Fifteen years ago, authorities raided a West Philadelphia abortion clinic owned and operated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell. What was found led investigators to dub the facility a “house of horrors.” In addition to blood-stained furniture, urine-soaked walls, and cat feces, investigators also discovered the remains of 47 children, born and unborn, in containers, boxes, and jars. Gosnell’s clinic targeted primarily poor, minority women. Staff testified that hundreds of infants born alive were killed, often through a method Gosnell called “snipping.” Now described as a “serial killer,” Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, 21 felonies, and 200 other legal violations.

The grand jury report blamed a “complete regulatory collapse,” adding that at the time of Gosnell’s arrest, Philadelphia nail salons faced more regulations and oversights than abortion clinics. In a recent essay in First Things, Erika Anderson documented a different list of ethical horrors that are also birthed from under-regulation and lack of oversight. To be clear, the stories of the “wild west” of “big fertility” are far more sanitized than Gosnell. Nor are they as shocking as what was found in Gosnell’s home and clinic, but that’s only because nothing is that shocking.

For example, a fifty-one-year-old California man who lives with his elderly parents hired a surrogate to carry embryos he “adopted.” He now has custody, with no background check or home study required, of three babies with whom he has no biological relationship. During pregnancy, he asked the surrogate to abort one of the babies, but she “refused and offered to raise the third child herself.” He refused and took all three children, and the woman who carried them “never saw them again.”

Bloomberg recently reported on the dramatic case of businessman Greg Lindberg, whose ex-wife got custody of their three children. Lindberg wanted children who could never be taken away from him so he “conned” young women into donating their eggs and signing over their parental rights in exchange for millions of dollars. He now has sole custody of at least twelve children.

In 2024, a Nashville fertility clinic was shut down after the Tennessee attorney general launched an investigation into Dr. Jaime Vasquez who allegedly neglected protocols, safety measures, and record-keeping. Court records obtained by the Daily Mail establish that embryo storage tanks at Vasquez’s clinic were not monitored for temperature, and there was no alarm system to alert workers if the temperature reached an unsafe level. According to Anderson, “Patients… lost access to their “reserved” embryos and weren’t told whether they would ever get them back.”

In 2023, a Virginia judge ruled that frozen embryos in dispute because of divorce proceedings “are property.” His decision relied, in part, “on a 19th-century law governing the treatment of slaves.” In 2021, the New York Times reported on a couple “shocked to receive a storage fee invoice for frozen embryos they had been told didn’t exist for more than twenty years.” The couple had been told that the embryos they created through IVF had not survived.

Each of these accounts, and the dozens of others that–as one attorney put it, “the public doesn’t even know about,” reveal how irresponsible and inhumane it would be to expand and subsidize this industry that is so under-regulated. Even worse, the regulations that do exist, at least the ones on the books in 49 states, treat frozen embryos as property. Even in otherwise pro-life states, embryos created through IVF have no right to life. Ethicist Charles ­Carmosy described the current legal view of embryos this way: “Imagine a human being who is a captive, an orphan, and a (quite) little child that the surrounding culture deems a non-person all in one.”

If, as Christians believe and science confirms, human life begins at conception, then every single human life deserves respect and protection. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, persons are persons and never should be property. IVF, as currently practiced, treats these persons as property and justifies doing so by centering adult desire over the rights and well-being of children.

Like the abortion industry fifteen years ago, the fertility industry is in need of far more regulation and oversight, not less. Even more, it needs a better legal framework, one built on the dignity and value of all human beings, not some. If not, then the list of ethical horrors from this industry will continue to grow.

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