IVF in Biblical Perspective: Interview with Josh Holler

1 in 40 babies are now born through IVF – 96,000 per year. To achieve this, nearly 4 million embryos were created. With 12 million IVF babies since 1978, there are now nearly half a BILLION embryos who will never see the light of day. Is the chance to have one child worth the lives of so many others? Kevin speaks with Josh Holler, author of “Misconceiving IVF: An Essential Guide to the Perils of In-Vitro Fertilization."

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Welcome to Generations Kevin Swanson with you, and more on Brave New Science today. I'm very interested in saving science. That's my background, Bachelor of Science and Mechanical Engineering. In fact, I'm writing a book on science right now. About 2.4% of all U.S. babies are now born through assisted reproductive technology, primarily in in vitro fertilization. That's about one in every 40 to 45 births. There are more than 500 fertility clinics reporting data to the CDC each year, and 1 to 1.5 million frozen embryos out there somewhere. Here is just one more hideous account from this brave new world in which a surrogate mother, a hired womb, usually for homosexuals, was required by her child's commissioning parents to abort the child. Here's why. Because an ultrasound had revealed the baby was missing two fingers. This is life site news. Now listen to this from Olivia Morrell, author and activist who herself was born via surrogacy and now fights against it. The wretchedness of this whole business of surrogacy and IVF is beyond our abilities to comprehend or to express it. Hired wombs, forced abortions, IVF with its abortion rate of 7 to 20 babies per child conceived, 100,000 babies born a year by IVF, but what a cost. What a cost. Live Action estimates that 1.9 million embryos did not survive implantation in 2023, and 1.759 million embryos were either frozen, destroyed, donated to research, or released for embryo adoption. That's a cost, huge cost. Kill off that many babies to salvage a few live ones. And now 60,000 babies have been bred and bought by homosexuals, roughly 30 percent of the surrogacy rent a womb business. Keep in mind the Mark Regnerist study found that sexual abuse occurs three to four times more frequently in homosexual families than typical families with moms and dads, and only 9% of Americans morally opposed this hideous business. But now also renting wombs and buying babies is one of the sickest, most depraved elements of human society today. It's a global trade set to be worth $200 billion worldwide by 2034, and the U.S. is the world leader in international surrogacy. It's been shut down in India and Vietnam, and recent scandals showing the factory farming of women in Ukraine and the former Soviet nation of Georgia have seen international baby buyers flock into the U.S. Surrogacy is the national shame of this country. It's permitted in all but one state, Louisiana, no federal laws regulating industry that has been described as legalized human trafficking. Surrogacy should be a crime, my friends. There are baby trafficking cases under the cover of commercial surrogacy now being investigated by the FBI in the United States. For 30 years, the U.S. has been the go-to destination for LGBTQ parents since 1995, whether single men, couples, thruples, quadruples, whatever, to buy the babies for whatever they're going to do to those babies. It's a brave new world out there. It's messed up beyond all recognition. But here's my question: How does a Christian interact with a MOOAR? Solomon suggested cutting the baby in two for the two prostitutes arguing over the baby. It was obviously a MOOBAR situation, messed up beyond all recognition. But what do we do with 1.2 million babies in cold storage? Do we pay $15,000 and just keep the industry going by impregnating our daughters, our wives, et cetera, et cetera, with these little ones? Do we wait for mechanical wombs to develop? Do we vote for Trump? We need a Solomon-like wisdom to work the moo bar on this one for sure. Fundamentally, without the fear of God before their eyes in the university science classrooms, no fear of God before their eyes in the corporate biological laboratories in the hospitals, anything goes, anything can happen. Without the fear of God and science, I don't know what's going to happen next. So, folks, here's my introduction to my new book on science in the fear of God. Okay, this is the way I put it. Here is a short and simple survey of science for the everyday reader, whether that be a 13-year-old junior high student or 33-year-old