 How many of you remember last fall there was a Christian university president where he preached in chapel about the need to be obedient followers of Christ and a student went to him afterward and said, I didn't feel safe with what you said. That felt threatening to me. An Everett Piper looked at this kid and said, this is a university, not a daycare center, get over it. And it went national. In fact, it went worldwide. That is where we teach this. And what it is, the course, here's the funny thing, it's actually already begun, because you start your reading before you show up. You show up for five days in July and you get to spend five days with me going over and getting into pro-life apologetics at a very deep level. We look at the toughest thinkers on the other side. We look at Michael Tuley, Peter Singer, David Boonen, Jeff McMahon, we go through the big guys. Not your street activists, the toughest the other side has. And we teach you how to engage those who think that way. The reading involves the textbook that's on the back table there, the case for life. It involves reading each chapter and doing the review questions. You write a final paper at the end of the course and then you take a midterm exam and read a couple other small books. It's a little bit of work, but it's totally doable. Last year, we had 14 crisis pregnancy center directors take the course, none of whom had ever taken apologetics before, none of whom had ever spoken publicly before. Are you ready? I know people exaggerate, they catch a fish this big and they tell you it's this big. I'm gonna be truthful with you. Not that I haven't already. 14 out of 14 have now spoken publicly. One of them taught a session that should have been assigned to me at the Heartbeat Conference in Atlanta in March. So one of my students knocked me off the podium and took my spot. And I'm dealing with envy. No, quite frankly, I'm thrilled. I would invite you if you are interested in taking that course, get this. Here's the cost, 750 clams. And by the way, if you wanna stay for the next week, you get pro-life speech and debate with my friend Mark Newman, who is the finest speech coach in the country. If you went to the score seminar here in Orlando, which is coming soon, you would spend $3,000 for their upper tier training, 750 bucks. And you get to learn from Mark, who I consider to be the best speech guy around. He's the guy that I have review my stuff and he rakes me over the coals and I get better because of it. So this is open to you. If you're interested, I'll have the cards up here. All right, moving along, into a topic that you don't hear discussed a lot in church and why I'm really thrilled this church is taking it on. And that is the question of what do we do with couples that really wanna have children but haven't been able to? And I mentioned last night that I know a couple who the wife has been through cancer and she told me the pain of infertility was way worse than going through cancer. The emotional pain of walking through that was so intense and the challenges it posed for their marriage and their family, their parents, everyone else, their church. She said, people have no idea the pain of that. They have no idea what it's like to sit there in church at Mother's Day and watch all these people celebrating. And there you are dealing with this. Father's Day, for him, it's little league time. Every time you drive past a park, you're not out there because you wouldn't be allowed to be. You see, this is real pain. And in the body of Christ, sometimes we aren't always the most helpful in the things we say to people. So what I'm going to try to do today is deal with reproductive technologies, meaning those technologies that help infertile couples have children of their own. They don't always work, but we're going to look at them. I want to look at them three ways. I want to look at them theologically. I want to look at them in terms of ethics and I want to look at them pastorally as well. How do we look at this? And we'll use that same framework when we come back from lunch and we deal with end of life issues that hopefully won't be provoked by what you ate at lunch. That was a joke, but anyway, and it died. How do we approach this very vexing problem of couples who want to have children but haven't been able to? So let's look at this and see what we can come up with. In 1986, there was an unbelievable case that some of you may remember if you're old enough to remember it. It was called the baby M case. What happened was there was a couple, the Stearns, who contracted with this woman named Mary Beth Whitehead. Mrs. Stearn could not have children. So they took Mr. Stearn's sperm and they took Mary Beth Whitehead and they inserted his sperm via a catheter, not through sex. They inserted his sperm into her. She then conceived and the agreement was that she would give the child up at the end of the pregnancy and she would receive in response all medical care and $20,000 cash. When she gave birth, she changed her mind. Now keep in mind she is the genetic mother of that child and the contract specified that she was to conceive this child for the express purpose of giving over her rights to her own child to the adopting couple, in this case, the Stearns. Everybody with me on this mess here? So when she gave birth, she fled to Florida. She had been in New Jersey and finally federal agents located her, brought her back to New Jersey. A lower court in New Jersey stripped her of all rights and said, the contract's a contract, too bad. Now keep in mind, this is her genetic child. The New Jersey Supreme Court then revisited this, overturned the lower court's decision and granted her visitation rights, not full custody, but visitation rights. Do you start to see the mess that reproductive technologies can play in our culture today? Despite that, I'm not going to argue that they're always wrong. In fact, I'm going to make a case that they can be okay in certain cases, but we've got to understand what the biblical fence posts might be that we need to wrap around these technologies. Just to give you an idea of what's out there and what's going on, I just went online, pulled down some news articles. Here's what's going on currently. All right, we got a couple that wants a perfect designer child. So here's what they do. They run an ad in college newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. We want a five foot 10 blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 1400 on the SAT, you donate your egg, we pay you 50 grand for a successful conception. Unreal. I mean literally, manufacture a kid according to your own personal grid. We've got a lesbian couple that wants to have a child of their own, so here's what they're doing. They're taking the egg of the one woman, they're having it fertilized by an anonymous donor, and then they're implanting the egg in the body of the other woman who will be the gestating mother who gives birth. We got a married couple who uses in vitro fertilization, that's where conception takes place in the test tube. We'll talk about that in just a moment. They create 10 embryos, 10. They then screen them all for genetic defects. They find four with defects and destroy them immediately. They implant the healthy six into the mother's uterus. In this case, all six take. So then they go in and destroy another four, leaving them the two they want. It gets even more interesting. A 60-year-old British woman is fighting the courts to use her dead daughter's frozen eggs so she can act as a surrogate mother. So the daughter's eggs, the daughter died, her eggs are on ice, they're frozen. She wants donor sperm to fertilize those eggs, put them in her body and be literally the mother, I mean literally these kids would be gestating inside their grandmother. That's the wacky world of reproductive technologies that we find ourselves in today as Christians. Let me just give you an overview of the basic types of reproductive technology so you can know what they are and what we're looking at here. The first is what we would call intrauterine insemination or IUI. And that's where we take the husband's sperm or it could be donor sperm. And through a catheter, we insert it into the woman's uterus in hopes of making pregnancy happen. Now this really isn't, it's not an expensive treatment and it's fairly non-controversial except for this. Often in conjunction with the treatment, the woman will take high doses of hormone drugs to stimulate multiple egg production. And then we're gonna deliver sperm into that environment. We have no idea how many eggs are going to become embryos. None, we have no idea. Which means we have a huge risk of multiples. Meaning multiple pregnancies that now all of a sudden the couple doesn't want all these or the woman's body can't handle. And so now they're going to go in and selectively reduce meaning abort the pregnancies that they don't want. The technology itself is not evil but when combined with those high fertility drugs produces some real problems. The other technology is egg donation. This is where a woman takes high hormone drugs to stimulate egg production. She then has surgery to remove the eggs in a single cycle that are then sold or donated to other couples. Then you have a technology known as gift which stands for gamut interphallopian tube transfer. And here's what that means, all these terms. We take sperm, we take egg and we extract both of them. We then put them together back inside the woman's body inside the fallopian tube close to each other where there's a better chance that conception will happen. So we remove sperm, we remove egg. We don't put them together in a test tube. We put them together inside the mother's body but we put them in close proximity to each other so we have a chance at conception happening. Again, on the face of it, it's hard to say that that seems evil or somehow immoral. Then we get to the one that gets really crazy, in vitro fertilization. This is where we take the egg from the woman, the sperm from the father and we don't combine them in the woman's body, we combine them in a test tube. And because the treatment and the egg donation process is very expensive, the best way to do this is to make sure that the mother takes a lot of fertility drugs to release a lot of eggs which are surgically extracted but here's where the rub comes in. The freezing techniques for keeping those eggs are difficult here in the States. We can freeze them, we don't do a very good job of thawing them out. So here's the