It doesn’t surprise me anymore when people demand credentials instead of arguments. We live in an age where many things have become more important than the truth. So they ask, “Who are you, exactly?” Not what are you saying? Not is it true? Not can you prove it? But where did you get your badge?
And if you don’t have the right badge—preferably laminated, hung around your neck on a lanyard, with a Latin motto and a hologram—then you are expected to sit down, hush up, and let the grownups talk. Not that most people demanding the badge have one themselves, but they’ve stockpiled enough handpicked quotes from those who do, and that has become their badge. Sensibility is no longer a virtue, specialization is. Wisdom is no longer the goal, certification is. And in this upside-down scheme, the worst possible thing you can be is a man with a Bible and a conscience who dares to speak plainly about something that matters.
The only thing that proponents of the ‘badge-party’, as I’d like to call them, forget is that two can play that game. “How dare you talk about IVF if you’re not a reproductive endocrinologist?” “How dare you speak about embryology if you majored in Computer Science?” “How dare you talk about ethics if you’re not on a board, or a committee, or a panel, or at least on LinkedIn?” Alright! If that’s how you want to play it, let me introduce you to Dr. Dawn Kuruvilla, senior consultant in internal medicine working at a private hospital in Trivandrum. You better eat them apples real quick if you want to keep this doctor away.
But before I let him into this discussion, let me say that there is a thin sliver of truth buried in this ‘badge-party’ argument, the way there is a thin sliver of meat in a hotdog. Yes, expertise exists. Yes, there are technical questions that require technical knowledge. If I’m having a heart attack, I don’t want my plumber to do the surgery. Granted.
But notice what the credential-demanders are doing. They are not saying, “You’re wrong because your reasoning fails.” They are saying, “You’re wrong because you are you.” The point is not to engage the claim, the point is to disqualify the claimant. They do not refute, they dismiss. And dismissing has become our international pastime—right up there with scrolling and self-pity.
It’s the rhetorical move where someone changes the subject from what is true to who is allowed to speak. A certificate can tell me you attended classes. It cannot tell me you are right. Plenty of credentialed people have been wrong—spectacularly, catastrophically wrong—about matters both technical and moral. Hasn’t Covid-19 taught us anything about experts? The point is not that expertise is useless. The point is that expertise does not function as a moral compass, and credentials do not transubstantiate bad reasoning into good reasoning.
So, if we’re going to talk about IVF, I figured I’d bring some credentials along for the ride. Not the decorative kind you hang on a wall or flash in an email signature, but the dangerous kind—a man who can think, who can read, who can reason, and who has actually done the work. A man with skills, judgment, and the rare modern qualification of moral clarity.
Meet Dr. Dawn.
I still vividly remember the last day of November 2018, when I felt the wiring in my brain change the moment a boy started crying in the baby cot next to my wife. She had just delivered our firstborn and lay next to him exhausted from the painful suffering a mother endures to bring the miracle of life into this world…
Eight years later, with two more children and a shared history of treasuring them together, I still find myself shedding tears of joy, wondering what I did in my often-miserable thirty-five years to deserve such beautiful gifts from the Creator God, who so bountifully bestows life.
Children are indeed a great blessing and one of the most wonderful things a man and woman can receive. Becoming a father and seeing my wife become a mother has been one of the most fulfilling experiences for us, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything else. My neurology resident had told me a couple of weeks before we had our son that all the fun we ever had as single men and women would pale with the ecstatic joy we would experience when he had children and see them grow with us.
Now permit me a brief interruption, one of several you will have to endure if you keep reading this article.
What you have just read is Psalm 127 put on flesh. It is Scripture translated into diapers, exhaustion, tears, and an unaccountable joy that refuses to stay theoretical. And right on cue, I can already hear the objections—“That’s just one man’s experience. Plenty of people experience otherwise.”
Quite so. And plenty of people experience indigestion after steak. That does not mean beef is a dietary myth.
Experience is not the author of reality, but neither is it the enemy of it. Experience does not legislate truth, but it does bear witness to it. Dawn’s testimony does not create the goodness of children any more than a sunrise creates the sun. It simply confirms that what God has said is, in fact, the case. Children are a heritage from the Lord whether anyone notices it or not. But when a man does notice it, he sees the truth, and the truth always sets him free.