adult working in and out of a scientific field. I make no bones about it without apology. I say my intention with this work is to save science. I wish to return science to the category of God's science in the fear of God. I call it God's science because all science comes from the Latin word for knowledge. All knowledge is God's knowledge, and therefore all science must be God's science. The fear of God is the beginning of all knowledge. And this certainly extends to the study of the natural world, that is, God's creation, the work of his hands, the demonstration of his praiseworthy attributes of wisdom, power, and goodness. This was the testimony of virtually every science in the Western world until Charles Darwin. They used to fear God. They expressed a deep reverence for God in their diaries, their letters, last wills and testaments. This all disappeared with the advent of Darwin's evolutionary hypotheses. Hardly any scientist admits to fearing God anymore. Pew research found 99% of all working scientists with PhD degrees hold to Darwinian presuppositions. The same can be said for 99% of universities that teach science, 99% of museums that promote science at this time. The situation is extremely grave. Science and technology produced without the fear of God will only produce untold devastation in this brave new world without God. What will scientists who do not fear God do with genetic engineering, weapons of mass destruction, biological laboratories, artificial intelligence developed designer viruses and bacteria, not to mention IVF and surrogacy? What destruction will their inventions bring to the character of the people? Integrity and balance needed in the human psyche and relationships that hold human society together. What will politicians who do not fear God do with technology designed by scientists who do not fear God? Anybody holding to a biblical view of human nature would shudder to think of the consequences coming about by such a horrific scenario. Saving science must also involve saving the world. And Christians who fear God in the scientific field may be the only common grace left and the only salt left to preserve the world in this modern age. Every Christian must be very clear and astute on this subject concerning the definition of science, the limitations of science, the purpose of science, and the difference between fake science and real science. The time is right for the release of this short introduction to real science. After 175 years of Charles Darwin's doubt and this long and painful sequence of nothing but failure to substantiate this far-fetched hypothesis, belief in evolution becomes increasingly unscientific, irrational, and even insane. Increasing the human base of knowledge about the universe has only magnified our only understanding of the complexity of living organisms and everything else by a million fold. The utter impossibility of molecules to man evolution by a chance mechanism is more obvious to the rational person than ever before. The conspicuous absence of meaningful evidence or any proven mechanism for the evolution of the species further exasperates the case. The modern scientific community appears more like a 15th-century assembly of alchemists or a muddle of primitive witch doctors. Modern science has finally come to a crisis point. The magnitude of the crisis is only accentuated by the universal acceptance of the unsubstantiated hypothesis by far and away the majority of modern institutions in media, academia, and government, abandoning God and the fear of God will not bode well for the future of any of these institutions. The only resolution to this is to build back the foundations of the fear of God and science and all knowledge, one student at a time, one teacher at a time, one parent at a time, and one homeschool family at a time. I am convinced that this is the only human factor that will save the world in the 21st century. That's my introduction to my new book on saving science today. So it's a big deal. My stats say two to three percent of babies born in the U.S. last year born by in vitro fertilization. And President Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, others have spoken out on enthusiastic support for uh this practice. And uh uh joining me today to talk about it, Joshua Holler, he's author of the new book, Misconceiving IVF, an essential guide to the perils of in vitro fertilization. He's pastor of first Baptist over at uh St. Louis, Missouri. Uh, welcome to the program, Josh. Good to have you with us.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_03 9:49