treatment of choice. As soon as those eggs are harvested via surgery, they are immediately fertilized. You now have embryos and those embryos are now on ice. Are you starting to see where we could start to run into some problems here? What happens if the first round of fertility treatments using IVF in vitro fertilization, what happens if they work? The woman is suddenly pregnant with two kids, she doesn't want any more but now she's got 14 embryos on ice. And a few short years later, she's at the end of her reproductive career. And there's 14 embryos on ice. What now? By the way, one of the most, I was totally caught off guard by this. When I first started doing pro-life work, this is probably, well it wasn't, now it wasn't immediately after I started but I'd say 20 years ago or so, I went to a meeting where there were all these parents who had leftover embryos and I don't know how I got called in on this but they wanted someone to come in and kind of just talk to them. They were all Christian couples, all of them in their 40s, all of them with at least four embryos on ice. And there was a California highway patrolman there with arms bigger than my legs, bawling, not knowing what he should do and wondering if they had made the right decision. So this poses some problems. There is another treatment that's called ZIFT. You gotta love this, gift, ZIFT. ZIFT has to do with zygote interphallopian transfer. That's where we take sperm and egg. We put them together in the test tube just like IVF only we don't put the developing child in the uterus. We put it directly in the fallopian tube so it can travel down naturally just like a normal pregnancy would. So those are your major technologies that are in play. You've also got surrogacy and there's two types of surrogates. You've got what are known as genetic surrogates like in the baby M case where the mother who's carrying the child donates the egg and the womb. She is the genetic mother and she is also the mother who will give birth. Then you have gestational surrogates who carry the child but have no biological relationship to the child. People kind of crudely call this wombs for rent and it's a big business, believe it or not. So those are your kinds of surrogacies that are in play and so what am I gonna argue through all of this? Here's my thesis. Reproductive technologies are not wrong in and of themselves. However, and it's a big however, they must be subjected to biblical fence posts that we draw around them to make sure they're not used immorally. So we'll look at what those fence posts are in just a moment, but that's the thesis. Reproductive technologies, I don't believe we should say they're all wrong. I don't think you can tell an infertile couple or should tell an infertile couple too bad, deal with it. There's nothing you can do biblically. I don't think that holds up to what we're going to see from what we're going to look at here. I believe that we have things to do. So what's the first fence post? I said there were fence posts. It's what we talked about last night, the status of the embryo. If a reproductive technology is going to result in the death of the embryo or the discarding of embryos or put at risk the lives of embryos, we as Christians need to avoid that technology. For example, if a couple were using interuterine insemination where we take the husband's sperm and we inject it via a catheter into the wife's womb to try to conceive pregnancy, it's fine to do that, but I'll tell you where you run into trouble. If you've got her on hormone pills to produce multiple egg releases and you don't know how many embryos are gonna take and suddenly she's got six in there and now the doctors say we gotta go in there and take four out or she's not gonna make it. At that point killing those embryos is the moral equivalent of what? Abortion, you're intentionally killing an innocent human being. So your use of the reproductive technology has to have in mind the status of the unborn. What does the Bible teach us that we looked at last night? Well, here's what it teaches us. All humans have value because they bear the image of God. Because they bear the image of God, the shedding of innocent blood is strictly forbidden. Exodus 23.7 teaches this, Proverbs 6 teaches this, Matthew 5.21 teaches this. The science of embryology is clear beyond all doubt that the unborn are human beings, which means the commands against shedding innocent blood apply to the unborn just like they do everybody else. There's your biblical case. We already know from science the unborn are distinct living human beings. We dealt with that in detail last night and you're going to get notes and those of you that are buying books, you're going to get a whole bunch of them that will help you like that. But there are some objections. You'll hear doctors raise. I've actually heard doctors' racies and here's what they say to couples who are using reproductive technologies worried about excess embryos and the doctor will come off and say something like this. Well, this is just a clump of cells. You don't need to worry about this until implantation really takes hold. We're dealing with a clump of cells. This is completely false. And let me help you understand this. A little bit of a crude illustration. Let's