INDIANAPOLIS--The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., on Wednesday voted to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization, signaling the campaign by evangelicals against abortion is widening to include the popular fertility treatment.
Earlier at its annual meeting, a proposed amendment to the church's constitution that would have banned women as pastors fell just short of the two-thirds majority vote it needed to pass.
In its vote against in vitro fertilization, or IVF, the Southern Baptists said the process routinely creates more embryos than can be implanted and that leads to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos, which the church considers human life. IVF involves combining eggs and sperm in a laboratory dish to create an embryo.
The move is the latest sign that U.S. evangelicals - a powerful voting bloc that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in the 2016 presidential election - are broadening their anti-abortion efforts, two years after successfully helping to overturn Roe v. Wade. Trump's challenger for the Nov. 5 election - President Joe Biden - in turn has made access to abortion, contraception and fertility treatments a centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that reproductive rights are at risk if Trump were to be re-elected.
The Southern Baptist Convention includes 50,000 churches and over 14 million faithful and has become a political force in recent decades. The IVF resolution before the thousands of leaders gathered in Indianapolis noted the pain infertile couples encounter but said that "not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified."
Before the IVF vote, some Baptist leaders spoke about their own experiences with IVF and urged a softening of the resolution's language to put less emphasis on the frozen embryos involved in the medical process.
Daniel Taylor, a deacon with Charity Baptist Church in Paris, Michigan, spoke emotionally about his godson, who was born through IVF. "Because of him, I thank God for IVF," Taylor said.
He added that the IVF resolution "would castigate and condemn the entirely moral and ethical actions" of parents seeking to have a child through IVF.
The resolution recommended members use alternative fertility therapies or adopt frozen embryos. The resolution called on "Southern Baptists to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation."
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children. The ruling arose from lawsuits by three families against Alabama fertility procedure providers accused of failing to properly safeguard frozen embryos, resulting in their destruction when a patient improperly accessed them.
The court ruling was based on an amendment to the Alabama state constitution approved by voters in 2018 that made it official policy to uphold "the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children." The court ruling left unclear how to legally store, transport and use embryos.
