Things go from bad to worse:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization.

…The resolution, which was passed by nearly 11,000 so-called messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, declares that IVF “most often participates in the destruction of embryonic human life” and calls on Southern Baptists to adopt and “only utilize reproductive technologies” that affirm “the unconditional value and right to life of every human being.”

Though the resolution is nonbinding, nearly 13 million Southern Baptists across 45,000 churches may now face pressure from the pulpit or in individual conversations with pastors to eschew IVF.

It seems to have suddenly occurred to this 13 million-strong denomination that their insistence that life begins at conception necessarily means that every egg fertilized for in vitro procedures is sacred. Now, for the first time, they’ve developed an  interest in intellectual consistency, whereas two minutes ago they were perfectly happy to harangue pregnant women about abortion without giving a thought to all the frozen and discarded embryos produced by the IVF process.

Of course, huge numbers of Southern Baptists, including those in the church hierarchy, have availed themselves of IVF to have children, and now they’re all morally suspect. This pivot was initiated when Alabama’s Supreme Court granted frozen embryos full personhood and suffered a furious backlash. But the brains behind this change are not concerned about being unpopular.

IVF has come under increasing scrutiny since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision two years ago. Many on the right have begun to question whether the practice, which often discards fertilized eggs, is at odds with their beliefs on when life begins, even as it is relied upon by millions of Americans to grow their families and is supported by the overwhelming majority of evangelicals.

“It’s going to be a long process. It took us 50 years to take down Roe,” said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the SBC. “It may take us a similarly long time frame to get people to a place where they are thinking more deeply about something like this. It’s okay. It takes time. We have to be patient.”

These freaks say some really weird things.

Erick Sessions, a pastor at Graceland Church in New Albany, Indiana, and his wife struggled to conceive for seven years but decided against IVF because of ethical concerns and opted instead to foster children. Nearly 15 years later, they have four adopted and five naturally conceived children.

“Anytime you get outside of the normal means within which procreation occurs, the more foreign you get or the more alien you get from that, the more you have to consider its moral implications,” Sessions said. “When you divorce it now from the actual physical act of sex, and you put it into a laboratory, it just becomes further and further away from the normal means within the natural world of procreation.”

The whole point of the procedure is to help people who try and fail to use “the normal means within the natural world of procreation” to have children. They have sex with each other and no child is produced. It’s not that weird. It happens all the time.

When it happens, do couples have to consider the moral implications of other options? Yes. Adopting has its own set of moral issues related to race, nationality, gender, and socioeconomics. IVF produces multiple fertilized eggs to increase the odds that the procedure is successful. Shockingly, ovaries do the same thing and for the same reason.

I’m willing to grant that when an egg and sperm come together, they create a unique genetic pattern that’s very special, but I’ve also lived through two ectopic pregnancies where the fertilized egg implanted in a fallopian tube instead of the uterus. That created a life-threatening situation for my partners rather than a child. I’ve also experienced multiple miscarriages resulting for a too-thin uterine lining, meaning that the fertilized egg tried to implant in the uterus but couldn’t sustain a foothold and died. It’s also common that a fertilized egg has genetic problems from the start and doesn’t implant, or implants briefly before dying off. In most cases, women have no idea this has happened.

A fertilized egg is no guarantee of a live birth, and that’s by design. Expecting anything else involves a fundamental misunderstanding of biology.

But these god-botherers fetishize fertilized eggs. They’re not happy when people have sex for fun instead of for procreation, and now they’re not happy when people have children without having sex. Why can’t they just fucking relax and let other people live their lives in peace?