suppose that through those doors right there, a doctor wheeled in a corpse that had been dead 10 hours. Would there still be live cells on the corpse? Lots of them. In fact, up to weeks later, do you have live cells? The corpse has live cells. How come the corpse is dead and you're not? You both have live cells. So why do we say the corpse is history and you're not? Here's why. In the corpse, there has been an irreversible breakdown of the body's ability to function as a coordinated whole. The cells are there, but they're no longer talking to each other. Where in your case, every cell in your body is working in coordination with every other cell for your overall life and health. In the corpse, there's been an utter breakdown of that. Mere clumps of cells can be on the corpse. An embryo is never just a mere clump of cells. And here's why. It's functioning as a living entity. Corpse don't function as living entities. Is everybody with me on the difference between the two? Embryos are never mere clumps of cells. I've seen doctors or heard people tell me their doctor told them, well, what's the big deal? Sperm and egg are alive. Okay, this is a confusion of parts and holes. Remember last night when I had you pinch skin off your hand, those of you that were here? And I made the distinction that these cells on the back of your hand are merely part of a larger human being you. They are not distinct whole human beings the way you were when you were an embryo, the way I was when I was an embryo. The same is true with sperm and egg. Sperm and egg have living cellular material, but guess what? Sperm and egg die in the act of fertilization. They die. They surrender their constituents into the makeup of a new living entity, the zygote. That's why, by the way, I use the term only because it's in the literature, but it's really not precise to use it. There's no such thing as a fertilized egg. Embryos are not fertilized egg because sperm and egg die in the act of fertilization, whether that happens in a test tube or naturally. So to say that sperm and egg are the same as a living embryo is simply false. And then the one that just gets me, and I cannot believe given our history you still hear this, well that embryo doesn't look like us. Last month, we celebrated, not celebrated, we marked the 100 year anniversary of the death of Audubanga. You may not have heard of Audubanga. Audubanga was brought over from the jungles of Africa by a wealthy American businessman in 1904. And in 1906, he took Audubanga, an African pygmy, and put him in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoological Gardens with a big sign over the cage that said the missing link, where he encouraged Audubanga to play with a monkey. Millions came to view this display. And the argument was he doesn't look like us. He looks like the ape. In fact, the most authoritative argument or article on the subject is entitled The Man in the Zoo. And this so troubled Audubanga that in 1916, he took a gun and shot himself. All because people decided he didn't look like one of us. Do we really wanna trace the humanity or rather the inhumanity we've shown simply because people don't look like we think they ought to look like? This is a very dangerous precedent and yet physicians who have no more authority to make philosophical judgments than you and me are making these kinds of claims and they are dangerous and they are deeply troubling. All right, fence post number two, the gift of common grace. Is medical technology, would you say generally something we celebrate as a blessing? Yes. And God, this is what we call common grace, God gives to mankind revelations that help them reverse the entrance of sin into the world. Not theologically reverse it, just the impact, the physical impact, disease. So we learn about medicine. He gives us knowledge. We learn about how to fight diseases and we learn what starts them and how to counter them. Is infertility an effect of the fall? Yeah. So why wouldn't it be the case that things we learn about treating it wouldn't be seen in a general sense as God's common grace to us? Now that doesn't mean there aren't rules but I'm just saying in principle, I don't know why we would view this much different than we would knowledge God gives us to fight kidney disease or cancer or any of the other things. Now there will be some objections. Let me give you one in particular. It's the Roman Catholic doctrine objection. Roman Catholic teaching when it comes to reproductive technologies and marital sex in general goes like this. Marriage is a sacrament and the act of marriage, the sexual union of man and woman must always have two components present, the unitive and the procreative. What they mean is that when married couples come together they do so for the sake of unity but they must also be open to procreation. Even if physically it's not possible they don't do anything that would prohibit procreation. The unitive and the procreative must be equally present in every act of marital love and if they're not equally represented there's a structural act or a structural break in the act of marriage that the church considers immoral. Now that does not mean Catholics and this is a good thing to keep in mind when you talk to your Catholic friends. That