Yeah. Um, maybe a little bit of your story of how you got to this position where you really felt like you needed to throw a flag on the play. I guess I could put it that way. You kind of threw a flag on the play um in your book in vitro fertilization, um, misconceiving IVF. So, uh, how did you get to that point?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Sure. Well, I I think it began many years ago. I've been passionate uh passionately pro-life for for many years, I as yeah, as long as I can remember, as as long ago as watching the Charlton Heston documentary on the was it the silent scream. I remember that.

SPEAKER_03 10:25

Yeah, I watched that as well. I mean, I'm talking like 83, 84 something. Yeah. I think I've got to be. Bernard Nathanson, all those guys.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yeah, grew up, you know, in a Christian home and uh uh listening to um resources from focus and the family, and those things just saturated my my being, and that there's just that was just in my bones. And um when I left home and I I when I first got majorly involved in in pro-life issues is after I left um active duty and went into college. And I think my first major group assignment was what do we do about you know um pro-life issues and Roe v. Wade. So this is 20 2011. Well, not what we do about Roe v. Wade, but just how does the church respond to abortion?

SPEAKER_02 11:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

And um, I think uh that's when I first got involved of sidewalk counseling. We it happened to be a 40 days for life was going on. We saw people outside of uh a cli uh Planned Parenthood off a Roosevelt um boulevard, I think it is, in in Chicago. Um, and we just hopped out and we're like, hey, what's going on? And and so this was something that uh I was deeply involved with even in in seminary, and I uh joined an organization called Churches for Life, which uh which was born out of the the PCA actually, Presbyterian Church of America. Okay, and they've did a lot of uh resource creation for them as well as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and they're a parachurch organization that worked to um create what was called life teams that would um uh what they would try to do is create resources and uh be gospel-driven champions, champions of life within local churches and cultivate that um so to promote that within within the church and and and mobilize the church. And I love that. And at the time, I actually there was a pastor here in St. Louis, and we I was been doing sidewalk counseling, even at the abortion clinic here, um, preaching the gospel, that sort of thing. And um, there was a pastor here in St. Louis who uh had pursued IVF for his kids, and I I wasn't really aware of what that meant, but I wanted to know more. So I got a um, I don't think it was Zoom, I think it was Skype back in the day, a call with him, and he was somebody who was going to be a prospective board member for our for Churches for Life, and I just picked his brain. I just asked him, you know, tell me about it. And he told me about the process of Ixie, where you take one sperm, one egg, one embryo, and here's how to do it ethically. And at the time, I thought, you know, this seems okay. There's there's this seems pro-life. What could be more pro-life than wanting to have kids and and have you know have babies and overcome infertility? And I didn't see what the issue was, and that was around 2017.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Fast forward three years later, I'm in uh my my ethics doctoral program, which be because it was in during COVID, it was held via Zoom. And I was assigned in this bioethics seminar the paper. The um the question was, what do we do with leftover embryos? And it was when I was assigned that question, is when my eyes were opened to the atrocities that are done to so many embryos in the name of overcoming infertility. And we can get into just so many of uh so much of that in I talk about this a little bit in the beginning. Good go ahead and you can jump.

SPEAKER_03 13:53

Yeah, let me back up for just a second, Josh. And uh what is it? Yeah, I think I I think my journey is actually fairly similar to that. Yeah, I started with the silent scream, the 1980s. That's how I got involved in a coalition for American Pro Life University students on the campus of uh California Polytechnic State University way back when. And um, and then you know, pro life candidate for governor here in the state of Colorado, and just you know, yeah, pro-life. And I, you know, I feel sounds all right, you know, whatever. But you dig into it, and I think I it seems to me that Christians need to get you know educated on these things. We we've got to dig into stuff. Is that is that a lesson learned?

SPEAKER_00 15:14

100%. I mean, we it once you increase your knowledge on any given subject, you're going to um expose yourself to the truth. Yeah, and once you expose yourself to your truth, you you gotta afflict the conscience rightly in order to get yourself involved with this. So much, so much of what happens around IVF, um, even up to the policy level, is done and born out of ignorance to to just the name something, the inconsistency that the Republican Party has in the pro-life position with with IVF.

