Octuplets

Last week a story hit the news of a lady who gave birth to eight, yes eight babies. At the time the mother refused to give any information and the details were sketchy. Most people reacted, “How nice, eight babies.” Now we are getting “the rest of the story.” The mother now has 14 children, all conceived by in vitro fertilization. She is a single mother and received the sperm from a donor, which brings up the whole question of bio-ethics.

On one hand, in vitro fertilization might seem a wonderful medical breakthrough for a married couple where the mother is unable to conceive through the normal process. It allows a childless couple to enjoy the gift of parenthood. On the other hand, in a world of Godless ethics the whole process is wrong. When a couple chooses to go this route the normal procedure is to harvest a number of eggs, fertilize them with the father’s sperm, and freeze the embryos. The problem lies in what to do with the unused embryos – more properly referred to as “children.” To destroy them is abortion – more properly referred to as “murder.” And then, in a world of Godless ethics, what is to prevent a single mother from giving birth to 14 children without a husband or a lesbian couple from bringing a child into their sinful relationship.

These are important issues. In a Godless world many of these medical and biological breakthroughs have no gatekeepers. If you cast away the Bible as God’s rule of moral behavior there is no end to the perversion that the human mind might invent. Without this standard the ethical debate has no basis of truth. “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Oh God, save us from the folly of our own devices.