Tag: IVF

IVF - defective product

IVF: a defective product without a warranty

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by Kathy Clubb

Although many have woken up to the immoral nature of IVF and to its inherent risks, low effectiveness rate and exorbitant cost, some conservatives unfortunately still believe it is a feasible solution for couples suffering from infertility.

Yet, only a little research is required to discover that, even if the procedure were risk-free and morally acceptable, it would remain problematic due to the amount of human error involved. A plethora of oversights are currently plaguing the industry, placing parents in unenviable situations and making IVF a highly defective product.

Embryo mix ups at the Queensland Fertility Group

The case of a mix-up by Australia’s Queensland Fertility Group exemplifies the problem of IVF’s inherently inadequate safeguards. A white couple who requested sperm from a donor in the U.S. made their selection based on the features of the future male parent: blond hair and blue eyes. It wasn’t until the baby was born that its parents realised it was of an entirely different ethnicity from theirs: the baby is part African-American.

A recent news report on the incident, by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), reveals that the mother involved wrote in an online parents forum: “I love my beautiful baby more than life itself [but] has anyone ever found out their IVF baby wasn’t theirs? Has anyone had a baby that looked like it came from [a] different ethnicity?”

The incident happened over a decade ago, but it was only recently made public as the IVF-provider and its Australian parent company, Virtus Health, ensured the scandal was kept quiet for as long as possible: the parents were made to sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for a settlement, and the mix-up was not even reported to the company’s shareholders.

Additionally, an ABC investigation revealed a significant conflict of interest existing between the Queensland Fertility Group and the industry regulator, RTAC (the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee). At the time of the incident, when RTAC claimed to have no knowledge of the mix-up, its chair was the scientific director of the Queensland Fertility Group. It is beyond belief that a senior employee of the fertility-provider would have no knowledge of such a devastating mix-up; yet he told the ABC that he had “no memory” of the incident.

It appears that Queensland IVF didn’t learn from its mistakes as other mix-ups have been recently reported. Two lesbians who thought their three IVF children were related were shocked to discover that one of their boys was not related to the other two. The anomaly was revealed after genetic testing of the children was conducted for unrelated reasons. The two women are also incensed that their children are suffering from health problems, including autism, and blame Queensland IVF for failing to properly screen the donor sperm. Unfortunately, had they done their homework, the two women would have known that IVF babies are more prone to developing a number of health problems over naturally-conceived children.

Multiple errors at Monash IVF

The mistakes being made at Queensland IVF are not limited to their company alone. Melbourne-based Monash IVF has this year been forced to apologise for embryo mix-ups on two different occasions. The first incident was devastating and traumatic. A Brisbane woman found that she had given birth to a stranger’s baby after a mix-up at the IVF laboratory. A lawyer specialising in “family creation” (donor conception and surrogacy) said that while this mistake was the first of its kind to happen in Australia, it was not unheard of in other parts of the world.

The second incident occurred on June 5 at its laboratories in the Melbourne suburb of Clayton. This involved the transplant of a patient’s embryo rather than the one she had requested: the embryo belonging to her partner. Consider the ramifications of this scenario: two lesbians each have at least one embryo, and see their potential family as a sort of mix-and-match affair!

An advocate for IVF patients, Lucy Lines, said that this second incident “rocked the industry to its core”, noting that more regulation is necessary as there is no legal requirement for embryologists to be registered with a central body. But is lack of oversight the fundamental problem? Is more regulation the answer to this morally problematic industry?

Embryo experimentation

Both of these incidents follow another controversy at Monash IVF, in which it was accused of using inaccurate genetic testing which led to the destruction of potentially viable embryos. More than 700 patients joined a class action lawsuit accusing Monash of secretly using embryos they had asked to be discarded. The parents’ decision to have the embryos destroyed was on the basis of the flawed testing which returned false positives for abnormalities. Monash subsequently used those unwanted embryos for scientific experimentation.

Repromed, a related Monash IVF company, was also accused of falsifying the results of a clinical trial, forging patient signatures on consent forms, and destroying documents to hide evidence of the illegal embryo experiments. Monash didn’t admit liability, but settled the class action out of court for $56 million.