doesn't mean they oppose all reproductive technologies, they don't. Here's the distinction they draw. They are fine with reproductive technologies that assist normal intercourse toward procreation but they oppose anything that replaces normal intercourse. Do you see that distinction? So for example Catholics in principle are not opposed to gift where we take sperm and egg, we remove them from the man and woman and we put them together inside the woman's body. Conception is still taking place inside the woman's body so in principle they wouldn't oppose that provided the sperm and the egg were collected within the act of marital love, okay? They also would not be opposed in principle to interuterine insemination where via catheter deliver it provided again that the elements were collected within the act of marital love. Where they do draw a line is in vitro fertilization because now we're replacing normal marital love with a technology and Catholic theology says no. I will say this without getting any further along on this. I don't think biblically and I'll let pastor correct me if he wants to. I don't think biblically the Catholic model holds up and I'll tell you why. I think scripture celebrates marital love as a good in and of itself. I think that's Paul's point in 1 Corinthians 7. I think that's the point of songs. It's marital love being celebrated as God's gift as a good thing, as something not to be ashamed of, as something God himself rejoices in and the unitive and procreative aspects don't have to be equally present. In fact I actually think the Bible puts a greater emphasis on the unitive and the children are the fruit of that union. That's how I view it. I'm open to hearing I'm wrong, I'm not trying to build a doctrine on that but that's how I see it. But Roman Catholic teaching is going to have a problem with any technology that replaces normal intercourse. All right, fence post number three. And this is one where right now our culture has just gone off the deep end. Procreation should happen in a stable union of one man and one woman in marriage. Let's think for a moment about the creation mandate God gave to Adam and Eve. Remember, be fruitful and multiply? He told that to who? One man, one woman. Now right away, well yeah but in the Bible there's all kinds of polygamous relationships even the patriarchs had numerous wives. Yeah, they did. Yeah, you're gonna find polygamy permitted. But let me ask you this. Every time Jesus, every time the apostles teach on marriage where do they point to? The polygamous prophets and kings or to the creation account? Creation account. For this reason a man shall leave his mother and father. They shall join, become one flesh. They're talking the creation account of Genesis 4, aren't they? This is not, this is not at all a justification for marriage being whatever we want because the Old Testament allowed polygamy. God through Jesus, through the apostles points to the man and woman, one man, one woman's stable marriage. That's where procreation is to happen. That's where it's to happen. And by the way the sociological data on this is clear and incontrovertible. Children raised in a home with a mom and dad do astronomically better than those that don't. I've looked at the details and when I was prepping for this I even went to the Brookings Institute. This is not a right wing group, this is left. And even the Brookings Institute made a point to cite a study that said the following. It said, the breakdown of marriage harms society as a whole. The Brookings Institution found that 229 billion in welfare spending between 1970 and 1996 was directly attributed to the breakdown of the marriage culture and the resulting social ills that followed from it, poverty, crime, teen pregnancy and drug use all followed from the breakdown of that culture. This isn't the Family Research Council. This is the Brookings Institute saying this. Maggie Gallagher puts it well. She said, sex makes babies, society needs babies and babies deserve mothers and fathers. That's solid stuff. Creation, procreation happens within a stable one man, one woman marriage. Fourth fence post, again, status of the unborn, common grace, procreation within marriage. Now we come to adoption as a rescue mission. If we are believers in Jesus Christ we should be very pro adoption. Let's put the theological framework around this. The gospel is not only that Jesus dies for your sin and because of that God declares you justified. That's great, but that's not the end of it. We also get transferred from one kingdom to another. We get transferred from our status as dead spiritually dead people into spiritually alive children of God who've been adopted into his family. I mean, think about who God adopts. He doesn't adopt people who kind of just look like their hair wasn't that good that day. He adopts people who were so rebellious they're spiritually dead and he has to make them alive and then he adopts them and everybody God makes alive he adopts. Every last one, no exceptions. With that theological framework we should be pro adoption. And that means we view adoption the same way we view spiritual adoption. It's a rescue mission. The problem with reproductive technologies in some cases a child is created expressly for