IVF babies and their mommies

A lady doctor vented to me one day: I do not understand these kids. They are different. They have no sense of right or wrong. They are ruthless with each other and never listen to my husband and me.

She was referring to her children, both IVF conceived. They are young, granted that, but yesterday I sat next to a kid who was older and had an equally exasperated dad, which is understandable, because she was being disrespectful and kept extricating the Holy Eucharist from her mouth and asking her younger brothers to do so

It is interesting because adults can have their issues and kids, from which adults develop, have their developmental or physical or other issues. It can be named. It can be addressed, given therapy. Autistic kids can be socialized. Developmental delays can be given stimulation. But I guess, at the heart of it, the parents who did IVF know it and just have a hard time making sense of it, yet seeing their kid be different. And they for the most part are helpless. I can sense the deep gasps that this father made that comes with the frustration that this seemingly perfect looking, two-parent kid is not getting simple basic moral cues.

The big landmark study that came out disclosing the higher rates of physical, intellectual and emotional disability in IVF-conceived children came as a boost to those who have suspected it all along. The first test-tube baby, after all, Baby Louise, now an adult in the UK, fully qualifies in what pediatricians call "FLK" (funny looking kid, which is their backtalk for something that seems off and suspicious for a genetic anomaly). That it took off to be a global human genetic engineering industry that even Catholics have turned a benign eye to it to terrible ends. The US FDA has once sought approval for a human-animal hybrid. Scientists, ethicists and lay people wrote to protest this. Just because it can be done (like the three-parent DNA conception, or the three-way marriage, or surrogacy or fornication or morning-after pills or late-term or any term abortion) doesn't mean it should be done. Doctors and researchers should have, in their review of literature, the wide (read: wide) capture of ethical concerns which include (as they have been the most seasoned of these thinkers anyway) papal encyclicals and Catholic bishops' statements.

The prophetic among them, having known how life should operate, as the Bible, the Guiding and All-Powerful Word of God, has made explicit, have given warning after warning when technological advances seek to seemingly serve, but ultimately destroy, the individual person and the human family. Pope Paul VI gave warning with Humanae Vitae (against contraception); St. JP II gave warning with Evangelium Vitae and Familiaris Consortio (against attacks on life in all stages and on family); the modern Church gave warning with the Lumen Gentium. To play a Catholic, but not follow its commands, makes for a dud, which even IVF kids, when thankfully getting the light of faith and growing up, will sniff out.