IVF industry smear campaign

The entire reproductive health industry should be chastened by the many examples of malpractice that are occurring with alarming regularity; yet rather than question its own morality, it has taken to discrediting alternatives to IVF. A natural approach to fertility, known as Restorative Reproductive Medicine, or RRP, is the latest casualty in the IVF industry’s campaign to establish itself as the only solution to the problem of infertility.

RRM is superior to IVF for a number of reasons, including its more wholistic approach to human life, its moral procedures and its higher success rate. Additionally, children conceived using RRP techniques are without the health risks so prevalent among children born using IVF.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center in America approves of RRP, describing its goal as the treatment of “the root causes of dysfunctions that make it difficult or impossible for couples to conceive and bring to birth children”. RRP is also recommended by the Washington-based think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, which states,

“RRM succeeds even after IVF has failed, at a fraction of the cost, especially across multiple pregnancies. One study published in 2024 found that 40% of couples previously diagnosed with infertility conceived naturally after undergoing RRM-based treatments compared with a 24% success rate with IVF. Another 2018 study found that 32.1% of women who had an average of two failed IVF cycles conceived naturally following targeted medical interventions with RRM.”

Yet its success has made RRM a target by the IVF behemoth, which regards it as “an approach long confined to the medical fringe”.

Conclusion

It must be restated that even if IVF could be provided without numerous opportunities for human error to derail its effectiveness, it would remain immoral. IVF kills more babies than abortion and can lead to harmful results such as huge numbers of donor-conceived children being related.

Society’s reliance on IVF is predicated on the idea that anyone — in any kind of relationship or none — is entitled to a child if he or she wants one. It is this philosophy that has given rise to abortion and surrogacy, as well as to IVF. As American author John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, has warned,

“The reproductive marketplace is built on twin illusions of consumerism and control. In this world, the almighty ‘I’ should have whatever he or she wants. Those who want sex without children should not be ‘punished’ with a kid. Those who want a child without the trouble of giving birth can rent an incubator for their little accessories. Those who’ve chosen an inherently sterile union can insist, not only that they should be able to have kids, but that others should pay for it. Any future technologies will be utilised accordingly.”

A return to the traditional view of marriage and family is the only solution to the heart-breaking problem of children being perceived as commodities. Until that happens, IVF will remain a defective product sold with no guarantee of satisfaction.

About the author
Kathy Clubb is an Australian mother and grandmother and has home-educated her children for the best part of 30 years. She has undertaken official pro-life work for 10 years, first in Tasmania, and then in Victoria. In 2016, Kathy was part of an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Victoria’s abortion exclusion-zones, which led to a constitutional challenge in the High Court of Australia in late 2018. Her articles have appeared at LifeSiteNews, Online Opinion, Family Life International, The Remnant Newspaper, Caldron Pool and Fidelity magazine.

The Arrogance of Transhumanism

The arrogance of transhumanism

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Technology has many benefits, but some high-tech fads like transhumanism, seem to treat human life as just another physical process to be manipulated.

Christian faith teaches us humility in light of the mystery of God’s creation of life. Today, as we enter a brave new world of elite technocrats calling for “transhumanism,” this faith is being tested.

We have been warned about the fate of those who seek to become gods on earth. Warnings found in Greek mythology (Prometheus and Icarus), Jewish tales (golems) and Western literature (Frankenstein) are being ignored in today’s secular world of rapid technological advancement. This advancement is evident in artificial intelligence (AI), which places “knowledge” at the fingertips of every person with a phone or a computer; experimentation on human embryos; and technological tools such as CRISPR that can select for human genetic traits. Hubris is a natural consequence. For many, we have become gods.

Technology can be a great boon for human progress, but caution is warranted for some of the latest high-tech fads, which seem to treat human life as just another physical process to be manipulated.

What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is the call for three supers—super intelligence, super longevity and super happiness—all gained through technology. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are the biggest promoters of transhumanist thinking. While they debate whether transhuman beings will be organic beings with increased lifespans and mental capabilities enhanced through drugs, or inorganic machines uploaded with individual personalities and enhanced thinking ability, they hope that technology will enable humans to design our evolutionary futures.1 Some transhumanists predict that the human mind will be uploaded into digital form; others believe that the future rests in designer babies, artificial wombs and anti-aging therapies.