SPEAKER_03 15:45

Yeah. So big big time. And I think digging in a little bit more, knocking the watermelon. I like to say that Tyson. My wife and I talk about that. You know, you gotta knock the watermelon a few times. You gotta dig into this a little bit, just you know, and and I think we need to be careful, we can't be trusting everything the world gives us. I mean, if that that may be a movie, you know, or that may be a a worldview that's being expressed in a science class or whatever. You just can't take what the world is giving you, hook, line, and sinker. I think that's a lesson learned. But let's let's take this apart a little bit. Now, let me give you um some stats that come from um this is from an organization uh called Life Action. And they looked at these charts from the IVF company A Life. Um, this is a company that does IVF, okay, and they've got this chart uh where they talk about you know an average of 10 to 12 embryos created per IVF cycle. Um, but anywhere from seven embryos up to as many as 17 per cycle are created using a conservative nine embryos, that's an average number, at 432,641 cycles. That totals about 3.9 million embryos created total via IVF in one year. Yet only 95,860 babies were born that year. So Live Action Group recently estimated that 1,947,000 embryos did not survive implantation 2023, and 1,759,000 other embryos were either frozen, destroyed, donated to research, or released for embryo adoption, not sure which category, but uh total of 3.9 million embryos to produce about 96,000 babies. Something wrong with that? Is something wrong with that? Is that that's that's yeah, was your take?

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah, there's something majorly wrong with that. Yeah, there's um if you were to present that before somebody, like we we will we we will overcome infertility and give you a child, but it's gonna take 10 kids in order to do that. We will keep the other nine kids and you can have the one. Nobody would nobody would take that that scenario.

SPEAKER_03 18:01

Yeah, that just sounds wrong. Yeah, and and and especially the parents thinking, those are my kids. Those are my kids. And and some of them are gonna die, a fairer percentage of them are gonna die in the process. And it depends on the age as well. Go through the science just for a moment if you've got it off the top of your head.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Sure. Well, uh, IBF from the beginning, what we're doing in vitro fertilization literally means it's um in in glass or a petri dish, and it that's what the cons it's conception in a glass, and and what or the original uh terminology for it was a test tube baby, and what we're taking as a sperm and an egg, joining them together outside of the womb to conceive. And um joining those two together, the process has gotten better, and so they do things like ixes, where you take you directly and inject one sperm into an egg to create an embryo, an embryo. Um, it's not a euphemism, it's a technical term, but it is a human life. This is a uh member of the species Homo sapiens. This is this is a little image bearer made this somebody made in the image of God. This is a who, not a what. And you know, passing the sled tests, size, level development, environment, degree dependency, all that. This is they're just in a different location, right? Yeah, um, all those things. And um what happens is they have to make a lot of embryos, and after that they make lots of embryos, they have to then go through a literal grading process. There's an A through F, and there's there's like AA, B B, and so forth. You could you could Google image this and the grading process is done off of morphology and how how they look through the for the embryologist, the the technician, and um, then they can be tested things for cystic fibrosis or spinal bifida and um or or even gender. You want a boy, you want a girl? This is eugenics 2.0, it's alive and well today.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

And when you get down to maybe your you you started off with maybe 16, and now you're down to eight. Then you get to your eight, and these are your eight viable, put scare quotes around that. Your your best looking, best um likely uh hood, uh like likely embryos to then transfer. That those are the ones that they're gonna freeze and uh use um for transferring an implantation. Um that's what happens. Now, in order I skipped a couple steps to get there, um in order to harvest the eggs, the the woman is put on put on a series of hormones and drugs which can lead to things like ovarian hyperstimulation uh syndrome. And you normally a woman's only supposed to produce one egg a month, and then suddenly she's gonna be producing something like 10. Yeah, it's not supposed to happen, not naturally. Right. Uh the sperm is obviously it's collected much easier, but usually through something like masturbation, which is are already mortally problematic in its own ways. Then skipping forward to then the uh you have your eight embryos to then then transfer. Um what happens to once you get one that's transferred and you get an implantation and a birth, and you have several leftover embryos.

SPEAKER_03 21:26

And the leftovers have not been implanted yet, is that right? So the leftovers have not been implanted at this point.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

At that point, yeah. So let's say, yeah, let's say somebody has as many as like let's we'll we'll withgo the number six. They had one that made it, and they have a life birth, they have their their dream child, but they have six leftover embryos. What do we do with the leftover embryos now? Well, they can be left over in storage indefinitely, which just happens to a lot of them, and there's some debate about what the number is. Could be as little as one million, could be as much as ten million. This highlights a major dispair, you know, we don't even know this.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Yeah, we don't even know this. I mean, I I got I think my numbers off of Google that was one to one point two million uh out there somewhere, but it could be more than that. And something I didn't realize, this was in your book, people have to pay for the storage, it costs money to store these babies. How much?

