Not going to lie… thought this was going to be about Intervarsity. They’ve been stirring up strife in our congregation.
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In time, pastors who oppose IVF (and I understand why), will have to be very wise in how they broach the topic around children who were conceived that way, as well as how they then deal with the parents. Thoughts?
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Only one: you are right.
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To get the ball rolling - what should we say? And not say? I honestly have no idea, but I do think that the questions, and answers, matter. So I would welcome people’s views, and even disagreement.
Dear @Hobbit,
What a child conceived through IVF need is mostly compassion and encouragement—to have had a sterile, clinical aspect to your beginning is weird, and he’ll feel that. And he may feel survivor’s guilt because of all the other brothers and sisters that were likely killed by the doctors who picked him to keep. These are burdens he bears, and we should bear one another’s burdens.
Another part of the burden he bears is to hear the evils of IVF denounced. The church must not shrink back from denouncing these evils—lives are at stake! Along with that preaching and teaching, what has to happen is a coming alongside those who were conceived this way and encouraging and bearing burdens.
This would be the case for any other hard thing that needs to be taught and preached and you know of someone in the congregation who’s affected personally—you preach it straight and you go encourage the weak and fainthearted, both.
Love,
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Thanks for the recommendation. I give it a solid C.
It’s a good introduction. It states a lot of foundational ideas that need to be stated and understood. It’s a home run compared to the morass of confusion I had to sit though in med school.
The most beneficial line is at the bottom of page 4. Quote: “Note three foci: the situation, the Word, the person.” This is intuitively how I tried to frame things in school, much to my professors’ chagrin, though I didn’t quite have the concise terminology down.
But as a whole, this work is too superficial and, frankly, outdated to be of much use today.
Outdated how? He explicitly avoids a discussion on IVF or AIDS. These fields have grown exponentially since 1988 and are some of the primary problematic areas of today.
Other resources?
Briefly, I’m looking for guidance in thinking about new drugs like Truvada. There are certainly times when I would be willing to prescribe it, but there are other times when I would really struggle to do so. Is that wrong? Thus far it hasn’t come up, but it’s just a matter of time and I want to be ready.
PS. Maybe this topic should be split into a general medical ethics discussion or something. I don’t know if I have the ability to do so, I certainly lack the know-how.
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Perhaps @aspaetti has other recommendations for resources? Regardless, I’m happy for general resource recommendations to land here for now. Feel free to start a new topic if you want to branch out to another more specific issue.
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Another winkle:
This should, at the very least, lead us to put a moratorium on the freezing of embryos. If course it will not. “Disposing” of unwanted embryos.
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