Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. In a recent exchange on X, Hannah Strage, the world's very first snowflake baby, was told by another user at Rory LS, and I quote, there's no such thing as embryo adoption. Embryos are property, not people. You were not adopted as an embryo, you were donated property. You might as well argue that a pebble has human rights, end quote.
Well, Hannah's story as snowflake number one has been told in various media outlets. She was born in December of 1998, but had been conceived. Far earlier, deemed a leftover or excess embryo from an IVF process. Her parents, who were struggling with infertility, sought the counsel of ethicists and Christian leaders about what it would take and what it would mean to adopt embryos already created and stuck in a freezer and give them a chance to be born and live life outside of the freezer. As Hannah put it in an article, I was a frozen embryo, one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of them at the time, created via an in vitro fertilization industry, unregulated and out of control.
But I was fortunate. I was the first frozen embryo ever adopted. Before I had a name, I was assigned a number, not an identity. End quote. Yes, in vitro fertilization has created quite a moral crisis.
There are now as many as 1.5 million frozen embryos just in the U.S. alone. Many of these will remain frozen or simply be tossed out. In the UK alone, an estimated 130,000 embryos have been thrown in the trash since 1991. At the heart of this crisis, a crisis that's been made far worse by the normalization of IVF and other artificial reproductive technologies, is what Hannah Strage noted in her response to At Rory LS on X when she wrote, and I quote, and there it is.
When your defense of IVF requires looking at a living human being and saying, you were property. you might want to consider which side of the ethical argument you're standing on. I was never property, I was somebody's child. Hannah has now dedicated her life to advocating for a truth that many in our culture have intentionally forgotten the one that doctor Seuss said, A person is a person, no matter how small. Each and every human being carries unique value and priceless worth, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.
The denial of the humanity of the unborn is what lies at the root of so much evil in our world, from abortion itself to calling people like Hannah Stregge property on social media. Whenever someone claims that the unborn, including embryos, do not fully count as humans, we have to be prepared to challenge it. Ask the one who made the claim what difference there really is between the person that he or she is now and the embryo that he or she once was that would justify killing it. Or, for that matter, in the case of IVF, locking the embryo in a freezer or donating it to science.
Now, the only differences there are do not change our value. Just remember, SLED. It's an acronym that stands for size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependence. Our value is never dependent on our size or our location. Humans are always developing, and we're always dependent on others.
The fact that an embryo is small or frozen, dependent, and still developing makes it no less a baby and no less a human being. IVF, as it's commonly practiced, dehumanizes more embryos than are born by treating human beings as being excess and unwanted property. We've heard that kind of thinking before. In fact, we hear it any time a tyrant or a particular group of people hope to oppress or even destroy another group of people. Once we push past the special pleading and sentimentality, we find the same reasoning behind current IVF practices.
And for now, you can find that quiet part said out loud on X in a post that was directed at Hannah Streggie. Thankfully, she knows better. Thankfully, she's more than able to push back on the lies that are said about her. As she recently tweeted out, and I quote, the fertility industry once had the power to decide whether I stayed frozen, was discarded, or got a chance at life. But I grew up.
That Frozen Embryo has a voice now, and I intend to make the industry very uncomfortable with what she has to say. Go, Hannah. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett.
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