Transhumanists could be dismissed as computer geeks who have read too much science fiction. But designing babies has become a reality and will become more refined with technological advances. American companies already screen the genetic traits of embryos, discarding the ones with high risk of disease or unwanted traits (such as being male or female), then implant the chosen embryo into a womb. Other researchers are pursuing the development of artificial wombs.2

Technocratic transhumanists believe in using drugs to enhance human cognition. This includes the use of psychedelics, long promoted in Silicon Valley. In the 1980s, the psychedelic drug MDMA, known popularly as Ecstasy, was touted as enhancing feelings of love and social connection that would heal “global trauma” and usher in world peace. This faith in MDMA as a wonder therapeutic drug has continued into the 21st century. In 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration turned down an application by Lykos Therapeutics for MDMA therapy, arguing that more data was needed. Lykos remains, however, a favorite of Big Tech investors who see psychedelics as the future.

The tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel is a major investor in Atai Life Sciences, which is testing ketamine-related drugs. Elon Musk has publicly mentioned his use of small amounts of prescription ketamine, an anesthetic. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has talked about how his son overcame grief following the death of his mother by using ayahuasca, an Amazonian plant psychedelic.3 In a Cabinet meeting on April 30, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins told President Trump that his team was looking at psychedelics as an option to combat veteran suicide.4

Big Tech gurus such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, however, understand some of the dangers of the new age of transhumanism. For example, Musk has warned that AI poses the greatest threat to humanity. It does not take a tech billionaire to see that the promise of bringing people closer together through social media technology has failed. People seem more divided and lonely than ever even though they regularly use TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat or Facebook. And who is not worried about government control of information and enhanced surveillance through technology? Many of our youth are living in an augmented reality through phones, screens and earbuds. We live in an age of in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation and transgender surgeries.

The pernicious fad of transgender treatment through hormones and mutilating surgery, even on children, could be seen as an offshoot of transhumanist ideology. Probably no worse example of playing God with the natural order may be imagined. However, we should not blame it on Silicon Valley tech titans. Musk is vehemently opposed to transgender treatments of children, having seen one of his own sons “transition” by means of this Frankensteinian perversion of modern medical practice.

Equally Frankensteinian is gain-of-function manipulation of dangerous pathogens, which likely caused the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic with the involvement of U.S. tax dollars in a Chinese lab. President Trump acted to restrict such research in May. He previously signed several orders to counteract transgender ideology.

Longevity and Immortality

Medical clinics are popping up promising to help clients live longer and better—for a hefty price.5 The goal of these longevity clinics is to extend and optimize a patient’s health for years through early cancer screenings, stem-cell therapies and socalled biological-age testing. Their efficacy is unclear. Venture capital is investing in longevity research, more than doubling the investment between 2021 and 2022 from $27 million to $57 million globally.

While aiming for longevity, scientists have explored the physiological dimensions of death itself. For transhumanists following this work on death, hopes of human immortality have arisen from attempts to keep the brain alive after the human body has failed.6 In 2018 the Silicon Valley AI billionaire entrepreneur Sam Altman reportedly paid $10,000 to join a waiting list to upload the contents of his brain to a cloud computer, on the chance that his consciousness could live on after he dies.

Transhumanists believe that true human immortality is only a speck on the horizon, but some are convinced that the future lies in detaching oneself from one’s physical body. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, seeks to capitalize on this vision of brain life after death through cryonics, the freezing of human bodies and brains in liquid nitrogen after legal death, to be revived (resurrected) once new technology becomes available.

Within the scientific community, cryonics is regarded as quackery and a pseudo-science, but this has not prevented the nonprofit from enlisting close to 2,000 members. More than 200 have already died and had their bodies frozen. Another 116 members have had only their heads preserved. Pet bodies have also been preserved. Immortality does not come cheap, though. Alcor charges $200,000 for freezing a human body or $80,000 for just the head.7

Stéphane Charpier, a professor of neuroscience at Sorbonne University who is a leading scientist in studying brain death, dismisses cryogenics as a “pipe dream.” He acknowledges that humans are capable of “tinkering with brains,” but considers it unimaginable that a machine could replicate complex neural processes.8

New Frontiers in IVF

In vitro fertilization (IVF) offers a devil’s bargain to humanity. It is popular for helping infertile couples to have children, but is also used in ways that lack an appealing justification, including reproduction without both a legal father and mother, eugenic selection of embryos, or careerist postponement of childbearing.