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Uh depends uh as it depends, but but you can see how this incentivizes some places for um to to make more embryos for more storage. I know it's uh embryos don't take up hardly any space. They're they're they they're stored in these little straws. Um but you should think about How quickly these little people can die if there's a fluctuation in the power. Yeah. If the the like what happened in Alabama, where a person inadvertently wandered into a section of the hospital, which was a fertility clinic, wandered as a mentally disabled person, wandered in, and then it was a you know, liquid nitrogen is very cold, and they they burned their hand, they they and they dropped the embryos and they just killed a bunch of kids.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

There was there's been a power fluctuation before, and there was as many as a thousand children just died overnight. Oh no. There's a lot of these fertility quakes are in California. What happens if there's a if there's an earthquake? We could be looking at a mass genocide just because of natural disasters, because of all these kids that are indefinitely just frozen and regarded as property. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 23:31

It's just as as as you hear this, you go, this is messed up. Um let's go on though to the problem of complicity. What what is that? Uh what's the problem of complicity um, you know, for the average person considering uh IVF as an option?

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Well, complicity is uh is your your willful involvement in like something take like in just an ethics, your involvement for crime. I think an example I gave that's just simple, you you you know, you're a you're uh a um a getaway driver at a um a bank robbery. You may not be the one that goes in there and holds the gun, but you drove away, you're complicit in the crime. So how does something like complicity uh what are the elements that make one complicit or not complicit in in a moral action? And there's three pairs of stuff. Let's see if I can remember them off the top of my head. Um, but the scope and seriousness of a kind of action. So the scope is like how how big is it? Like how widespread, the seriousness here we're talking about here millions, the seriousness that we're talking about life and death, literally. Then the other elements are knowledge and intent, and then as well as as time and proximity. Knowledge and intent are are things like do you know what's taking place and what are you actually intending to do on the time and proximity are referring to like how long ago did this action take place? So an example I use in the book is some people like I I live not that far away from Bayer headquarters, and some people are aware of like in World War II, uh Bayer was involved with the creation of the gas that that that killed Jews. And they're like, Well, we can't it is are you saying that I can't buy Bayer aspirin because that somehow makes me complicit in the destruction of Jews? Oh no, not at all. There's a a huge discontinuity between who worked for Bayer then and now, that not only in knowledge, uh intent, um, and and as well as the time and the proximity then.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

But when we come to an issue like like IVF, the here's here's the key thing is that not only we're not maybe we're not dealing with the same doctors from the 1980s, like after Marie the first IVF baby, uh Marie Brown Louise Brown, she was born in 1978. Um, but we're building off the knowledge of of hundreds of thousands, uh millions that have have been killed and destroyed. And the IVF technicians, the embryologists, those that are working at these fertility clinics know what's going on. They know that these are indeed little, these little embryos are humans. They know 100% what is taking place. I have more sympathy that the the couples going in might not be 100% where of aware of every step along the way of what happens to their embryos, and oftentimes they're being deceived. Yeah, and this has happened in multiple cases. But by when we increase our knowledge of the fact of what is taking place, we are participating in this major industry that frequently sells itself on being highly successful at the destruction of human lives. And so this the moral speed bump I want to throw in front of people is we need to consider whether if even participating in this is making us complicit and put making our hands dirty of this, at least morally speaking.

