TL;DR
IVF is wrong, even in its most carefully constructed “ethical” form. Even when only one embryo is created, immediately transferred, and none are frozen, discarded, or genetically screened. The problem with IVF is foundational, not merely executional. At its core, IVF replaces God’s design for conception, allows humans to own other humans, and voluntarily increases a child’s risk of death by 10X.
Is IVF Necessary?
IVF, or in vitro fertilization, is a medical fertility treatment where eggs are retrieved from a woman’s ovaries, fertilized with sperm in a lab, and then an embryo is implanted in the uterus to achieve pregnancy. It’s commonly used when natural conception fails due to issues like blocked tubes, low sperm count, or ovulation problems.
Embryos undergo preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), where a cell sample checks for chromosomal issues or genetic diseases to select healthy ones. Viable extras (often several from 8 to 10 embryos) are frozen via cryopreservation for future use.
The first thing to understand is that IVF is not the necessary and exclusive fix for infertility. For those that are struggling with fertility, yet still want a biological child (if God wills), there are great alternative treatments, the best of which is NaPro.
IVF operates like a numbers game: spend $12K to $30K per attempt1, plan for 3 to 4 cycles minimum, intentionally create dozens of children knowing most won’t survive, and hope “probability” works in your favor, all while insurance fights you at every turn2. Costs can easily exceed $100,000. It’s a high-tech, high-stakes gamble that assumes your body is broken beyond repair and needs to be bypassed entirely.
NaPro works like actual medicine: it investigates the root cause and restores what’s not functioning properly. It costs (at max) roughly what one IVF cycle would, except it’s treating you as a patient with a medical condition rather than a customer buying lottery tickets with human embryos.
The “Perfect” IVF Scenario
Christians who oppose IVF typically focus on the industry’s most obvious ethical violations: frozen embryos warehoused indefinitely, genetic screening that reduces children to quality-control metrics, the routine creation of dozens of embryos knowing 91% or more won’t survive, and gay couples purchasing children through surrogates.
These objections are valid. They’re also insufficient.
Because even if you stripped away every one of these problems, even if you constructed the most carefully constrained IVF scenario imaginable, the procedure would still be categorically sinful. The issue isn’t merely how IVF is practiced. The issue is what IVF fundamentally is.
Before addressing the core problem, let’s acknowledge what most Christians already reject. If you’re freezing embryos, you’re incarcerating your children. If you’re doing genetic screening, you’re treating image-bearers like defective products. If you’re creating ten embryos knowing nine will die, you’re responsible for their deaths. If you’re using surrogates or donors, you’re bypassing God’s design for procreation.
But some Christians push back here. They ask:
“What if we avoid all of that? What if a married Christian couple uses only their own gametes, creates a single embryo, transfers it immediately without freezing or screening, and implants it in the mother’s womb? Wouldn’t this be ethical? After all, we’re just using technology to overcome the effects of the fall, the same way someone might use surgery to save their life.”
It’s a reasonable question. It deserves a serious answer.
The Fantasy of “Ethical IVF”
A truly “perfect” IVF setup (one that creates only a single embryo, transfers it fresh immediately, never freezes or discards embryos, never uses genetic testing, and operates this way as standard practice) essentially does not exist in today’s market. Why? Because the entire IVF industry is built around the assumption of multiple cycles.3
Biologically, IVF depends on ovarian stimulation to retrieve multiple eggs because attrition is massive at every step. Not every follicle yields a mature egg. Not every egg fertilizes. Not every embryo develops normally. Not every transfer implants. Forcing the system into a “one egg, one embryo, one transfer” model makes success rates catastrophically low and cancellation rates high.
The mechanics work like this: when a clinic retrieves eggs, they don’t know which ones will successfully fertilize. If you start with five eggs, perhaps three become actual embryos. Of those three, maybe one or two develop properly. This uncertainty is why clinics retrieve multiple eggs in the first place. Even if a couple requests “only one embryo,” the cycle success rate drops to 5-20% (just for this stage). This means paying for a new cycle over and over until you successfully can move on, which could take 5-10 cycles.
