IVF and abortion

In an Sun Times op-ed, Leah Thomas (Sept. 13, 2022) warns that abortion restrictions may restrict in vitro fertilization [IVF] procedures, especially those procedures that create several embryos with the intention of trying to bring only some of them to term. 

She relies on one of the more unconvincing (to me) kind of argument that probably proves too much. It's the "if people claim to be pro-life, then they would X," where X is the arguer's preferred policy:

If lawmakers claim to be pro-life, they need to protect patients trying their hardest to bring life into this world.

I support the woman's prerogative to choose abortion, especially in the first two trimesters. I also support it as a policy. As I've said before, I hold those views in tandem with the belief that the fertilized egg is a person. As I've also said before, it's very hard for me to hold the last view while holding the first view. I'm able to do it. I can square that circle.

But I can't do it when it comes to voluntarily creating what, in my opinion, is new human lives, all with the expectation that most of those lives will never be lived, will, in fact, perish eventually after months or years frozen.

My argument that it's the woman's special prerogative to decide whether she carries a baby to term rests on my notion that she has autonomy over her body and that the unborn person is so intricately linked to her body that her autonomy over herself supersedes the claim of the unborn. When the embryo is created outside the body, it's no long a question of bodily autonomy. In that case, the calculation differs quite a lot.

Therefore, I'm very much okay with making abortion widely legal, even to the extent of subsidizing abortions for those who want one but cannot afford it, while at the same time outlawing IVF. I see no contradiction.

All that said, I have to acknowledge a few things. As Thomas points out in her op-ed, IVF is one way (and for all I know, the most effective way) for an otherwise infertile childless couple to have children. Thomas, who is a medical student training to be gynecologist, relates what it's like to help couples conceive and have children:

some of the greatest joy I saw during my rotations was in the Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility Clinic. The look on a future parent’s face when they saw their developing baby during the first six-week ultrasound was indescribably elated. These patients had been through so much — multiple miscarriages, painful and invasive testing, devastating diagnoses and the exorbitant cost of it all.

I cannot discount that view completely. As a personal matter, I don't desire children. I therefore don't know what it's like to want children and yet not be able to have them. What to me seems like a choice among different preferences may for others be a deeply felt existential need. To me, that need doesn't obviate the terrible question of creating multiple lives with the high probability, even expectation, that at least one of those lives will die. But I should remember that I don't know all things.

Add to that the fact I know at least some people who have had ertility treatments. While I haven't been so nosy as to inquire whether or not those treatments were IVF, I assume that in at least some cases they were. I hesitate to judge them.

I could adopt the grandiose pose and claim that my wariness about judging rests on my own magnanimity or on my belief that I haven't any prerogative to make moral pronouncements against others. But I'll confess to a basic confusion, perhaps a fear that by judging I am intruding into others' decisions. What seems clear to me as a philosophical and policy matter gets muddied in real life. 

All that said, the philosophical and policy matter does seem clear to me. And that's where I stand at the moment.