SPEAKER_03 27:07

You know, Josh, and I want to come back around quickly on this and say, you know what, there's a lot of things that happen in life where now that I'm aware of this, how do I shift direction on this? I mean, there may be families who've, you know, supported this and gotten involved in this through the years, but now, you know, we're getting educated. We're realizing, man, we live in a brave new world and I participate somewhat in this, but now I want to set a new direction. And uh, you know, I mean, it's not to say we live lives of regret, and this is one thing I do not want. I don't want families living lives of regret, but I do want to live lives of renewal and repentance and reformation and you know, doing things God's ways. And you know, there are a lot of people involved in abortion industry in the past that become some of the most amazing pro-lifers. I mean, thinking Bernard Nathanson, you know, one of the amazing, you know, beginnings of all the pro-life stuff in the 1980s. Um, I guess I just want to encourage families to say, you know what? Can we can we now set a new direction? Can we begin to say, we're gonna save lives, we're gonna do everything we can to save lives in the future. Uh I guess that's the right response, right, Josh? I mean, for all of us, for me and you.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

That's right. Yeah, I I think repentance, I don't think, I believe, repentance must always be accompanied by restructuring. Yeah, you see, this is a profound theme in the Old Testament, right? When Josiah, when they they get into the temple and they this discover the the scrolls and they read them, they're like, oh my goodness, we haven't been doing any of these things. It's accompanied by this major restructuring throughout the land that we must come into conformity with God's law, God's ways, God's word, and so forth. We need to do the same thing today. We need to repent, and and we do that when we come into the the knowledge of the truth. And when it comes to this, we need just to realize these are little human beings that are being destroyed regularly, routinely, uh, and in full knowledge of a lot of people. And you'd be surprised at how many times people have been pushed through the IVF process and they come out the backside of it. They don't regret having their kids, sure. Like they don't say we don't wish our kids didn't exist, right? Sure, but they said we wish we had it and pursued IVF. Right. Um, there's a there's a podcast, a gal named Kelly Fell, who is one of my endorsements of the book, center, I think Center for Bioethics and and Culture. I might be misquoting um her credentials there. Um, but her her podcast, she has couples on that are frequently say the same thing that we were we were pressured, do IVF, do I VF, and they over they overlook things like restorative reproductive medicine, some very basic things to help heal the body naturally and do many, many of these things because infertility is often just a symptom of many things that are already wrong and disordered within a person's body. Um, so yeah, there's a lot of things that need to happen. Yeah, and one of them is we just need to come into, we need to expose the truth.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

Yeah, that's a big part of it. And thanks for doing that with the book. I want to throw this at you, and I hope it's it's not a curveball here, but uh and I've been thinking about this for a while myself. And this is an example that comes to me, partially because I'm a student of history and I've done a ton of work on the history of the missionary movement around the world over the last uh actually 2,000 years, as in taking the world for Jesus. And one of the examples that I came upon, I think this is Arnaught in the Congo. And we're talking about, you know, well before Livingston, Arnauts out there in the Congo. So good stuff uh happening with these missionaries, the early missionaries in Africa. And uh he ran into the guys who are kidnapping and enslaving, okay, the Muslim slave trade, right? So you run into this uh in the 1830s or 40s. And um and now, okay, suppose the kidnapping business or the slavery business is legalized. And apparently it was, I don't know whether it's completely legal in all these nations, but that was the kind of thing they were doing. And so what they would do is they would sell the kids off to the missionaries and sometimes even threaten to kill their kidnapped kids if they were not, you know, bought and paid for by the missionaries. But again, that's there was a business involved here. And so they would kidnap and sell these kids to the Christian missionaries. And thankfully it was guys like Livingston who stood up and said, actually, we're shutting the whole industry down. It's like we're not gonna play this. And what would happen is you get this push-pull thing going where the more the more the missionaries played the game, the more the slave traders would engage. And so to what extent do Christians say, you know what, we're pulling back from the industry and we're gonna do the best we can to shut this thing down? I I guess sort of like what David Livingston did. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Yeah, I I guess is to ask a question to clarify your question. Are you asking if we Christians get more involved with embryo adoption, will that inadvertently just cause the industry to just ramp up the creation of embryos?

SPEAKER_03 32:09

I kind of on either side of it, whether participating in the IVF itself or get involved in IVF adoption, I I, you know, I don't know uh how much Christians should be involved in the business versus trying to shut the thing down. I uh you know, there's a tension, there's ethical tension on this. I'm sure you've grappled with that yourself.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

But I think the way that w we bring IVF to a halt isn't through regulation. And you'll see that the policymakers, policy analysts, they want regulation, which certainly it's terrible that it's unregulated, and there's so many stats we don't know. Like you were you were citing that group at the beginning is making estimates, they're making estimates because there's a lot of stuff that the that this is the wild west of ART, system reproductive technology, that they're just not required to to report. So it's it's best best you know scenario, you know, best best case um estimations. Um to use a hit a historical example um that I used in the book, you know, Upton Sinclair, when he wrote the book The Jungle, which is uh the turn of the century 1900s, um, he wrote a series of articles that was aimed at describing just the horrific conditions of of refugees that were coming, uh immigrants coming through the the rust belt cities like Chicago and so forth, and just how terrible the food industry industry was and and how they were being preyed upon. And his his big answer was probably even worse than the problem was at the time, which was socialism. He thought socialism was gonna be the the big thing that was going to solve all their problems, you know. And after the fact, the the big thing that did result out of his book was things like the formation of what later became the FDA, the Food Drug Administration. You know, Teddy Roosevelt one Sunday one morning was reading his newspaper eating sausage when he heard about a man who fell into a meat grinder and was turned into sausage, and that led to the passage of the creation of this of this the of the FDA. Umclair then later wrote, I aimed to paraphrase, if I might misquote it, I aimed for America's heart and I hit them in the stomach. I think when it comes to IVF, I fear the direction that people, policy analysts and so forth are looking at is with is that this is just industry run amuck and we just need to regulate it.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

And really what we need to be looking at is what has God already provided in his world and how we're supposed to have babies. And look at the beauty and creation of having big families of lots of babies, and also the alternative means for having babies for those who are childless and cannot conceive. And he gives us a beautiful picture of that in this thing called adoption. Yeah, it is absolutely just so happens that this is this is a uh an analogous picture of the gospel. I'm not saying when you adopt somebody, that is the gospel. I got accused of that actually. Somebody's saying, You're saying this is the gospel. No, no, no. No, I'm not.

SPEAKER_03 35:16

It's just the picture of what God does for us, really.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

That's that's right, 100%. And this is something the church has been charged with in caring for the orphans and widows. That's right. Now he it not everybody's being told they should adopt, but God's calling somebody to do it. Yeah, and we're not supposed to, we're not supposed to poo-poo on that and just say just adopt. This is not a this is not simple, this is not easy, this is a high calling, and there's a lot of orphans out there that needed to be taken care of. And I think when you make you the church does what the church is supposed to do with this beautiful picture of the family, big families, roaring families, the teeming with life, that that that the idea of even wanting to go to IVF is going to shrivel up and die.

SPEAKER_03 36:03

And we begin to see the true redemption of of this entire thing uh through the Christian family. And we hope to see that more and more. Uh, let me ask you about the one flesh union uh chapter. You've got this other moral issue with IVF, it's the one flesh union, and it it's been a question mark in my mind for a long time. I'm not sure I've resolved it entirely in my mind. What's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Well, the the one flesh union is this that God is um he's the creator and designer of sex. Uh he he tells us where and when and how we're supposed to procreate, and that is it's between one man, one woman, and the covenant union under him, um, in the context of that marital union for life. Um in the beginning, he he created man and woman that he man should be joined to his wife, and they shall be the two shall become one flesh. This is a re uh later quoted by Jesus, and then again Paul quotes Jesus, quoting uh Genesis intertextually. Um that one flesh union isn't supposed to be violated. Yeah, and when it comes to IVF, it's violated you know four ways from Sunday. Here you're you're you're it we live in this strange world where you can have uh sex without marriage and kids without sex. And so you're taking the eggs outside of the woman where not only a third, and it's not only a second and third and fourth party are handling it, and then the uh somebody's handling the man's sperm and bringing to them together in uh uh uh alien foreign context. But now we're also outsourcing the protectiveness of the the woman's womb, yeah, the protectiveness of the man's responsibility to over his own children. It it's a total violation of the one-fleshed union, and it's been something actually the Catholic theologians were the first to jump in on this and point this out um on this uh yesterday in the I think in the 1980s.