Economically, clinics survive by spreading high fixed costs (labs, embryologists, equipment, accreditation) over many embryos, transfers, and add-on services like frozen embryo storage and genetic testing. A clinic that never generated surplus embryos, never froze them, and never used screening would sacrifice most of the revenue and success leverage that keeps it profitable. Even if one couple chose an ultra-restrictive protocol, the clinic’s broader business would still rely on conventional IVF practices just to stay solvent.
At best, a couple might negotiate a more constrained version for themselves inside a system whose default remains multi-embryo creation, freezing, and selection. But a clinic structured and committed to operate exclusively under “ethical” constraints? It’s a pipe dream.
But let’s be generous. Let’s assume such a clinic existed. Let’s grant that you could find a way to do it profitably. Would IVF then be permissible?
No. Even in the “perfect” scenario, IVF remains objectively sinful. Here’s why.
1. IVF Replaces God’s Design Instead of Restoring It
God’s Word is clear: there is one exclusive path to creating and receiving children. The marital union.
In Genesis 1:28, God blesses Adam and Eve and commands them:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
Immediately after, in Genesis 2:24, we read:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
This one-flesh union is personal, bodily, and exclusive, so the “fruit” of the marriage naturally proceeds from the embrace God ordained. In other words, the Bible weds the “what” of multiplication to the “how” of marital intercourse. The child is received as the gift that comes from husband and wife cleaving to one another.
To seek offspring apart from that union severs what God joined, whereas receiving children through conjugal oneness honors the shape of creation.
Psalm 127:3 reinforces this:
Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
You can actually take this imagery further. The seed (man), the tree (the woman’s womb), and the fruit (children). God designed one process for procreation, and He embedded it in the covenant of marriage. Sexual intimacy within marriage is the means. The womb is the location. Children are the gift. IVF fundamentally alters this design.
Conception Begins in the Lab, Not the Womb
The objection here is predictable: “But we’re still married. We’re still using our own samples. We’re just using technology to help the process along. Isn’t that dominion? Are you saying cars are sinful too?”
The issue isn’t technology, but what technology does.
IVF doesn’t start with marital intimacy. It starts with samples. The sperm and egg are retrieved separately, brought to a laboratory, and combined by a technician under fluorescent lights. Day zero for that child is not in the mother’s womb. Day zero is in a petri dish.
You can’t appeal to the marital act that produced the samples (even though most IVF sperm samples are taken sinfully) because those samples were not connected together in the mothers body via the one flesh union.
Instead, you have a technician who combines these samples and creates an embryo. Now, the child’s existence has begun, not through the one-flesh union of husband and wife, but through a mechanical procedure in a lab.
Dominion vs. Demonic Technology
The purpose of technology matters.
Doug Wilson put it well:
“In order to evaluate a tool, we have to account for the telos, the end, the purpose. Hammers are used to build both brothels and barns.”
Dominion technology works within God’s design to restore what the fall has broken. NaProTechnology, for example, investigates the root cause of infertility and treats it medically. The goal is to restore the body so that conception can occur naturally: through the one-flesh union, in the womb, as God designed. The process hasn’t changed. The design hasn’t been circumvented.
IVF does the opposite. It doesn’t fix what’s broken. It abandons the original design entirely and substitutes a new process. The end result may be a child, but the means by which that child came into existence is fundamentally different from what God ordained.
Consider pornography. The technology that makes porn more accessible isn’t neutral. It’s being used to provide sexual pleasure (a good thing) outside of God’s design for marriage. The efficiency of the technology doesn’t justify its use. The purpose disqualifies it.
IVF operates on the same principle. It creates children (an immeasurably good thing) through a process God never authorized. No amount of technological sophistication changes that.
Jesus Anchors Marriage to Genesis
When the Pharisees questioned Jesus about divorce in Matthew 19:4-6, He didn’t cite a verse about divorce. He went back to Genesis:
Matthew 19:4–6
He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Jesus took the principle from Genesis and applied it to a specific situation. The creation account isn’t just descriptive. It’s normative. God’s design for marriage, sexuality, and procreation is the blueprint. Any deviation from that blueprint, no matter how technologically sophisticated, is sin.
