Embryo Destruction and Selective Abortion in IVF Fertility Treatment

IVF is the sixth topic we will explore in our study of Jewish legal opinions that depart from the protections for unborn human life stated clearly in Torah.

Infertility in the bible responds well to prayer, as well as to promises consecrating the baby to God’s service. Prophetic intervention, clean living and kosher eating also help barren women in the bible conceive.

Six bIblical couples with fertility problems play key roles in Jewish history. 

Sarah and Abraham are childless for many decades. When Sarah was 90 and Abraham was 100 they finally are gifted with Isaac.

Isaac prays for 20 years before he and Rebekah have the twins, Jacob and Esau.

Rachel remains barren for seven years before her pleas to the Almighty are answered. She gives birth to Joseph, and later Benjamin.

The unnamed wife of Manoah is a barren Israelite. The Angel of the Lord appears to her. He gives her strict instructions about her personal habits and proclaims that the couple will have Samson, who will deliver the Israelites from the Philistines.

Hannah, wife of Elkanah, remains barren for many years. Her prayers to conceive are answered when she promises to dedicate her son, Samuel, to God’s service.

The Shunammite woman is childless. She and her elderly husband host Elisha when he travels to their town of Shunum. To thank them for their hospitality, Elisha blesses them with a son. 

In our modern age, many more men and women experience infertility. Environmental exposures of hormone disrupting chemicals are associated with falling sperm counts. Female hormonal imbalances due to years of birth control use dysregulate egg production and uterine integrity during pregnancy. Ovarian and uterine cysts cause problems, as does damage to the uterus and cervix from abortion.

Prayers and lifestyle improvements may not be sufficient to overcome these difficulties. Holistic therapies to improve fertility are available but health insurance denies reimbursement for these modalities. Despite health risks and high costs, many infertile couples turn to IVF.

IVF Fertility Treatment

Increasingly, couples turn to In vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. The IVF global market size was estimated at USD 25.3 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 37.4 billion by 2030. Increasing cases of male and female infertility, along with favorable medical insurance changes that increase providers and profits, spur this growth.

In Vitro Fertilization Market (2024 - 2030) https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/in-vitro-fertilization-market

IVF produces much loved children to infertile couples. The treatment is considered a very positive approach for those who need help bearing children and as a way to address falling birth rates. However, IVF presents moral dilemmas.

IVF Moral Dilemmas

At conception, a new human life enters the world. This life has intrinsic value whether the conception occurs in the womb or in a petri dish. We know that embryos are in fact alive and human. IVF methods present serious moral dilemmas for people who consider life at conception sacred. 

Successful IVF treatment requires the creation of multiple embryos. In humans, the term embryo is an unborn child until the end of the seventh week following conception. Extra embryos go to medical research, they get frozen for future fertility treatments, they are adopted or destroyed.  Once implanted, selective abortion culls unwanted embryos as they develop based on their genetic properties, assessed viability, and risk to favored embryos. 

Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old  https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/29/1120769/exclusive-record-breaking-baby-born-embryo-over-30-years-old/

Embryo Defense https://www.facebook.com/embryodefense

Less often discussed moral dilemmas of IVF include exploitation of women and children by nefarious industry profiteers. IVF enables a criminal network of enslaved women into surrogacy to produce children who are sold. Surrogates who gestate IVF created embryos have no legal right to protect the baby from abortion that the embryo’s donor parents may demand anytime throughout the pregnancy.

For IVF to truly be a worthy clinical treatment for infertility, these moral and ethical questions must be addressed and resolved.

Jewish legal opinions on IVF

Jewish legal opinions on IVF do not appear in the Talmudic record. Reproductive science and laboratory techniques that manipulate fertilization paved the way for Jewish legal opinions on IVF in the 20th century.

Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Waldenberg, 1915 - 2006, was a member of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem and the foremost authority on medicine and halacha in his time. In his encyclopedia of Jewish law and medical ethics, Rav Waldenberg objected to the entire procedure of IVF, citing the prohibition of wasting sperm in Genesis 38:9-10, Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother. Onan dies in short order because he wastes his opportunity to produce children.

Rav Waldenberg argued that in IVF whenever the fertilization fails, the father has wasted his sperm. Even when one sperm cell does fertilize the egg, Rav Waldenberg notes that the rest of the semen goes to waste. 

He denied IVF created children a role in the positive commandment to be fruitful and multiply, thus removing the religious reason to undergo the treatment. What does one gain by presenting a way to create children in this manner, if the creators of this child will not fulfill any Divine command and the practice of IVF will create profound and complex problems, which have the potential to cause the level of human morality to deteriorate more than a thousandfold?

https://www.sefaria.org/Gray_Matter_II,_Family_Matters,_In_Vitro_Fertilization.2?lang=bi

Rabbi Waldenburg opposed IVF on religious grounds. He did not oppose it on a fundamental right to life of the human being in early stages of development. He allowed abortion within the first trimester for babies with abnormal test results to relieve them of future suffering, and through the second trimester for babies with life limiting diagnoses. 

Unfortunately, Rabbi Waldenburg’s compassionate exceptions to the prohibition of abortion in Torah acted as precedent for the moral decay he forecasted. Denying IVF babies Jewish personhood and the right to life led to permissive legal opinions on IVF and abortion that reduced human beings in the womb at later stages of development to utilitarian commodities without intrinsic value. 

Other influential rabbis of this period had mixed views. Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach discouraged IVF in Jewish religious communities, saying that infertile couples are not obligated to undergo IVF in order to have children. Rav Ovadia Yosef allowed IVF for infertile couples only if could be verified that the wife donated the egg and the husband donated the sperm. 

https://www.sefaria.org/Gray_Matter_II,_Family_Matters,_In_Vitro_Fertilization.22?

Current Orthodox Jewish legal opinions support IVF if the egg and sperm are sourced according to specific guidelines. The status of embryos before implantation does not meet the threshold of personhood, therefore, their protection is not of great concern. Orthodox legal authorities frown upon selective reduction of implanted embryos unless some threaten the viability of the others. 

IVF and Fertility Treatment in Judaism: What Jewish Law Says about Modern Reproductive Treatments. https://ivfclinicsabroad.com/en/ivf-and-fertility-treatment-in-judaism/

Rabbi J. David Bleich has a comprehensive study of halacha opinion on pregnancy reduction.

Survey of Recent Halakhic Periodical Literature: Pregnancy Reduction/ Kashrut Certification https://traditiononline.org/survey-of-recent-halakhic-periodical-literature-pregnancy-reduction-kashrut-certification/

In Judaism, all human life has equal value

A fundamental principle in Judaism is that all human life has equal value. A human life cannot be sacrificed to save another human life. Logically speaking, this first principle would apply to human life in the womb, making abortion of all sorts and fertility treatments that destroy embryonic life out of reach. 

The Baby Redefined as a Threat

Referring back to our first study of abortion to save the life of the mother, we learned that rabbinic opinion in the first century applied the rodef principle to the baby in the womb. The rodef principle allows killing another person whose intent and action pose an imminent mortal threat to another person. Redefining an innocent human being in the womb as a threat may have added context to philosophical debate, but it had no practical application in its time, therefore, inconsequential. 

With the invention of surgical and chemical abortion, the redefinition of a baby in the womb as a mortal threat to the mother’s life spurred the growth of the profiteering abortion industry. Today, a threat to a mother’s life is a ubiquitous term that can be applied to any difficulty or inconvenience beyond an imminent danger to her life. Furthermore, it is no longer necessary to torture a baby to death in the womb to save a mother’s life, rendering this opinion irrelevant. 

The Pro-Life Reply to: "Is Abortion Ever Medically Necessary?" 

