Is the Abortion Debate Obsolete? Q+A with Liza Mundy

The complex ethical issues of assisted reproduction explored in reporter Liza Mundy’s new book, Everything Conceivable, (and reviewed earlier this week on this site) can make the abortion debate look outdated. ReligionWriter called up Mundy to discuss the new meanings of “reproductive choice,” the voice of religious leaders in answering these ethical questions, and what the U.S. can learn from the U.K. about encouraging public debate on reproductive technology.

ReligionWriter: What drew you to the topic of fertility medicine?

Liza Mundy: I came of age in the early 1980s, when reproductive rights was an almost defining ideological issue. The word “choice” really had one meaning: your position on what a woman could do with an unwanted pregnancy. I’ve written all my career about reproductive politics, including what turned out to be a controversial article about two deaf lesbian women seeking a deaf sperm donor, which introduced me to the field of bioethics. Then I wrote about how low-income people experience infertility in 2003 and learned how common infertility is and how hard people will work to have a child.

After that article I was having lunch with a reporter who was pregnant with IVF twins, and it was at that moment I realized the menu of reproductive choices had expanded enormously since I was in college. When you embark on infertility treatment, you face hard choices that scramble whatever preconceived notions you might had about the notion of choice.

RW: Do the questions raised by assisted reproduction make the abortion debate obsolete?

Mundy: I don’t think it will ever be obsolete in this country. In

England, people have managed to move past it. We don’t seem to be able to do that. As one reviewer of my book in England put it, the story has become “how the battle to achieve freedom to control conception gave way to a battle to conceive.”

RW: In your book, you suggest that some infertility doctors hide, in some sense, behind the mantle of “reproductive choice.”

Mundy: Of course there is a lot of variation among these doctors; some are very scrupulous, others less so. But yes, some have co-opted the concept of choice to justify making everything available, and leaving up to the patient important decisions like how many embryos to transfer [to the womb in an IVF cycle.]

RW: So what does the word “choice” mean now in the reproductive context?

Mundy: The concept is so widespread as to be meaningless. There was one moment during my reporting, when the director of a pro-life-oriented group called Snowflakes, which arranges embryo adoptions, talked about providing people with “as many choices as possible.” It was a beautiful example of how the pro-life and pro-choice positions become so intermingled on these issues.

RW: When you interviewed people who were facing hard choices — about whether to reduce a multiple pregnancy, for example, or a tell a child he or she was the result of gamete donation — did you find that many consulted with their religious traditions or leaders?

Mundy: I was at one fertility clinic, waiting to speak with a doctor, and I saw a woman, who was Catholic, cancel her appointment after talking with her priest, who advised her against being treated with fertility drugs. Of course the Catholic Church has more formal guidelines [on assisted reproduction technology] than most; they oppose IVF from the start as being unnatural and abrogating the realm of God.

I also talked to pastors who said in the course of their work people confide in them about the grief of experiencing lifelong infertility.

RW: In your book you talk with infertility doctors, patients, bioethicists and others who have thought deeply about the ethical issues of fertility medicine, but religious figures don’t appear much. Why is this? Are there no religious leaders up-to-date enough that they would have made an interesting interview?

 

Mundy: Yes, I would say so. I didn’t run across anyone who jumped out at me. A lot of official church bodies are being forced to grapple with reproductive technology now, most evidently in the area of stem cell research. They are trying to figure out how to think about the embryo, and some churches have weighed in.

RW: You describe how many couples are almost paralyzed by the question of what to do with their frozen embryos. If religious organizations all issued clear moral guidelines, would that help people make these tough decisions?

Mundy: People don’t always follow dictates of their church of course. The question is made more difficult because it’s so hard to donate embryos for research right now.

When patients go through this process, they become very attached to the embryos. It’s a very personal thing. So even if your church says it’s okay [to allow embryos to "lapse" or be donated for research or adoption,] that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy or it feels okay to you.

RW: Do you see a parallel here with descriptions of pro-life people who have, for whatever reason, found themselves seeking abortions? That personal experience can be so powerful as to override even religious belief?

Mundy: That’s right. What makes it so hard for people is that many if not all religions place a high value on family and family life. The Catholic Church might say IVF is wrong, but the church and the culture are simultaneously saying children are the greatest blessing. Those would be confusing messages to process.

I also talked to people who encountered religious prejudice. One woman used fertility drugs and conceived quadruplets, one of whom died and the other three of whom were disabled. She said sometimes when she went forth into her Texas community, people would say, “You got what you asked for in defying the will of God, because God intended you to be infertile.”

RW: Was there ever a moment in your reporting when you thought, “Maybe the Catholic Church is on to something in prohibiting IVF. Maybe we never should have let the genie out of the bottle?”

Mundy: No. What struck me most were the people who said, “No matter how hard it was, it was all worth it.” I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about it. There were certainly people, particularly with multiples, who said, “If I could go back and do it over again, I would do it differently.” But I do think it’s a good thing that three million children now exist who would not have existed if it were not for the science. I was trying to highlight the difficult choices, but I didn’t have the sensation that all of this is wrong or misguided.

RW: In one of your chapter titles, you call selective reduction the “best-kept secret” of reproductive technology. Why hasn’t the issue received more public attention?

Mundy: It’s not something people like to talk about it, if they’ve had a selective reduction. Unlike abortion, there are not strong advocacy groups mobilized on either side. The fertility industry really doesn’t want people knowing how often this occurs, and most of the doctors who perform it probably aren’t going to let a reporter spend time with them. But there is no shortage of medical literature about it. Just go onto Pub Med and type in “selective reduction” or “multi-fetal pregnancy reduction.”

RW: Does it strike you as odd how some fertility-related ethical issues — like partial-birth abortion for example — grab headlines, but other equally vexing issues — like selective reduction — don’t?

Mundy: It tends to come up when someone has, say, octuplets, or other high-order multiples, and it’s on the evening news. Sometimes the couple says, “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do selective reduction.”

RW: Out of the many issues you discuss in the book, are there one or two you think are likely to become hot-button debates in the next few years?

Mundy: In this country, a lot of these debates are going to be carried out in state legislatures, because that’s where family law is made. Connecticut, for example, has voted for insurance coverage for IVF, and insurance companies can therefore limit the number of embryos transferred in IVF.

In the United Kingdom, there is a government agency to regulate assisted reproduction, and its decisions are often met with outcry and debate. You see assisted reproduction issues on the front pages of the newspapers there all the time. It’s just part of the public discourse. Whether or not people [in the U.K.] have been through fertility treatment themselves, everybody thinks they have a stake in these moral debates.

In the U.S. because [infertility treatment] is a private, profit-making branch of medicine, and it’s not regulated or funded in any high-profile way that would provoke an outcry, I don’t know whether the public discussion is ever going to crystallize. But something could always percolate up. Who knew that one of the first questions President Bush was going to have to deal with when he took office was federal funding for stem-cell research?

RW: So does the U.K. have it right?

Mundy: They have a more coherent policy than we do.

RW: Is that because they have a state-run health care system?

Mundy: After IVF first succeeded, in England, with the birth of Louise Brown, there were scientists who organized themselves and created charitable foundations to bring some coherence to the debate. They made a concerted effort to educate Members of Parliament, literally inviting them to look down microscopes at embryos. As one scientist told me, “That did a lot to persuade people that we weren’t making Frankensteins in the basement.” They made an effort to move the issue forward, and that doesn’t seem to have happened in this country.

 

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