In Vitro Fertilization Is Practical, Profitable, And Popular – Just As The Slave Trade Was

You're at a fabulous party at a historic, tasteful home built in 1923. Art Deco chandeliers beam down on polished furniture and tapestries hang from the walls. Everybody's having fun. Honest people are making good business connections, new friendships are being forged, and over in the corners a couple of people are even inviting nonbelievers to visit their church. Nobody's drunk, no one's trying to "hook up," and there don't seem to be any arguments. You can't believe this event is really happening, much less that you got invited to it.

There's just one thing — and you're the only person who seems to have noticed it. In the huge crystal bowl full of tasty, nonalcoholic punch that everybody's been drinking from, you see a big, dead gray rat. Its beady little black eyes seem to be boring into your soul, its tail popping out over the side.

Nobody else pays attention. They're ladling new servings to guests or for themselves, with the rat bobbing right there in front of them in the liquid.

Do you tell everyone about Templeton? Would that humiliate the hostess, destroy the vibe, maybe snuff out those Bible conversations you overheard -- imperiling people’s souls? Would you just have to slink outside, unsure if you'd ever be invited again? From now on, all those people might just think of you as "Rat Guy" — the guy who ratted, the guy they associate with and somehow blame for the rat.

Welcome to our world. Because the Trump administration, and especially Elon Musk, are accomplishing amazing things every day. They're smoking out corruption so foul, perversions so dark, in the very bowels of government that The Stream can't reprint all the filthy details. Every day The Brew bubbles over with happy news. Liberal tears are flowing like rain, and we feel like Noah safe in the Ark, listening to all the pairs of friendly animals barking and mooing.

But we can't look away from Templeton. And we simply have to say something.

Is IVF the New COVID?

Donald Trump's endorsement of federal support for in vitro fertilization and Elon Musk's public, enthusiastic use of that technology are contaminating the punch. It's not just some little moral quibble which we as purist pro-lifers and overscrupulous Catholics insist on raising here to spoil the fun. Rather, it's a weaponized virus, cooked up in a government lab like COVID-19, which if unchecked will devastate our future in ways we can't even imagine -- though novelists such as Aldous Huxley offered hints: eugenic manipulation to create “super” children, and conversely to form lower-IQ, compliant manual laborers.

We understand the motives here. Millions of women throughout the West have been pressured by feminist messaging, misled by their physicians, and held back by pressures both economic and cultural from bearing the children God meant for them. They postponed marriage for dating, and even in marriage put off having babies until -- thanks to the biology God gave us and saw was good -- they're much less fertile. The children their husbands sire are much more likely to have autism. (Oldster sperm and eggs, like gray-haired football players and cheerleaders, simply aren't what they used to be.)

Thousands of Americans doubtless struggle with fertility for other reasons we'll never discover because, instead of addressing root causes, we're reaching for easy solutions. Watch newly baptized convert, and former Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., running mate, Nichole Shanahan explain the short-sightedness of using the IVF sledgehammer on women’s delicate reproductive health:

Women are sold IVF as a quick fix for fertility, but what aren't they told? Cancer risk, hormonal damage, and no long-term health tracking. I know how sensitive this is--I'm affected too. But ignoring the truth leads to corporate control over reproduction and a Handmaid's Tale... pic.twitter.com/dOTLmP3ohl

-- Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) February 27, 2025

Thousands of Americans are answering the long-muffled, God-given instinct by trying to become parents. That's at heart a healthy thing. And medical science is offering them what sounds like an easy, pragmatic answer: Just as plastic surgery can counter the cosmetic side effects of aging, in-vitro fertilization can overcome the age-imposed hurdles to fertility. That's a highly profitable thing. Put those two things together and what do you get? A president who ran as pro-life endorsing IVF, with all its frozen warehouses full of discarded embryos whose life began at conception.

As of now, there some 600,000 such children are sitting in deep freeze across the U.S. already, with no legal protections for them whatsoever. They have fewer rights than chickens in farms. 

It Started with Compassion and Empathy

That doesn't make Trump a hypocrite or his supporters a bunch of phonies. In fact, Trump's stance reminds us of a very good man from the past, the Franciscan friar Bartolomeo de las Casas (1484-1566).

Sent from Spain to preach to the Indians whom the conquistadors had just conquered, that friar was rightly horrified to see those helpless people being turned into slaves. The Spaniards had sought out the Indies in part to counter the rise of militant Islam. Instead they found two whole continents which might be teeming with gold and silver. So even as they claimed to be spreading the Gospel and really were fighting the Ottomans, the Spaniards started forcing the Indians to work as slaves in the mines to fill Spain's treasure ships. And those Indians were dying by the thousands.