Psalm 127 does not need Dawn’s story to remain true. But Dawn’s story stands as a living footnote, a flesh-and-blood “amen” to what God has already declared.
So, if you’re a young couple delaying children in order to enjoy life to the fullest before taking on the responsibilities of parenthood, then we should be clear about what that says. According to Psalm 127, you are not viewing children as a blessing. You are viewing them as a burden—something that gets in the way of “real life,” something to be postponed until you’ve had your fill. When they are consistently delayed for the sake of personal enjoyment or comfort, the issue is not merely practical or circumstantial, it is a quiet theological judgment about what kind of life is actually worth living.
But that’s a different topic for another time. Pressing on.
But this isn’t the reality for many couples in India. We are not yet as bad in our fertility rates as countries like Japan, which now has more demand for adult diapers than baby nappies because of its ageing population and fewer children being born. Indian markets continue to sell more baby products than condoms, and more marriages still take place each year than divorces. Even with all of that, the number of children per couple is dropping, and more young couples are deciding to remain childless in the cities or having difficulty planning pregnancies.
It is in this regard that assisted reproductive options like IVF (in-vitro fertilization) and surrogacy have become popular and a viable option to have children for many couples. Such modern technological possibilities have opened up new realities, and science has hence reshaped our paradigms of looking at pregnancy, children, and our desire to have offspring. We hear stories of famous couples having children via IVF, actresses freezing their eggs for the future, celebrities announcing their childbirth achieved through surrogates, and many on social media lauding the wonders of newer technologies helping countless couples get their dream of holding a child in their arms. We drive through cities and see advertisements of fertility centres promising the dream of having a baby with their expert medical services and sophisticated technology available for use.
We live in a time when easy sex is widely accessible, cohabitation is often presented as consequence-less, abortions are increasingly fast and uncomplicated, and pregnancy itself can be planned, postponed, or prevented with remarkable precision—realities that profoundly shape how our culture understands intimacy, responsibility, and the value of new life. We are being told that highly effective means of pregnancy planning and getting children as we desire are all readily available, medically possible, and socially normalized.
What Dawn is circling here, perhaps without yet naming it outright, is the moral axis on which all technology turns. Technology is never neutral. It is always a multiplier. The only real question is, what is it multiplying?
Technology does not create virtue or vice, it amplifies what already exists. A microphone amplifies a voice. A bulldozer amplifies human strength. A computer amplifies calculation. And reproductive technologies amplify our theology of sex, marriage, children, and responsibility, whether we intend for them to or not.
An essential distinction Christians must recover here, is the difference between sin and crime. Sin is a violation of God’s law, and crime is a violation of civil law. This means that all crimes are sins but not all sins are crimes. Adultery is a sin even when no police officer shows up. Covetousness is a sin even when no property changes hands. Lust is a sin even when it remains entirely private. Scripture is not impressed by our ability to keep our hands technically clean while our hearts are filthy.
So, if something is legal, most people assume it is moral, and technology becomes a powerful accomplice. When technology restrains crime, it is a blessing. Locks, alarms, forensic science, and surveillance discourage theft and violence by increasing accountability. But when technology is used to mask sin, to allow sinful desires to be indulged while minimising visible fallout, it does not heal corruption. It entrenches it. This is where our culture’s ethical confusion becomes obvious. We assume that if a technology reduces visible harm, it must therefore be good. But Scripture never evaluates righteousness by visible outcomes alone. God judges means as well as ends, intentions as well as results.
A society that invents cleaner ways to sin has not progressed morally. A burglar who uses better tools to avoid being caught is not a better citizen. A liar who uses sophisticated language to mislead without technically lying is not virtuous. A man who commits adultery but avoids pregnancy, disease, or scandal has not committed a lesser sin. The absence of consequence is not the presence of righteousness.
This is why the “outcomes justify the means” ethic is fundamentally pagan. The Apostle Paul asks, “Shall we do evil that good may come?” And answers his own question with—By no means! (Romans 3:8). Jesus Himself warns that many will appeal to outcomes—Lord, Lord, did we not…?—only to discover Him say, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:22-23). Impressive outcomes with no obedience.
The Bible is clear. God is sovereign over both means and ends. He governs not only what comes to pass, but how it comes to pass. We are never authorised to sin for strategic advantage, to disobey in order to achieve a desirable result. Faithfulness, not effectiveness, is the measure God requires.