the purpose of giving him up for adoption. In normal adoption that's not what's happening. In normal adoption the child is already there the decision has already been made not to care for him and we come along as rescuing agents. Do you see the difference between the two? When reproductive technologies are used to create another human being for the express purpose of uprooting him from his natural mother and father and giving him to someone else that is an issue. But when we rescue a child who's already there that's another thing altogether. In fact as we look at our scriptures which you will get in your notes you're going to see passage after passage where God cares very deeply about justice for the weak and vulnerable. It's not an option. He cares very deeply about it. And that means no couple who is struggling with infertility should rule out adoption on the face of it. I'm not saying that's their only option. I am saying I don't think they should ever just say never in a billion years will that be the option we take. I think that's something they ought to consider being open to. All right. Fifth sense, but fence post. Trust in God's sovereignty. It would be very mean to say to a couple who are struggling with infertility. Too bad, trust God, grow up, read your Bible. We don't want to be saying that. However, if having a child of your own, a biological child of your own is so important to you that you have taken a good thing and made it an ultimate thing. Now we're talking idolatry. That's the essence of idolatry. We take good things and make them ultimate things. We are not entitled as believers or as a culture to procreate without any limits. We're not entitled to that. And there does come a biblical principle of resting in the contentment that God provides for us. Again, that doesn't mean a couple can't try anything, but it does mean if they're so desperate that they're willing to do anything to make it happen and cannot find any contentment outside of getting that child of their own that we are on dangerous turf. All right, fence post number six are just the regular things that go with reproductive technologies, what we just call the general moral concerns. Here they are. I'll just rattle through these and then we'll wrap up. The risk of multiples. Again, some of these technologies can result in multiple pregnancies and when they do, that's a problem. The risk of leftovers, the embryos we mentioned earlier that are leftover on ice. And then here's the one that I think we all need to think deeply about. The risk of treating children as commodities as opposed to gifts. Reproductive technologies change how we view children. By the way, all technology that we think is just neutral really isn't. Think about how television changed how we think and learn. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas did a debate at the Springfield County Fair in 1858. Douglas spoke for three hours, followed by Lincoln who spoke for three hours, followed by one hour rebuttals. We're talking eight hours a talk. Oh, and the audience was standing listening to this and they thought of it as entertainment. We would think of it as torture. Why could that audience follow a sophisticated debate with very deep and nested arguments, track it, follow it, and like it? Where today we wouldn't even understand what they're saying. And we would be checking our smartphones within five minutes. Why? Because, as Neil Postman points out, that was a book learning culture. A TV culture comes along and now our primary epistemology, the primary way we learn about the world, is through television. And television has put within each of us a now this mentality. Ever noticed that? You're watching the news. Today in Afghanistan, 500 civilians were blown up at a taco ria and now this. And we go to a commercial from Burger King. What does that do to our understanding of the world as a serious place? To where we could be talking about 500 dead people one minute and then we're gonna talk about tacos. Imagine reading a book and right in the middle of the paragraph and now a word about a big map. Would that strike you as odd? But isn't that what we get from media? Reproductive technologies are not neutral. They change how we think. They train us to think about children as products of our desire, not gifts we receive as they are. That's a problem. And that's why you get a couple that has 10 embryos. They screen them all for defects, destroy four, put six in, destroy another four to get the two they want. Comes right out of that kind of thinking. There's another issue here. This one, I'm gonna let you disagree with it because I'm not quite sure that I'm not communicating this as absolute certainty on my part, but I'm gonna tell you something I'm concerned about. Egg donation for a woman is no walk in the park. She has to take heavy fertility drugs. Then she has to undergo a surgery that is not risk free and it's painful. For the sole purpose of selling her eggs so someone can have a child they want. And here's the question, I just wanna throw it out there. Should we as Christians be asking our fellow image bearers to go through that kind of surgery just so someone else can get a commodity that they want? What they see as a commodity? That's one I'm wrestling