By Bob Allen
The newly elected leader of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission says couples who conceive children through in-vitro fertilization are morally responsible for extra embryos created in case the first round of treatment doesn’t result in a pregnancy.
Russell Moore, who begins work June 1 as Southern Baptists’ top spokesman for moral, ethical and religious-liberty concerns, posted a blog April 17 titled, “What should we do with our frozen embryos?” Currently a seminary professor and administrator, Moore occasionally uses a format where he answers a question posing a moral dilemma.
On Wednesday Moore responded to “a stressed dad” feeling guilty about banking unused embryos but who cannot afford any more children. Moore said the man’s nagging conscience might be a sign of grace.
“It might be that what you are hearing is a happy foretaste of obedience to Christ, as you hear his voice saying, ‘I was frozen and you remembered me,’” Moore replied.
Moore said in-vitro fertilization, a process where an egg is fertilized outside the body in a laboratory and then implanted into a womb, is ethically complex, but once done the issue is clear.
“In a Christian vision of reality there is no such thing as an ‘almost person,’ which is what we think with the abstraction of ‘fertilized embryos,’” Moore said. “Someone is either a human person, and therefore my neighbor, or not. You do not have ‘frozen embryos.’ You have children, frozen in this cruelly clinical world of suspended animation.”
“It is one thing to decide you can’t afford to have children before you conceive children, just as it is one thing to decide you can’t afford to marry before you marry,” he continued. “You’re married though, and you’ve conceived children. You have an obligation to them.”
Moore said that doesn’t mean the game plan is going to be easy. “There’s a cross to take up here,” he counseled. “The path from frozen storage to birth is difficult, whether through bearing those children or making an adoption plan for them into loving families. But these are not things; these are persons, worthy of love and respect and sacrifice.”
Moore advised the couple to meet with some respected spiritual advisers and to come up with a strategy to “take responsibility for your children.”
“The first step is to start thinking of them that way,” he said, “not as your ‘embryos’ or a project to be managed, but as your children, your neighbors, and the ‘least of these,’ who bear the image of our Lord Jesus.”