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Frozen Orphans

A Focus on the Family broadcast sparked a very interesting conversation in our office yesterday. The broadcast, A Snowflake Comes to Life,[i] was the story of one couple’s struggle with infertility and the ethical dilemma associated with assisted pregnancy. They found themselves asking the question of what happens to the leftover fertilised embryos … are they little lives, and is discarding them murder?

A Snowflake Comes to Life Broadcast

We seem to be very vocal on the subject of abortion, and so we should be, but what of the masses of frozen orphans who are filling clinic freezers around the globe? The reality is that most of the church is relatively silent on this issue. That is, except perhaps for the Catholics. In fact, just a couple of years back, the Vatican issued a high-level teaching document on certain bioethical issues,[ii] and it specifically addressed this issue by stating:

The majority of embryos that are not used remain ‘orphans’. Their parents do not ask for them and at times all trace of the parents is lost. This is why there are thousands upon thousands of frozen embryos in almost all countries where in-vitro fertilisation takes place.

John Paul II made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”.

In his book, When a Nation Forgets God,[iii] Erwin Lutzer shares this eyewitness account of how some German Christians reacted to Nazism:

I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because, what could anyone do to stop it?

A railroad track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realised that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!

Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us.

We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past the church we were singing at the tops of our voices. If we heard the screams we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.

Years have passed and no one talks about it anymore. But I still hear the train whistle in my sleep. God forgive me; forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians yet did nothing to intervene.

Lutzer went on to ask, “What train is rumbling past us today whose whistle we ignore?”

I know in writing this that I am touching an area that will be the cause of immense pain for many Christian couples in this country, and I am truly sorry for your struggles. However, I feel I must ask the question: “Is this one of those trains that Lutzer speaks of?”

Have we as Christians been blinded by wonders of science and let them, along with our own emotions, cloud what God has to say on the subject of life? Is it time to consider whether we have in fact silenced God’s voice on this issue?

The upshot for the couple I introduced above was that they couldn’t go down the IVF path … not because they were opposed to IVF per se, but because of their concerns related to the ethical dilemma of what to do with any left-overs – it was their conviction that each one of those completely unique single-cell embryos is actually a child . What they felt led to do was to explore how they could possibly save the life of at least one frozen orphan. They managed to adopt one, which resulted in their beautiful little daughter, Hannah.

If you want to hear their story for yourself, contact Focus on the Family and ask for the broadcast, A Snowflake Comes to Life.

By Tim Sisarich

Director, Focus on the Family (NZ)