IVF works by extracting eggs from a woman who has been primed with injections of powerful drugs, then fertilizing the eggs with a man’s sperm in a laboratory. After a fertilized egg (zygote) undergoes embryo culture over two to six days, the embryo can be implanted in the would-be mother. Women can freeze dozens of their eggs—a practice sometimes encouraged and paid for by large corporate employers in the U.S.—while they wait to make the decision to get pregnant. After eggs are combined with sperm to form embryos, surplus embryos may be frozen or discarded. How many frozen embryos exist in America is not known.

Embryos may be subjected to experimentation. Research on fetal tissue is permitted on a state-by-state basis. New York state has no limit on how long embryos may be grown for experimentation, while California has a guideline of 12 days.

Embryology has made huge advances in the last three decades, but we are still at the beginning of a wave of unforeseen consequences.9 In the 1990s researchers pioneered preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). An embryologist took single cells biopsied from embryos and identified their sex, as well as certain chromosomal abnormalities. PGT subsequently became increasingly refined, and today nearly half of IVF cycles are tested, at a cost of $3,000-$5,000 per batch.

Eugenics Based on ‘Risk Scores’

There are questions about PGT’s accuracy, but in any case this testing goes beyond the promise of improved health. Newer polygenic embryo studies have identified genes linked to traits ranging from height to likely educational attainment to propensity for mental health disabilities such as depression and schizophrenia. Unlike earlier PGT, which focused on single-gene disorders, polygenic embryo screening (PES) examines the likelihood of developing more complex traits that depend on many genes.

PES provides “risk scores” that rely on identification of hundreds or thousands of genetic variants that can be linked with certain human attributes. PES lends itself to eugenics, the selective breeding of children. Companies have been created to screen embryos for hundreds of conditions. One such company is Orchid, headed by Noor Siddiqui, in Silicon Valley. Orchid provides polygenic screening that produces a risk profile of each embryo’s propensity for certain health conditions. This risk profile aids the selection of which embryo(s) to implant.10

PES has not yet gained wide acceptance, but some surveys show that nearly 4 in 10 people said they were “more likely than not” to use it if it could increase their child’s chance of getting into a top college.11 Several European countries have banned this procedure or limited its use. Britain, for example, does not permit PES, but does allow screening for an approved list of roughly 17,000 single-gene disorders. In the U.S., such screening is not subject to any regulatory oversight. Genomic Prediction, based in New Jersey, has provided risk scores for at least 420 clients involving more than 1,600 embryos.

Legal and Ethical Conundrums

The advances in embryo research have given rise to ethical and legal problems. In one among many similar disputes, a Tennessee divorce court in 1992 concluded that embryos “are not, strictly speaking, either ‘persons’ or ‘property,’ but occupy an interim category that entitles them to special respect because of their potential for human life.” Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of the father who wanted to destroy seven frozen embryos, while his wife wanted to donate them to others. The court upheld the father’s claim, based on a contractual provision, that he should not have to father children against his will.12

State legislatures have only begun to address the status of embryos. In 2018, the Arizona legislature passed a law requiring judges to award disputed embryos to bring in vitro human embryos to birth and not keep them frozen in storage, regardless of preexisting legal contracts.13

Spurred on by a controversy that arose from an Alabama court decision during his 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump signed an executive order this year that calls for policy recommendations to protect IVF and lower its costs. Many around his administration support his pro-natal perspective and are strong supporters of IVF. Despite having experienced no known infertility issues, Elon Musk has used IVF to produce most of his many known children (some with the assistance of paid surrogate mothers). Peter Thiel has invested in multiple fertility-related companies.14

There is widespread concern in the developed world about declining birth rates, as described in the May 2025 Mindszenty Report. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see IVF as a policy solution to this problem or to push governmental support of the $25 billion global IVF industry. IVF is very expensive and unpleasant, has a low success rate, and poses significant health risks for both the mother and the offspring.15 There are obvious ethical problems with destroying embryos, practicing eugenic selection of embryos, experimenting on embryos, and engineering children who may never know both of their biological parents. IVF is contrary to Catholic teaching.

