Who, me? A fresh-faced symbol of youthful aspiration? So much time have I spent shuffling off this mortal coil that Joe Biden and I could have double-dated at the root beer stand—had that eccentric notion seized either of us. That is how I’ve come to see a lot. Among the more notable sights: a very, very short list of human problems more than partly amenable to expert and reasonable human solutions.

The problems of our world, it strikes me, after a lifetime of sorting them out for pay and other worldly inducements, have edges, angles, pull-outs, protrusions, and rusty nails sticking out everywhere. They’re tough and hard to figure, despite all the humans lining up to “fix things.”

So much for medicine-cabinet truths. We come today to the dense and perhaps unfixable problem of in vitro fertilization (IVF, for short) and where if anywhere it fits in with Americans’ diverse expectations regarding unborn life. I’m getting ready to tell you that the sheer diversity of our expectations about the meaning and purposes of human life itself is what needs fixing on the front end. I will then make modest (and likely futile) suggestions as to what we might do or consider doing. The size of that enterprise, the longer I think about it, would humble Donald Trump, provided he gave it a thought.

Well, anyway, here goes.

Public opinion, in an age of personal re-invention, where truth is what your neighbor claims it to be, instead of what many once learned growing up, rarely bothers with fine points. Often as not, the point that counts most is what political cause wins and which loses, depending on how things get decided.

Regarding human replication through birth, or non-replication through circumstances or, likelier, abortion, the most common sentiments we see these days are of a laissez-faire nature: Who cares, apart from the parties most involved; and who deserves the say-so when doubts and questions arise?

It turns out that the transport and implantation of human sperm through the miracles of science, and the commencement of human pregnancies that were once unthinkable, is the newest battlefield and point of tension in the contest over abortion rights.

America’s first IVF baby, Elizabeth Carr, is today 42 years old, a medical wonder in her own way, affirming the worth of human life in the post-Roe v. Wade years when the choice between life and no-life had become stark, the divisions angry and explosive. Law and public tolerance alike made room for the choice to give life through means other than those reported in Genesis as involving Adam and Eve and their unpredictable offspring Cain. “I have gotten a man from the LORD,” said Cain’s proud new mom. “Gotten” in the fleshly, formerly universal manner.

I recall from 1982 no explosions of political concern over the scientific introduction of an embryo into the womb of a woman unable through the natural processes to give birth. Were not Elizabeth Carr’s parents, Roger and Judith, exercising what could be pointed to as a responsible choice? We were still then sorting out, in the aftermath of Roe, our increasingly flexible views of the fundamental human condition called birth—entry, that is, into human existence. Who had the say-so? Who needed to keep his—or her, as the case might be—mouth tightly closed?

We are four decades past that era. Not much remains of whatever slight consensus we could point to back then concerning life and its varied obligations and expressions. Today we all note opinions, viewpoints, claims to all configurations of personal outlook drawing sustenance from an atmosphere of profound moral unsettlement.

I am going to return shortly to that dusty adjective, “moral,” which needs attention of the sort it rarely receives anymore. But first a word about the circumstances that bring us to this point. Last February, out of nowhere, so far as most Americans were concerned, popped the news that Alabama’s Supreme Court had found embryos—a biological term used dismissively by advocates of choice in abortion—to be children. Children? What? Like we all used to be? Wait a second here!

The indicated wait has shown Americans divided on a question that is essentially an offshoot of the whole pro-life, pro-choice debate—a likelier word would be battle—over abortion. The judicial overthrow of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case settled nothing but the question of the Court’s formerly assumed right to impose on the country a new constitutional right—that of aborting a pregnancy. It set off a political/legal scramble to discover what comes next. What can be done now? What should be done, say, about frozen embryos in Alabama? Pre-Roe questions were simpler, based on plainer, cleaner understandings of the male-female relationship; viz., childbirth belonged in lawful marriage, and there only.