Now apply this distinction to sex and reproduction. Technologies that allow consequence-less sex are often defended on the grounds that they reduce crime-like outcomes—abortion rates, unwanted pregnancies, social cost. And in the narrow, short-term sense, some of that may even be true. Fewer visible crises. Less immediate mess.
But what they do not reduce is sin. In fact, they amplify it. By separating sex from consequence, technology trains people to think of intimacy as recreational rather than covenantal. It multiplies lust while minimising accountability. It reduces unplanned pregnancy, yes, but it also reduces fidelity, permanence, and trust. And the long-term costs of those losses dwarf the short-term savings.
We now live with the results. A culture of infidelity. Fatherless homes. Relational instability. Loneliness disguised as autonomy. An entire moral ecosystem hollowed out because sin was treated as a logistical problem rather than a spiritual one. Technology did not defeat sin. It simply made it cheaper.
In our hurried pursuit of career success, financial security, and material ambitions, marriage is often delayed and children postponed—and when pregnancies do occur, they are increasingly treated not as gifts to be received, but as burdens to be managed and endured, along with the inconvenience of raising children who demand time, patience, and sacrifice. Our bodies and physiological functions are less accommodating to such demands in this modern world. Time is a fleeting reality that waits for no one—least of all for our attempts to bend it to the demands of self-fulfillment or to the ambitious timelines we construct around the next milestone in our professional lives. These and many other factors contribute to what is increasingly becoming an alarming rise in infertility and in the inability of couples to carry pregnancies to term once conceived.
But why bother, if we have developed effective ways to assist us in having children without worrying too much about our bodies—whether diseased, dysfunctional, or simply less desirable—going through the changes that childbearing and childbirth demand? These technological solutions fit our needs and fulfill our emotional wants; this has now become the grid by which we assess how useful they are to us. Modern medical technologies present ample evidence of their effectiveness, offering what appears to be a boon—meeting our carefully timed desire for a child, even as they attempt to remedy problems that are often, at least in part, of our own making.
What Dawn describes here is not merely a demographic shift or a medical dilemma. It is a theological reordering of life, one so familiar to us now that it hardly registers as revolutionary. We have quietly decided that life must submit to our schedules rather than the other way around.
Marriage is delayed not because we lack the capacity for commitment, but because commitment interferes with our momentum in a rapidly unravelling life. Children are postponed not because they are unwanted in principle, but because they are inconvenient in practice. Pregnancy, when it does occur, is increasingly treated as a disruption—an interruption in the march toward professional milestones, economic security, and personal fulfillment. And when the body protests, when it turns out that fertility does not wait patiently while we finish our résumés, we are surprised, even offended.
Modern reproductive technologies undeniably demonstrate effectiveness. They can produce children on demand, according to our timelines, often bypassing the very bodily limitations we have cultivated through years of delay. The tragedy is not that technology can help bring about life. The tragedy is that we increasingly want life without submission, children without surrender, fruit without faithfulness, and blessing without cost. The grid by which we assess these technologies is not whether they honor God’s design, but whether they fit neatly into lives already arranged around ourselves.
To clarify the term and briefly explain the procedure, IVF, or in-vitro fertilization, involves taking sperm and ova from a man and a woman and fertilizing them outside the body—in glass vessels such as test tubes or petri dishes (think back to your chemistry lab days)—resulting in the formation of an embryo. This embryo is the first living cell of a new human person, and life has now begun. This person is living in a kind of suspended animation outside a woman’s womb and is worthy of all moral considerations and legal protections afforded to other human beings. In order to increase the odds of a successful pregnancy, doctors create many such embryos in a controlled environment in the laboratory, after which the best among them are transferred into the woman to gestate and grow into a fully formed baby in her womb, to be delivered at the end of the pregnancy. Most IVF pregnancies result in twins, and occasionally triplets or more, because multiple embryos are transferred into the woman’s womb in the hope that some will survive…
IVF process, as it is commonly practised, has built into it the creation of many fertilized embryos, all of which have living personhood at their core and have potential for life and growth, and development, and being born as real children. Many of them are discarded, allowing only a couple to be placed in a mother’s safe home to grow. The rest are generally frozen and not given the opportunity at life as we know it. Many countries allow medical experiments on such embryos as part of research, many are destroyed, and many are kept in limbo for decades till someone claims them.
