What about contraception, infertility treatment, and IVF?
By Will Bourne · Question 134
The direct answer
These practices are not one moral question. Contraception concerns how a couple approaches fertility and responsibility. Infertility treatment concerns care for people who may be grieving. IVF adds questions about creating, selecting, freezing, transferring, and sometimes discarding embryos. Each deserves specific, informed discernment.
Fuller explanation
Scripture values children without teaching that every sexual act must result in conception or that infertility reflects divine rejection. Couples should not be pressured to produce children to prove spiritual maturity.
Because I believe developing human life has moral value, treatments involving embryos require particular care. That conviction does not authorize simplistic judgment of families who made decisions amid pain, incomplete information, or medical complexity.
Pastoral counsel should be honest about its limits. Medical facts belong with qualified clinicians, legal questions with appropriate professionals, and moral decisions with informed conscience before God.
The objection we still need to face
Why not simply say technology is either a blessing or interference with God?
Because technology can be used in morally different ways. The relevant questions concern what is done, to whom, with what risks and responsibilities. A label cannot replace those distinctions.
Scripture and its use
Genesis 1:27–28; 1 Samuel 1:1–20; Psalm 127; Luke 1:5–25; James 1:5
Read these passages in their surrounding chapters alongside the explanation.