SPEAKER_03 38:06

The other ethical issue I bring up from time to time, Josh, is uh is that uh you know, Exodus, I think it's chapter 22. God is very down on the idea of in any way oppressing an orphan. And arguing from the lesser, that is the oppressing the orphan, to the greater in which you are intentionally creating an orphan, is itself apparently an abominable thing to God because he says, if you do this kind of thing, I'm gonna come and I'm gonna destroy you. You know, I don't have the verse in front of me, but in Exodus 22, he's not big on this oppressing orphan business. And the idea that you're gonna intentionally create orphans, I mean mass-produced orphans, is is another issue that uh that kind of works in my craw. But I want to ask the bigger question here just for a moment as we wrap this thing up. Is there a deeper issue, underlying issues that came about by the development of IVF in 1978? I mean, is there something bigger here, something more root in terms of you know, problems with our society or our science today?

SPEAKER_00 39:13

Well, you know, it's it's funny. I think I I don't know who said it originally. Um it's like the church is almost a hundred years behind responding to advances in technology. Wow. Comes things like bioethics. And it seems like that's the case when you look at the first advances of pioneer, uh pioneering technology and things that led to what led to IVF with Walter Heap was the first um pioneer in this, where he was artificially inseminating a rabbit. Um did somebody know in the late 1800s where this was going to go? I I I highly doubt it. So why would the church have had a need to respond then? I think part of the the the the underlying current that's leading to uh the major problem here with with IBF is that we just live in a culture of death. Yeah, we so devalue the the val of life and the image of God. We we devalue it. It's it's Satan that he hates the image of God. He's gonna do anything he can to attack it. And it's not just this front. Um when it comes to the transgender issue, he wants to tell boys that they're girls and girls that they're boys, it's an attack on the image of God. When it comes to abortion, he wants it to it's the same thing, wants to tell tell them that that uh that this child is going to ruin their life, right? So it's an attack on the image of God. It it's the father of lies uh ultimately playing through this worldview and expressing um his uh his attempt to express dominion um through ideas, uh, and he hates he hates God, he hates the things of God, and he's going to do anything he can to assault and suppress the image of God post-Genesis 3. And I we see that played out in ideas and ideologies, and this is one of the latest expressions of that.

SPEAKER_03 41:13

I think of the verse, the enemy has come to kill, to steal, and to destroy, but I've come to give life and to give it more abundantly. I mean, that pretty much summarizes what you just said. You know, put it in Jesus' words, right? So that's right.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

He roams about like a roaring lion. That's right. But yet King Jesus is putting putting his enemies under his feet. That's right. And we have the gospel, we have the word, and we need to unleash the word. That's what we need to do.

SPEAKER_03 41:38

That's it. Well, friends, uh, Joshua Holler has been my guest on this edition. Misconceiving IVF, an essential guide to the perils of in vitro fertilization. That's way more in the book than what we've covered today. He talks a great deal about infertility as well. So check it out at founderspress.org. That's uh the new book, Misconceiving IVF. Uh, founderspress.org. Uh they they sell it there at their store. So uh pick up a copy. It's certainly let's educate ourselves on these things, friends. So important. Uh Josh, thanks for joining me on Generations today. Appreciate you um just sharing. Um, it's been helpful, really informative.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Thank you, brother Kevin. It's been a pleasure to be on with you today.

SPEAKER_03 42:17

And friends, I just want to invite you back again next time as we continue to lay down a vision for the next generation. This has been a production of the Generations Media Network. For more information, go to generations.org/slash media.