The Africa Review in Five highlights African current affairs from a Christian perspective. Listen and subscribe through Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Today is Friday, September 29^th, A.D. 2023. This is The Africa Review in Five, written by Tim Cantrell and presented by Yamikani Katunga.

The Bitter Truth About Test-Tube Babies

In 1978 when the first test-tube baby was born, the media announced that she let out, “a cry round the brave new world”, deliberately borrowing from Aldous Huxley’s book warning about the dehumanising dangers of technology. IVF was a method engineered in the 1970s, putting the sperm and egg in a Petri dish (“in vitro” = “in a glass”) to produce a fertilised embryo (a ‘test-tube baby’). 

The world and its ways have progressed a great deal since then. It’s morals have often regressed equally so, in the opposite direction. African countries have not been spared these humanistic ideas and murderous methods as the headlines and court cases reveal, and as the insurance companies gladly cover. South Africa leads the way on the sub-continent, offering some 37 different IVF clinics countrywide. Moving a little further north one article flaunts the headline, ‘Smiles for 45 women after successful IVF at Kairuki Hospital’. But not all parties who contributed to this headline are smiling. What about the embryos that did not make the news on account of them being frozen or discarded? Let’s take a step back and consider what Scripture has to say.