IVF asks us to believe that God’s design can be improved upon, that we can relocate conception from the womb to the lab and call it progress. But if God’s design is truly His design, then our job is to work within it, not around it.
The Slippery Slope Is Already Here
If you accept the premise that conception can legitimately occur outside the womb, you’ve opened a door you can’t close. If it’s acceptable to take one piece of the pro-creation process and perform it in a lab, what about:
A single woman cloning herself and growing the embryo in an artificial womb?
A married couple using an artificial womb instead of the wife’s body because it’s “safer” or more “convenient”?
The argument that “we’re still using a married couple’s gametes” doesn’t solve the problem. It concedes that the location and means of conception are negotiable. Once you’ve moved conception out of the womb, you’ve lost the foundation to argue it must stay tied to marriage at all.
2. Parents Choose Higher Risk for the Child
Here’s the part most IVF advocates don’t want to acknowledge: the child never consented to being brought into existence with a drastically higher chance of death.
The Statistics Are Devastating
CDC 2022 ART4 data reports about 251,000 egg retrieval cycles resulting in roughly 94,000 live births, a roughly 37% success rate per cycle, but with an average of 4 to 6 embryos created per cycle (from 10 to 15 eggs retrieved, 70 to 80% fertilized, and 40 to 50% reaching blastocyst stage), this equates to 1.0 to 1.5 million total embryos (children) and a 6 to 9% live birth rate per created child.
Long story short: 91 to 94% of children conceived through IVF die.
In stark contrast, natural conceptions in the same year produced 3.67 million live births from roughly 5.5 million recognized pregnancies, yielding roughly a 67% live birth rate per clinical pregnancy after typical 10 to 20% miscarriages5. If we control for abortion (roughly 17% of pregnancies), the natural success rate rises to roughly 85 to 90% carried to term (assuming viable), far above IVF’s success rate.
That’s a 10x higher failure rate.
The Abortion Parallel
The objection here is predictable: “But natural pregnancy has risks too. Miscarriages happen. That’s a part of our fallen world.”
However the question that must be asked is: who decided?
Natural risks fall under God’s sovereignty. IVF risks are your culpable choice. You knowingly subjected your child to a process with a 91% death rate because you wanted a child badly enough to bypass God’s design.
People actually make the same objection with abortion. “Since miscarriages happen so often, the abortion doesn’t matter anyway, let me kill it.” And all Christians should read that and say, “The answer is obvious. God stopped the development of those miscarried children. You, on the other hand, have hired a hitman to murder your child.” We must apply the same logic to this situation.
God’s Design Is Better
NaProTechnology, by contrast, has higher success rates6 than IVF, operates within God’s design, and doesn’t create and destroy children at industrial scale. It restores the body so that conception can occur naturally. The child’s life begins where God intended: in the womb, through the marital union.
The principle is this; God’s design is always better, because it’s His universe.
It’s better to eat food straight from the farm than to bleach it, strip the nutrients, and artificially add them back in. It’s better to breastfeed than to use formula (when physically possible). It’s better to conceive naturally than to manufacture a child in a lab.
Culpability Through Purchase
In natural conception, you don’t control the developmental process. Miscarriages happen under God’s sovereignty. You didn’t choose to create the child in a high-risk environment. You followed God’s design, and the outcome, however painful, was not your doing.
But with IVF, you chose to create your child in a laboratory. You chose to pay for a procedure with a 91% death rate. You chose to subject them to handling, potential freezing, and implantation, all of which carry significant risks.
You made that decision. The clinic made it possible. You’re both culpable.
The Entitlement Idol
The mentality driving IVF is difficult to escape. As much as couples may protest otherwise, the willingness to bypass God’s design reveals an underlying assumption: I am entitled to children, no matter what God thinks.
When natural conception fails, the biblical response is prayer, medical treatment that restores the body (like NaPro), and submission to God’s sovereignty. Infertility is painful. It’s heartbreaking. But it doesn’t grant us permission to rewrite the rules.
