implanted in the womb are aborted to increase the chance of the other babies surviving the pregnancy.

More IVF embryos are created than are needed. Many embryos are then either destroyed or frozen for future treatment or experimentation. In December 2000 a British government minister told the House of Commons: "Between 1991 and 1998, more than 750,000 embryos were created through IVF… 48,000 were donated for … research and 237,000 were destroyed. The rest were … used in treatment or held for future use"¹⁰.

The biological parents of IVF embryos must give consent for their embryo to be experimented on. After 10 years the embryos must be destroyed unless the parents consent to continue storing them¹¹.

There are tens of thousands of embryos in cold storage across Britain and this has caused serious problems¹². All embryos are unique individual human beings. Pro-lifers believe that freezing human embryos should be stopped immediately. Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice-president of the Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome, described the freezing of embryos as "a very grave act of violence"¹³.

Being able to make human beings in a test-tube has led to human life being treated like a commodity. Recent developments in IVF technology have increased the possibility of creating made-to-order human beings, or designer babies. Some people fear that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is within sight, particularly since the emergence of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis¹⁴.

In 2000, an American expert in reproduction predicted that within 20 years the link between sex and reproduction would be a thing of the past. Professor Greg Stock of the University of California told a meeting of fertility experts in San Diego that IVF, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and the harvesting and storage of women’s eggs would mean that in the future all babies would be produced in a test-tube. He said: "We will be able to screen for lots of genetic diseases. We will … be able to take a single cell from an embryo in the lab and calculate … how the child will develop. Effectively, the child will have to pass a test before it is even born. Eventually it will be thought as reckless to have a child without genetic screening as to have a child without pre-natal screening, as happens today."¹⁵

1 A localised thickening of cells in the blastocyst will develop into the embryo and the outer wall (trophoblast) develops into the placenta.
2 Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary, 4th Edition, 1996.
3 Of the 50,000 babies born in Britain as a result of IVF treatment between 1978 and 2000, half were born since 1997. [Daily Telegraph, 13 December 2000]
4 www.hfea.gov.uk/Pressoffice/Factsandfigures
5 Dr EL Billings, India, August 1999
6 Extrapolated from figures released by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, 2000
7 Reported by LifeSite, Canada, 18 October 2000
8 In the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) limits the number of embryos who can be transferred in a single IVF treatment cycle to three.
9 BBC News online, 5 July 2001. HFEA figures released in 2000 indicated that 47 percent of babies born alive following IVF were from multiple pregnancies, although virtually all IVF treatments involved the transfer of two or three embryos at once. 50.5 percent of transfers (7,073 in total) involved the transfer of three embryos, despite the fact that "the stillbirth and neonatal death rate for a triplet pregnancy with one or more babies dying is 59.6 per 1,000 birth events compared with 9.9 per 1,000 for single pregnancies".
10 Yvette Cooper, the Public Health Minister; House of Commons Hansard, 15 December 2000
11 The medical director of an IVF clinic in Melbourne, Australia, revealed that 95% of couples who undergo IVF in the state of Victoria prefer their embryos to be killed after the statutory maximum of five years in storage rather than give them to other childless couples. [Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June 2001]
12 An audit of Britain’s 118 IVF clinics in 2000 revealed that frozen embryos had been destroyed as a result of power failures, or implanted into the wrong women as a result of mistakes in data collection. The audit by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) found that electricity disruptions at "various" centres had led to the deaths of an undisclosed number of embryos in frozen storage. Errors in data collection led one former HFEA inspector to suggest that 1,000 test-tube babies may have been implanted into the wrong women, leading to as many as 30 live births. The Sunday Times newspaper focused on the cases of four women. Two of them had their last remaining frozen embryos thrown away by mistake, one had another woman’s embryo implanted which she then killed by abortion, and one wasted eight years of IVF treatment until it was discovered that she had been fitted with an [aborti-facient] intrauterine coil all along. [Sunday Times, 12 November 2000]
13 Writing in L’Osservatore Romano; reported by Catholic World News, 10 April 2001
14 see section 1.4.3
15 Daily Express, 25 October 2000

Adapted from 'A Way of Life' The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children March 2002

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