Father de las Casas was outraged, and spoke up with passionate eloquence against the enslavement of the natives. Many churchmen, and even the Spanish monarchs, found his arguments convincing. These pagans had done nothing to merit being conquered and enslaved. Their abuse at the hands of conquistadors was making the Gospel seem hollow and slowing down their conversion.

The Spanish Crown passed edicts forbidding mass enslavement -- to the outrage of their land-grabbing colonists. How else would they dig out the silver and gold Spain needed to fight off the Muslim conquest (and slave raids) all through the Mediterranean?

Here’s an Easy Answer. What Could Go Wrong?

That's when de las Casas proposed in-vitro fertilization. (No, not exactly.) Instead, he made a similar moral compromise: He pointed to the fact that Arab slave traders were already selling many thousands of African slaves. Those people were already captured, had already lost their freedom. Surely it was better to simply buy them and put them to work than to impose fresh slavery on the free American Indians.

And Spain listened. Then Portugal. They both turned to the Arab slavers who preyed on west Africa, where local chieftains routinely captured and sold many thousands from rival tribes. Soon the Dutch, then the British, became the slave trade's best customers.

It would take 300 years for that trade to be outlawed, and other 50 years for slavery to end across the Americas.

All the cruelties of slavery, the deaths of the Civil War, the scandal of segregation and racial tensions right up through today stem in part from the well-meaning, pragmatic solution proposed by a kind-hearted Christian pastor.

What Elon Did, and What It Did to His Kid

Okay, okay, we can already hear people saying: What if we were to better regulate IVF and ban the production of "extra" embryos?

It's not clear that such a targeted use of IVF is even technically possible; mass production of embryos, then the selection of just a few, seems to be essential to the process. But for the sake of argument, let’s just ask: What if it were? What if IVF is practiced more ethically, without all the discarded babies locked in technological limbo?

There are other dark possibilities beyond the callous waste of embryonic life. And they're highlighted by the actions of a man we mostly admire, Elon Musk. In a brilliant new column, ex-gay Christian author Joseph Sciambra explores the tragic background of the son whom Musk says he "lost" to transgender ideology. Please, please, go read it in full. We'll quote the critical passages, though:

I recently read a series of incredibly poignant and heartbreaking posts on the social media site Threads, which were written by Vivian Jenna Wilson… I can sense the anger and frustration throughout the posts that were directed towards the father. At one point, Vivian wrote: ‘He doesn't know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn't there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed...’ The initial post has garnered over 40,000 likes. Why? Probably because Vivian is the son of Elon Musk and his first wife Justine Wilson.

Born in 2004, along with twin brother Griffin, Vivian was once named Xavier. Although born male, Vivian now identifies as a female and on April 18, 2022 -- one day after turning 18 years old, he legally changed his name and gender in my home state of California. At the time, Vivian stated: ‘I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.’ Vivian's parents divorced in 2008.

In addition to Vivian and Griffin, who were conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF), Elon Musk also fathered a set of triplets, also through IVF, with his first wife. He then procreated three children with the Canadian musician Grimes, one who was born using a surrogate. Recently, Musk purportedly sired his 13th child with social media influencer Ashley St. Clair.

Do Four-Year-Olds Go Woke?

In the column, Sciambra unpacks Musk’s rage at transgender ideology. Musk thinks that this evil worldview took Xavier (whom Musk believes was simply “born gay”) and ruined his life by convincing him he was “really” a woman:

[I]n his interview with [Jordan] Peterson, Musk blamed the ‘woke mind virus’ for his son's condition, and during a separate interview, he blamed ‘communism.’ But how is a 4-year-old boy being influenced by the woke mind virus and communism? He isn't. Though he is deeply affected by the absence of his father. Musk blames everyone except himself. But I've seen it hundreds of times, some people would rather believe that their son was ‘born gay,’ or even born in the wrong body, rather than admit to themselves that they were neglectful or abusive parents.

Do we want a world in which men with the means can father large numbers of children with different women they’ve never even met, much less married, via test tubes and petri dishes? Do we want political leaders who act this way? Isn’t transgender ideology an outgrowth of the same anti-natural, inhuman, ungodly worldview that underpins IVF?

And aren’t the embryos who are being created, frozen, traded, and even sold the commodities in a postmodern slave trade?

Yeah, we’ll pass on that glass of punch, thanks. We’re just not feeling thirsty. 

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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