Emma Wren Gibson and mother, Tina Gibson. Photo Credit: Southern Charm Portraits

You may have heard me say, tongue in cheek, that I used to pastor in New Hampshire serving God’s “frozen people.” Well I want to tell you about some people who really are frozen, and since God is the Author of life they are, in a sense, his “frozen people.” I’m talking about the 600,000 to 1 million human embryos that inhabit special storage facilities across America. In a recent article in World, Jamie Dean reports that these embryos are from couples who have children via IVF (in vitro fertilization) and decide to have any leftover embryos frozen.

Today (Monday) marks 45 years since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade landmark decision that made abortion legal in all fifty states. Justice Blackman who wrote the majority opinion commented years later that he had believed the court’s ruling would have ended the debate. He could not have been more wrong. That decision ignited the fire of the Pro-Life movement which continues the fight for the unborn. The great clash of worldviews represented by Roe v. Wade makes this the most polarizing issue in America.

This conflict in worldviews is heightened by the fact that thousands upon thousands of human embryos have been discarded like trash if testing suggests any chromosomal abnormality. There is an increasing tendency towards pre-implantation testing as a means of deciding which embryos are kept and which are not; in other words, who lives and who dies. For example, if testing indicates the possibility of Downs Syndrome, the embryos may be discarded. Gene Rudd, physician and senior vice president of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, commented on the “cultural bent on search and destroy…the notion that life is disposable if we don’t get exactly what we want.”

What is so glaringly missed by abortion advocates is that the value of life cannot be diminished by its quality. Would you reject a gift just because you didn’t care for the way it was wrapped? It’s what in the package that makes it precious and in this case, it’s human life and God is the Giver. To make quality the standard puts all of us on a slippery slope. Today, it’s the petri dish, tomorrow the nursing home.

Would you reject a gift just because you didn’t care for the way it was wrapped? It’s what in the package that makes it precious and in this case, it’s human life and God is the Giver.

Because life begins at conception and each embryo is an unborn human life that bears the Imago Dei (image of God), it is important that we do not retreat from this front in the Pro-Life battle for the unborn. What Christians must understand is that all human life is sacred whether in the womb, in the cradle, or frozen in storage. