I will admit readily that I have no idea who Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are. When someone suggested I write about them, my first response was, “Who?” I’ve reached the age where I no longer can retain the names or identities of anyone younger than Brad Pitt, and I no longer care to. But when I read the gushing article in People about Teigen and Legend planning to have another designer, in vitro fertilization (IFV) baby, I had to pause.
During a red carpet interview with Entertainment Tonight at the 28th Annual Producers Guild Awards on Saturday night, Chrissy Teigen laughed when asked about having more kids with John Legend.
“A little boy is next, for sure,” she said with a smile.
Teigen, 31, and her husband Legend, 38, share daughter Luna, 9½ months, who was conceived with the help of in vitro fertilization.
I still don’t care who they are, but the idea of implanting their boy child (because that’s the embryo they have left, as Teigen noted in a tweet after the interview) struck me as incredibly sad. While I am empathetic to people with fertility issues who seek to use IVF in order to have a family, the process has become overused among the rich for convenience. One in thirty embryos ever make it into the world, while the rest are discarded like garbage. There are serious philosophical and moral questions that should be asked and answered when addressing issues of life and death—and who holds the keys. These are critical issues, yet People is reporting this like we are talking about what designer bag some trendy person is carrying down a runway.
Last year, Teigen shared the couple’s decision to have a girl exclusively with PEOPLE.
“I’ve made this decision. Not only am I having a girl, but I picked the girl from her little embryo,” she said. “I picked her and was like, ‘Let’s put in the girl.’”
These are human souls we are talking about. Who were the ones that were not picked? What happened to them? I don’t know what this couple’s situation is or why they need IVF, if at all, and I hope they’ve carefully weighed the moral implications of this method. Most of the time in vitro fertilization starts with four or five healthy embryos that are “selectively reduced,” even if they are healthy, to cut down on the number of children born. This is, of course, abortion. Is it justifiable to kill two of your children so you can have just one child at a time? How do you choose which one gets to live and which one has to die? Is that a choice we should be making?
Some people feel that the usual in vitro method requires unacceptable loss. I spoke with a reader who told me she and her husband only allowed two embryos to be created and inserted and they would accept both if they took. Their doctor tried several times to encourage them to implant more and then abort the unwanted embryos, but their sense of humanity wouldn’t allow it. Unfortunately, one baby died in utero at around five months, and the other died three months after birth, suffering an unforeseen fatal heart condition. A story like theirs makes the flippancy of starlets even harder to stomach.
Another article which touched on related, but slightly different, life issues surfaced on my Facebook feed from a friend I know who was raised by bisexual and pedophile parents who abused her. She is an advocate for the children of homosexuals who have not been heard when they have told disturbing stories. The article, published in The Federalist, “Don’t Ignore The Chid’s Perspective On Gay Couples Commissioning Babies,” has some heartbreaking details from the children of surrogate procedures.
…purchasing eggs and employing a surrogate costs $100,000- $200,000. Many children born via sperm and egg donation are troubled that money exchanged hands over their conception, no matter how little. I heard one adult child painfully remark “My father (sperm donor) was paid $75 to stay out of my life forever.”
It seems we have come to a place where children are only tools, used by adults to fulfill themselves in some way. No one seems to spend time thinking about what the children might want. We saw it in the Women’s March, with the women demanding that children not inconvenience them until they want them—and then they might want to abort for sex selection or raise their girl as a boy, because “diversity!” We see it in the callous experimentation with human and pig hybrids grown for the hope of spare parts to better the lives of sick people who are fortunate enough to already be born. We see it in Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetal hearts, lungs and intact heads for cold, hard cash.
This is a crossroads that has serious implications for humanity. Those of us on the side of life and liberty need to stand up and ask the hard questions and encourage those around us to value life in all stages because reducing some lives to dollars and cents, status or accessories can’t end well for us and certainly can’t end well for the children stuck in the middle.
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