Pursuing IVF, even in its “cleanest” form, reveals that the desire for children has eclipsed obedience to God’s design. You want a child so badly that you’re willing to create one through a process God never authorized, a process that statistically results in far more death than natural conception.
And once you’re in the system, the temptation to compromise intensifies. You’ve spent $50,000. Two years of heartbreak. You’ve done one embryo at a time, and it hasn’t worked. Maybe you try ten embryos next time. Maybe you freeze some. Maybe you add genetic screening “just to be safe.”
Hannah vs. Hagar
Scripture gives us two contrasting examples of how to respond to infertility.
Hannah, barren and heartbroken, prayed. She wept at the door of the temple daily. She pleaded with God. And God, in His timing, answered her prayer and granted her a son (1 Samuel 1).
Hagar, by contrast, represents the flesh. Abraham had a promise from God that he would have a child. But when Sarah remained barren, Abraham took matters into his own hands. He went to Hagar, Sarah’s servant, and conceived a child outside of God’s design. Paul uses this as an illustration in Galatians 4, contrasting the child of promise (Isaac) with the child of the flesh (Ishmael).
What Abraham did was sinful. He didn’t trust God. He subverted God’s design because he wanted to force the outcome on his own terms. IVF is the modern Hagar. It’s taking matters into your own hands. It’s saying, “God hasn’t given me a child through the means He designed, so I’ll use technology to make it happen myself.” And to make it worse, Abraham had a promise from God. Modern Christian couples do not even have that, and yet they’re willing to do the same thing.
3. IVF Turns Children Into Commodities
Even with pure motives and no intent to traffic children, IVF still involves purchasing a child. You pay a clinic. The clinic retrieves eggs, fertilizes them, and creates embryos. Once the egg is fertilized, you have a child, no matter how small. The clinic’s job is to produce that child and implant it. Whether the child survives development is another question, but make no mistake: you paid someone to create a human being for you.
Legal Classification as Property
In most U.S. states, embryos are legally classified as property7: chattel or marital assets. They can be disposed of via patient contracts, consent forms, and judicial rulings. Only Alabama and Louisiana treat them differently. Legally, you own the children the clinic creates for you. Can humans own other humans?
The nature of the transaction also shifts how children are perceived. They’re no longer a heritage from the Lord, received as a gift through the covenant of marriage. They’re a deliverable, expected from a service provider you’ve contracted for a product.
The Distinction from Adoption
Someone might object: “But adoption involves money too. Are you saying adoption is sinful?”
No. Adoption is fundamentally different.
Adoption is a response to sin. A child has been abandoned, orphaned, or removed from an unsafe situation. The adoptive parents step in to provide what the child’s biological parents cannot or will not. The fees involved cover legal processes, agency costs, and administrative work. The parents are not paying to create a child. They’re paying to legally formalize their responsibility for a child who already exists and needs a home.
IVF, by contrast, is seeking through money and scientific manipulation to create a child. You’re initiating existence, not responding to abandonment. The clinic’s deliverable is a human being.
Conclusion
IVF is not a gray area. It’s not a matter of personal conviction or disputable opinion. It is, by definition, a fundamental departure from God’s design for procreation.
Even in the “perfect” scenario (where no embryos are frozen, no genetic screening is used, and only one embryo is created), IVF still relocates conception from the marital union and the womb to the laboratory and the technician’s hands. It still commodifies children. It still reduces their survival rate tenfold for the sake of adult desire.
The issue isn’t just the industry’s abuses. The issue is the procedure itself.
God has ordained one method of procreation: the one-flesh union of husband and wife, within marriage, resulting in children as a gift from the Lord. Any process that circumvents this design (no matter how technologically sophisticated or carefully constrained) remains sin.
If you are struggling with infertility, you are not crazy for suffering. That pain is real, and it’s heartbreaking. But the answer is not to bypass God’s design. The answer is submission to His sovereignty, medical treatment that restores rather than replaces, and trust that He is good even when He says no.