Enter the Brave New World

Couples can be infertile for various reasons, but both eggs and sperm decline in quality with age. Therefore, IVF is less effective for older would-be parents. Changing the culture to encourage more marriage and childbearing for women in their 20s would be a preferable way to boost birth rates. And we certainly do not want the government to promote IVF, or related assisted reproductive technologies such as purchased eggs and surrogate motherhood, for gay couples or single parents.16

We are at a point in embryo science that allows for the culling of the population. Whether it is called positive or negative eugenics, it is all eugenics in the end. Although it is possible to do IVF without destroying embryos, IVF in the U.S. commonly entails the rejection and elimination of at least several embryonic human beings.17 Designer babies culled from a herd of subsequently discarded sibling embryos may not appreciate their commoditized origins.

Essential to any discussion of transhumanism or IVF is the importance of understanding God and the mystery of our creation and His design for the world. Removal of God from the human equation tends to breed nihilism and hopelessness.18 Transhumanism and Christianity present divergent value systems. For the transhumanist, the highest virtue is intelligence and the highest goal is to defeat death. Christians believe that the greatest ideal is love—love of others, including one’s own children, in their flawed humanity, and love of God. Transhumanism is a new religion, which should not replace God.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

  1. Alexander Thomas, “Transhumanism: Billionaires Want to Use Tech to Tech to
    Enhance Our Abilities,” The Conversation, January 16, 2024. ↩︎
  2. Mark Legg, “What Does the Bible Say About Transhumanism?” Denison Forum, June
    20, 2023. ↩︎
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/tech-billionaires-psychedelics.html. ↩︎
  4. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/va-secretary-tells-trump-about-psychedelicspotential-to-combat-military-veteran-suicide-crisis-at-cabinet-meeting/;
    https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/va-sec-doug-collins-says-agency-willlook-at-psychedelic-other-alternative-treatments/85-d90e6b9d-a705-4f09-aeda5b839879bd03 ↩︎
  5. Alex Janin, “The Longevity Clinic Will See You Now—for $100,000,” Wall Street
    Journal, July 10, 2023; Alex Janin, “Want Better Health and Status? For
    $250,000, Longevity Clinics Promise Both,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2025. ↩︎
  6. https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/health-andbiotech/immortality-an-ancient-fantasy-revived-by-transhumanism/. ↩︎
  7. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-19/see-inside-alcor-lifeextension-s-cryogenics-facility-in-arizona. ↩︎
  8. Ibid. ↩︎
  9. This discussion of IVF and the current state of embryo research draws heavily from
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/opinion/human-embryoexperiments-timeline.html; and https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-oflife/2025/04/24/new-york-times-we-owe-clustercells/?srsltid=AfmBOoqAkPMgoM175_FK6K6D6kVjrK7t7T9ulxqgShugqUGsZsPK07gt. ↩︎
  10. Anna Louie Sussman, “Should Human Life be Optimized?”
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/opinion/ivf-gene-selectionfertility.html. ↩︎
  11. https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-of-life/2025/04/24/new-york-times-we-oweclustercells/?srsltid=AfmBOoqAkPMgoM175_FK6K6D6kVjrK7t7T9ulxqgShugqUGsZsPK07gtd. ↩︎
  12. Ibid. ↩︎
  13. Ibid. ↩︎
  14. https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/FS268.pdf. See also n. 17. ↩︎
  15. See “A Comprehensive Report on the Risks of Assisted Reproductive Technology” by
    Katie Fell for the Center of Bioethics and Culture Network, https://cbcnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Comprehensive-Paper-on-ART-Final.pdf. ↩︎
  16. For an in-depth discussion of surrogate motherhood and purchased eggs, see
    Mindszenty Report, December 2019. ↩︎
  17. Kayla Bartsch, “Eugenics Gets a Modern Facelift, with Investment from Peter Thiel,”
    National Review, April 4, 2025. See also
    https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/12/96647/. ↩︎
  18. https://firstthings.com/the-impossibility-of-christian-transhumanism/. ↩︎