with. That's one I'm wrestling with. Another moral concern has to do with donor participation. Say we got a couple, we have a husband and wife. They get donor sperm, donor egg, put them together in the test tube, then the wife carries the child term. She's the gestational mother, but neither parent is related to the child. Now some Christians have said that's adultery. No, it's not adultery. There's been no sex, no deceit, no nothing that goes with adultery. But here's the question. Though I can't point you to a scripture that says thou shalt not use third party elements, if the creation model is our model, if Jesus and the apostles point to the one man, one woman within marriage as the place for procreation to happen, and we're introducing third party elements, what do we make then of that creation model? Do you see this? So this is where as Christians, I think it's helpful to build a cumulative case and say I don't know that that's what we should be doing as Christians. I don't know if that's something we should do. I can't point you to a thou shalt not scripture, but I think on balance that's something to think about whether we ought to be doing that. Then there's the issue of surrogacy. Think about a mother who contributes the egg, contributes the womb, carries the child to term, her child, she then has to sign over adoptive rights to the other couple, the father whose sperm was used. She has to literally sign over her own child. Is that good for us as a society? Is that good for the children? Is it good for the parents? These are the kinds of things we have to think about as Christians. I'll wrap up and then we're gonna break for lunch. Just some guidelines for us on this whole idea of assisted technologies. Here's what I would say if we could just tidy this up. First of all, while all reproductive technologies are not wrong, Christian couples need to take personal responsibility for every human life that is created. That means every embryo, whether on ice or being implanted at that moment, the couple needs to take responsibility. So that means, as happened to a friend of mine, when they went through treatments to try to have children, they did not put 14 embryos on ice. They only, they got egg, sperm, they did IVF, but they only fertilized two because that's all she could carry. And they implanted those, it didn't work, and then they tried again and it was hugely expensive. It would have been a lot cheaper just to do a whole bunch and freeze them and then discard them later. But no, they couldn't do that because they're a pro-life couple. So they chose to spend a ton of money to try it twice so that they could take personal responsibility for any embryo that ensued. I think they did the right thing. Unfortunately, it did not work, so guess what they did? Did they despair? No, they went out and adopted two girls. They worked with a local crisis pregnancy center and they were able to adopt two girls. And they got a fiery redhead right now who is the ultimate Irish girl who certainly keeps their home humming. And the other girl is the quiet intellectual. It's quite the interesting thing to watch. But they went ahead and said, you know what? Then we're gonna move toward adoption. We're okay with that. They gave it a try. They didn't say, oh, woe is me. I can't try anything. They went ahead and tried it ethically, but then went ahead and moved toward adoption. Leftover embryos, those in storage, those have gotta be kept to a minimum. That means you don't wanna be like those couples that have 20 embryos left over. I would also say that when it comes to implanting these embryos, you don't implant any more than the wife can physically handle. And a doctor will help you make that assessment. So you don't wanna be that couple that puts six in knowing she can only handle two. And then finally, I think as Christians, we have to categorically rule out pre-screening therapies aimed at destroying human beings that don't match our model of perfection. I don't see any room in the gospel for pre-screening tests that have one purpose in mind, destroying human beings who don't measure up. Now having said all this, I wanna conclude it with something I think it's very important for us to do. It could be true that there are some people here today that your use of these technologies has not been what you know it should have been. And it may have been that there were embryos discarded or donated for research or I don't know, maybe not, but just in case I wanna remind us of something that we talked about last night. If that's true, the solution for you today is not guilt, it's not an excuse, it's an exchange of taking Christ's righteousness for your sinfulness. And you know what else I'm gonna say? Given there aren't a lot of churches like yours that take on these issues, is it any surprise Christians wouldn't be well-informed and could be very capable of making mistakes that had they had better information, they might've made a better decision? So this isn't about pointing a finger at anybody, but it's moving forward, we as Christians beginning to think biblically and strategically about these issues so that we can not only inform the world out there, but the people in our own pews about what the biblical standard should be for this.