IVF is enormously costly (2-3 lakh per cycle of trying), and the success rates are 20-30% per cycle even in the best centres. The process is often painful for women—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Their bodies are first hormonally stimulated to produce more ova than normal, followed by the uncertainty of whether even healthy embryos will successfully implant, and then the added complications of pregnancies that are frequently multiple and medically complex in assisted reproductive procedures.
What Dawn is doing here, again, perhaps more carefully than many readers will realise, is refusing to let desire smuggle itself into the driver’s seat of moral reasoning. And that refusal alone already puts her at odds with the spirit of the age.
Notice the framing of the question, “Because medical science provides us options, is it therefore correct to use them?” That question cuts against the deepest modern assumption that capability implies permission. But Scripture has never reasoned that way. The Bible assumes the opposite. Power is morally dangerous unless governed by obedience.
Now let’s be clear here. The desire for children is good. Noble, even. Scripture commands fruitfulness, celebrates offspring, and calls barrenness a grief. None of this is in dispute. The dispute is whether a good desire can sanctify an immoral method.
IVF forces us to confront this principle because it industrialises reproduction. Once fertilization is removed from the covenantal act of marriage and placed in a laboratory, children cease to be received and begin to be produced. And production requires excess. IVF does not create a child. It creates many children, knowing full well that only a select few will be allowed to live. The rest are treated as surplus inventory—graded, frozen, experimented upon, discarded, or forgotten. This is not a tragic accident of the system. This is the system.
At this point, the moral issue should already be obvious to any Christian who believes what Scripture teaches about human life. An embryo is not a potential person. It is a person with potential. Life begins at conception, because God says so.
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
— Psalm 139:13
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me.
— Psalm 139:16
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you.
— Jeremiah 1:5
“The LORD called me from the womb,
from the body of my mother he named my name.”
— Isaiah 49:1
From that moment, we are dealing not with tissue, not with property, not with medical material, but with a human being bearing the image of God. And Scripture is unyielding that image-bearers of God are not a means to an end. They are ends in themselves.
I want to end with a clarion call to Scripture-believing, God-honoring Christians who desire to preserve life and champion children within their marriages, as well as to those who are considering IVF.
We should not forget that IVF replaces the God-designed natural process of sexual intimacy between a covenanted husband and wife in the bearing of children. IVF artificially manufactures life in a strange and foreign environment, rather than in the sacred and mysterious ways by which God weaves children in the depths of our bodies and causes them to wonderfully grow. IVF invites third-party scientific interference into an exclusive two-person marital union that is meant to lovingly beget children. IVF replaces the God-given mandate to trust Him with outcomes—when He opens and closes wombs—and to receive His grace to navigate pain and loss with courage and hope.
Much more can be said about the multibillion-dollar fertility industry and the money-driven reproductive technologies that are heavily marketed to tap into the fears and anxieties of modern couples. Much can also be written about how IVF is increasingly used to engineer babies, and how eugenic principles are employed to eliminate the imperfect in favor of designer-made children. Many should also be aware of how the IVF industry caters to same-sex couples through donor sperm and ova, employs surrogate women to carry pregnancies, and effectively purchases children from birth mothers—along with the many-layered horrors of such profoundly unnatural practices.
Suffice to say, we should be very careful to even consider the possibility of having children through assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, as they are fraught with innumerable serious ethical and moral issues. I strongly believe that this option is not a feasible one for Christians, and that we should instead help couples who are bearing the pain of infertility toward more holistic options for childbearing—such as exploring restorative reproductive approaches (which have higher success rates than IVF), and other possibilities like adopting orphaned children. The couple longing for children but barren can be grafted into families with children and churches, where they can disciple younger individuals as spiritual parents and be part of the organic life and family of a covenant community.
Let me summarise for those of you who prefer points over paragraphs.
At the heart of IVF lies an unavoidable moral reality. Human beings are deliberately created knowing that many will be destroyed or indefinitely suspended.
Christian theology has always held that human life begins at conception. From that moment, a new, distinct human person exists—bearing the image of God (Genesis 1:27), known by God (Psalm 139:13–16), and worthy of protection (Exodus 20:13).
IVF routinely violates this principle by:
Creating multiple embryos to increase success rates
Selecting some for implantation
Discarding, freezing, or experimenting on the rest
No human life may be created as disposable. To do so is to deny the inherent dignity of the image of God.
