Jeremiah Johnston is a well-known apologist who serves as the Associate Pastor of Apologetics and Cultural Engagement at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, under the leadership of Jack Graham. He has written several books, including Unleashing Peace, Body of Proof, and the Bible study Know Thy Enemy, which is part of Steve Deace’s Nefarious series. Despite his prominence in Christian apologetics, Jeremiah Johnston is an outspoken proponent of in-vitro fertilization.
President Trump signed an executive order to expand access to IVF. The relevant portion of the executive order is as follows:
Sec. 2. Lowering Costs and Reducing Barriers to IVF. Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.
Trump’s executive order is to crowdsource a policy. This presents a unique opportunity to reform IVF to remove much of its dystopian barbarity. However, that is not in the interest of Johnston who stood out in Evangelicalism for praising Trump’s executive action which was poorly received elsewhere.
Jeremiah Johnston is no stranger to this controversy. On average, most IVF treatments will cost somewhere between $15-20K but it could exceed $30K per round. Storing the embryos adds further costs, and the other fertility treatments or consultations drive up the total costs of IVF. This is without delving into the downside risks that these procedures have, like cancers or higher-risk pregnancies. The Johnstons would end up having triplets via IVF, adding a personal interest in Johnston’s position.
Johnston’s position also relies on the premise that life, or ensoulment, begins at implantation and not conception as the pro-life movement. Therefore, Johnston defends the practice of creating excess embryos having previously written:
What a handful of lawmakers and a few judges fail to understand is that an embryo doesn’t always transform into a pregnancy or develop into a child – whether that’s entirely naturally in the womb or with help via medical procedures like IVF. An embryo is not synonymous with a child. That was true even before IVF existed. Only when an embryo successfully attaches in a mother’s womb does a child begin its beautiful journey to soon living an independent life.
I say this as a pro-life individual who believes every life is sacred and precious.
But what I’ve learned from endocrinologists – many sharing the same faith as I do might I add – is that a handful of outliers claiming an embryo in and of itself is the beginning of pregnancy simply misunderstand the process and hinder moms and dads on their journey to give birth and start families.
Johnston cites that only 25% of embryos successfully attach to the womb, but this is equivocating the providence of God to the hubris of Man. By his logic, all birth control and Plan B are permissible since it is not a life until it implants in the womb. Furthermore, the same could be argued about embryos experimented on in laboratories, like the experiments funded by Francis Collins at the NIH where human cells are merged with rats in grotesque chimeras. The failure rate of natural biological mechanisms for procreation, being part of the “mystery of natural conception,” does not justify the creation of embryos to be stored nor discard their value as life. Implantation is a weak moral standard that does not safeguard against modern science and medicine.
Jeremiah Johnston is defending the horrors of IVF blindly capitulating to a dystopian solution to a modern problem with no moral qualms or regard for discarded human life.
