Alicia is sending out occasional updates from her trip to Omaha, where she is attending the NaPro Technology conference. In her last post, she remarks,
I have never thought IVF to be a good idea even without the moral implications, but I will admit that I have thought about it from the woman's POV. This tale of woe caused me to think about the man's experience, suffering shame and humiliation and performance pressure, for love of his wife and desire for a child of their genes. It is really sad that our culture has so adopted the mentality of 'bypass' rather than 'diagnose and cure' for infertility. Maybe we have adopted that erroneous mentality in other areas of life, as well.
There is so much to unpack in Alicia's paragraph I hardly know where to start. Most of us are familiar with the immoral, dehumanizing choices faced by women seeking treatment for infertility (I wrote a bit about my own experiences here.) As Alicia says, the emphasis is not on "diagnose and cure" but on "bypass." The objective is to make that baby. (A local IVF clinic is advertising on the radio, Successful delivery of a live baby or your money back!) So in addition to the evil of bypassing the unitive dimension of the marital act and turning the baby into a commodity instead of a creation, a woman being treated by the "bypass" model runs the risk of having the health problems that are causing her infertility go undiagnosed.
It would be interesting to view the presentation Alicia's referring to and hear more about infertility treatment from a man's point of view, for the options commonly offered to men are just as offensive and dehumanizing. If I were a man, I don't think I'd appreciate being treated like a faucet. (attention -- biology alert)