Scripture consistently presents children as something to be received, not engineered (Psalm 127:3; James 1:17).
Once children are produced through technological processes, they are inevitably subjected to quality assessment, selection, optimization, and rejection.
This is not parenthood as Scripture describes it, it is a consumer logic applied to human life. We’ve made a business out of creating, choosing and killing children. In this market, children become outcomes rather than persons entrusted by God.
Christian ethics has always understood procreation to belong within the one-flesh union of marriage (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4–6).
IVF deliberately separates sexual union from conception, love-making from life-giving, and covenant intimacy from procreation. This separation matters because it teaches something false, that life can rightly originate outside the embodied, covenantal self-giving of the husband and the wife.
The problem here is not merely procedural, it is symbolic and theological. IVF redefines where life comes from. Instead of flowing from personal union, it emerges from technical intervention. As theologians have long argued, the means of conception speak a moral language. IVF speaks the language of control, production, and management—not gift, mystery, or submission.
IVF rests on a utilitarian ethic, many must be created so that a few may live. Christian moral theology rejects this outright. Scripture never permits the weak to be used to benefit the strong, and innocent persons to be treated as means rather than ends.
A living child born through IVF does not retroactively justify the destruction of their siblings.
The historic medical ethic shared by Christian physicians for centuries is primum non nocere—first, do no harm. IVF violates this ethic in multiple ways.
Harm to embryos who are destroyed or frozen
Harm to women through aggressive hormonal stimulation
Harm through medically risky multiple pregnancies
Harm through emotional trauma, false hope, and repeated failure
Christian medical ethics insists that patients are persons, not problems to be solved. IVF asks doctors to knowingly harm some patients (embryos) to benefit others. That is incompatible with a Christian understanding of medicine as healing rather than harming.
Cryopreservation of embryos introduces a moral absurdity. Human beings deliberately placed into limbo with no clear path to life.
Frozen embryos are alive, human, and intentionally deprived of normal development. This violates the Christian duty to protect and nurture life. Many embryos remain frozen indefinitely, effectively abandoned. Others are destroyed once deemed unnecessary.
To create life with no intention of allowing it to live is morally indefensible.
Finally, IVF embodies a deeper theological error, the belief that a good outcome sanctifies any means.
God promised Abraham a son. Sarah, weary of waiting, offered a sensible workaround. “Go in to my servant… that I may obtain children by her” (Genesis 16:2). Hagar was Sarah’s technological solution. The plan was practical, culturally acceptable, and, most importantly, it worked. A child was conceived. The outcome arrived on schedule.
And look where that got them. Disaster. Jealousy, strife, division, and generations of conflict followed. Paul later explains how Ishmael was born “according to the flesh,” not according to promise (Galatians 4:23). God did not deny the promise, He rejected the shortcut.
Scripture repeats the lesson relentlessly. Saul lost his kingdom for an unauthorised sacrifice (1 Samuel 13). Uzzah died for a well-intended touch (2 Samuel 6). Jesus warns that many will plead impressive outcomes—“Lord, Lord, did we not…?”—only to be turned away (Matthew 7:22–23).
God is unimpressed by success achieved through disobedience. He is Lord over outcomes and over means. Christians are not allowed to sin efficiently.
The longing for children—however deep—does not authorise disobedience.
No, it is not worth nothing. Children born through IVF are fully human, fully precious, and fully bearers of God’s image. Their worth does not depend on the righteousness of the method by which they were conceived. God regularly brings life and blessing out of disordered situations, without ever endorsing the disorder itself.
But that distinction is precisely the point.
To affirm the dignity of these children is not to affirm IVF. In fact, the Christian objection to IVF exists because children have such dignity. God’s mercy in giving life does not grant us permission to violate His design in order to get it.
The Christian hope is not that every desire will be fulfilled in this life, but that God will be faithful. Jesus Christ secures life not by controlling outcomes, but by redeeming His people. And that is enough.
Faith waits. Faith obeys. And faith trusts God with both the gift and the cost.
Check out Dr. Dawn’s entire article here. Dr Dawn Kuruvilla is a senior consultant in internal medicine working at a private hospital in Trivandrum. He is married to Daisy, and together they have the great joy and privilege of watching their three children grow up in their home.
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