What can it mean, all of a sudden—we have to protect an embryo? We have to protect that which the supporters of choice are accustomed to make fun of as so minuscule, so non-humanlike as hardly to merit notice? “Nonhumanlike” indeed! That life begins upon fertilization is a recognition shared widely outside the labs where 96 percent of biologists, according to Alexandra DeSanctis (https://eppc.org/publication/when-human-life-begins/), affirm the very same thing. Note, as does the New York Times (March 25), that growing numbers of couples, “well aware of the challenges of conceiving and carrying a healthy baby to full term, skip sex and go straight to IVF.” Don’t tell us there’s no there there—no nexus between sperm and life!

So it’s all good, the rush to the freezer? We might wish to hold the applause. The miracle of joint creation, in the Adam/Eve mode, recedes here into the background. The mechanics of the matter rise to the fore: the tests, the procedures and permissions, the vials and needles. It’s about getting the job done. Yes? No?

Adam and Eve would likely have said, no, it’s not; it’s about something connected to the author of life Himself: Who, shall we say, invented the idea of human birth, making up the rules that applied ’til the day humans came up with their own diligent, self-actuating concepts. Not so much here of Noah, and God’s instructions to the old salt—“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”—as of what moderns might see as one of the necessities of daily living; only so much time at hand and lots to get done.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal features the question: How many embryos are needed to make a baby? What if you don’t need as many as you think? Where do the rest go? There are currently a million such “spares” at large in the United States. What’s the relevant moral teaching here? Is there one?

Americans don’t as a matter of course ask such questions. Maybe they will get around to it. The questions are immense and troubling in a culture that constantly touts its humanitarian/human-rights concerns.

A major reason moral analysis gets shelved in the 21st century, as a public duty, has to do with the nature of duties that come into the kitchen trailing spider webs and the look of abandonment and decay. Science and medicine, beginning with the popularization of the contraceptive pill, show us the way around inconveniences such as total reliance on plain old sex for baby-making. A modern moral environment formed on the expectation that people make their own life choices further lessens the need for old rules, old ways, old expectations. You have to think hard to see advantage in the old-fashioned way of populating the earth: all the non-romantic work for many couples; the uncertainties, the fears, the well-here-we-go-agains.

A larger barrier to moral discourse on human life follows from the premise that individuals (read: women, in the present context) are in charge of their own lives. “Individuals” equals “voters.” Voters, told they can’t do or have whatever they want, when they want it, get angry and uproarious. They throw things. They are as likely as not to throw particular politicians on the garbage heap for failure to do as they’re told. Which, to be sure, is good democratic theory and practice. What you must hope is that good democratic theory and responsible moral considerations can most of the time co-exist.

Hope alone cannot do a job of such immensity. Some degree of moral re-grounding in our national life looks more and more like the precondition for any arrangement—any whatsoever—that joins Americans in fruitful action. Herewith the point to which I have been pointing—the need for some measure of moral renewal. We just can’t go on the way we’re going.

Let me suggest that such a wild-haired enterprise as moral renewal in a country at odds with itself over ancient questions of right and wrong is even now being shown some important measurements for debate.

Consider a moral division unexpectedly brought to light by the Alabama Supreme Court decision. The human passion to create human life—it can’t still be around, can it, in the age of the condom and the whole idea of life as a purely optional affair? It can’t? Explain, please, why it can’t?

A constitutional affray centered on the rights of embryos reveals the moral stubbornness still resident in a society that has been lectured for half a century on the idea of unborn life as an encumbrance, a barrier to personal freedom and enjoyment.

It’s an odd ideal, I’d venture, flaky from the word “go.” Isn’t life what it’s all about: “it’s” meaning everything in sight? Isn’t life, in other words, properly defined as existence? In which case, how come something so important, so all-encompassing gets passed to politicians for explication? Are not the rest of us obligated to try a little harder and examine their—not legal; not political; their moral premises? Should not they be made to show us something big, not small (like the winning of elections), as proof in their eyes of the comparative unimportance of unborn life?

Make them show us . . . how? How indeed if not through the deliberate rekindling of moral discussion in venues where it has lapsed and waned in the years since Joe Biden and I were on the root beer scene.