The Baby Redefined as Subhuman

In addition, an almost universal mistranslation of Exodus 21-22-23 in Jewish legal and rabbinic sources has relegated the unborn person to a ‘subhuman’ nonperson. The Torah text of verse 22 reads:

וְכִֽי־יִנָּצ֣וּ אֲנָשִׁ֗ים וְנָ֨גְפ֜וּ אִשָּׁ֤ה הָרָה֙ וְיָֽצְא֣וּ יְלָדֶ֔יהָ וְלֹ֥א יִֽהְיֶ֖ה אָס֑וֹן עָנ֣וֹשׁ יֵֽעָנֵ֗שׁ כַּֽאֲשֶׁ֨ר יָשִׁ֤ית עָלָיו֙ בַּ֣עַל הָֽאִשָּׁ֔ה וְנָתַ֖ן בִּפְלִלִֽים:

The Hebrew text above includes the words, וְיָֽצְא֣וּ יְלָדֶ֔יהָ, translated as a premature live birth, a situation where only financial damages would be suitable. The word for miscarriage is הַפָּלָה. This word does not appear in the Torah text. 

When the word for miscarriage replaces the words for premature birth in the translation, the baby’s death doesn’t rise to the level of a life for a life, the implication being that if only financial damages are awarded, the baby’s life has less value than the mother’s life. 

This mistranslation perpetuates a huge lie that in Judaism the unborn child has less value than a born person so abortion does not destroy a person. This subhuman status of an unborn child appears nowhere in our Torah or scriptures. Indeed, unborn children can inherit under Jewish law and they receive full human status everywhere in Torah and scripture, deeming the true translation consistent and accurate.

Jews are “sub-human”

The permission to legally kill human beings at whatever stage of development depends on reducing human life to a status that is not worthy of lawful protection. We see this in the annuls of Jewish history when Jews were redefined as subhuman and parasitic. This successful propaganda campaign allowed a mass slaughter of Jews behind high walls. The reality of the slaughter finally became visible upon liberation of the death camps.

“The sub-human, that biologically seemingly complete creation of nature with hands, feet and a kind of brain, with eyes and mouth, is nevertheless a completely different, dreadful creature. He is only a rough copy of a human being, with human-like facial traits but nonetheless morally and mentally lower than an animal… For all that bear a human face are not equal.” (Pamphlet published by the Race Settlement Main Office, Germany, 1942).

Untermensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch

Similarly, the redefinition of unborn human beings as subhuman and parasitic allows the mass slaughter of unborn people behind clinic walls, and now bathroom walls, thanks to legal chemical, at home abortion. When the reality of this slaughter becomes apparent to our nation, we will be morally  outraged and implement federal protections for the unborn.

Regarding IVF, mass destruction of human beings in the embryonic stage of development continues only if these young human beings are categorized as a potential life, ie., subhuman. When embryos are given full human status, IVF advocates will quickly figure out affordable treatment methods that produce children without destroying children.

Can IVF be done by creating only one embryo at a time? https://www.reddit.com/r/prolife/comments/1ayg5iy/can_ivf_be_done_by_creating_only_one_embryo_at_a/

Morally Based Reproductive Medicine

Our culture generally accepts the premise that If we have to kill someone to obtain what we want, we should do without. Until this principle applies to reproductive medicine, infertile couples will love their IVF children, but the destruction of their children's siblings will cast a shadow over the joy of having them. At the very least, their discarded babies ought to be acknowledged and mourned.

Can You Be Pro-Life And Support IVF? 

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Cecily Routman 

May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and good life upon us and upon all Israel. Amen.

Cecily Routman is the founder and president of the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation. She opposes abortion homicide in general and among Jews in particular and laments secular policy making in Israel that results in loss of Jewish life and delays the messianic redemption. She envisions a Torah based holy Land of Israel and a world that respects the life of every human being from conception.

Please visit our Hebrew blog on our Israel website.