The cultural upheavals of the ’60s cannot be said to have ruined us as a society, but they badly battered such moral unity as we fallen humans still maintained in the years after the war.

Our joint project as Americans of the 21st century, it seems to me, should be the re-examination and, if possible, the recovery of a number of premises trampled underfoot. Among these premises—obviously—is the worth, the value in abstract as well as personal terms of human life, as taught in philosophy and Scripture.

No conversation on IVF itself, as another aspect of our perplexities over human life, can be easy. Those who teach and proclaim can differ significantly in approach. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (p. 571, No. 2377) teaches that to “dissociate the sexual act from the creative act” is “morally unacceptable.” The term “morally” brings to the whole question of life, however initiated, an element that cannot be shunned. But is. And now requires restoration in the name of what was formerly seen as Truth—the thing, you may recall, which is supposed “to make you free.”

The urgency of moral conversation grows and grows and grows. Freedom turns out not to be exactly what the politicians sometimes say it is—the successful application of personal desire, the reaching out for . . . well, whatever.

Even within the community of IVF supporters, with their life-affirming hopes and desires, problems arise. A large one is whether to let nature take its well-known course or tailor the product for higher satisfaction. Far from fully explored is the prospect, the possibility, of employing genetic testing to check out possible birth defects. Or intelligence. Even eye color.

A Rutgers law school professor, Kimberly Mutcherson, observed to the Wall Street Journal: “We are being asked to decide these deeply difficult and complicated moral and ethical issues that come up in the context of making new people outside of bodies.”

Decide on what basis, according to what tests, what comparisons, what authorities? We’re not exactly into moral comparisons these days. “Beyond Good and Evil,” in Herr Nietzsche’s formulation, is where we more or less live today, though not all of us. Not enough of us to let a state or a whole nation bypass embryonic, let us say, questions such as Prof. Mutcherson draws to our attention.

And think of all the other freezer-stored embryos I mentioned earlier. What’s one going to do with all of them anyway? Human beings (by court edict) may and do create, but the reversal of creation reveals itself as an entirely different matter. What is easily predictable is the intervention of the political authorities with their laws and injunctions and jail sentences: intended testimonies to the public good. But how good? And designed to what end? By whom? And bearing what responsibility for outcomes?

Nietzsche and his modern acolytes jam the doorways of understanding, refusing access to any but like thinkers.

Moral discourse about large matters evades us due to our aching lack of moral leadership. We have stopped believing, as a people, in principles that formerly, most or much of the time, underlay our life together: principles like the worth, not to say the sacred nature, of unborn life. We can’t talk these things over—figure out how to work through new circumstances such as IVF. We don’t start arguing from the same premise—that God-given life is good.

If, as I have argued, our perplexities arise from America’s, and the West’s, smashing failure over at least the past half century to think—to talk—to reason in any normal, or even eccentric way about human life, we can’t delay addressing questions such as the meaning and destination of life.

We don’t know what’s going on half the time when a new situation involving life presents itself: say, legal cut-off periods for abortion; say, the morality of an abortion pill such as mifepristone; say for certain, without doubt, the imputed status or lack of status of an embryo.

There is no framework for thinking about such things, far less talking about them. We bring to the table only the splenetics no one wants to be dragged through after all the years of judicial opinions, campaign promises, and good old-fashioned name-calling.

If the Nietzscheans, foes of moral standards, jam, as I have said, the doorways of understanding, what is there to do but talk back to them? And more—to batter down their notions, which are nothing at all but notions based on personal opinion, enforced by bile and raw intellectual contempt.

And so you ask, gentle reader, who’s going to do all the necessary talking, our intellectual institutions having fallen in on themselves, our churches having developed bad cases of the theological wobbles, our media having dug in with the Nietzscheans? Whose voices can drown out theirs?

We don’t know. One thing we know: The job—and it’s a job for sure; arduous; unceasing—has been put off long enough. Or we wouldn’t be talking about it now, would we?

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Original Bio:

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.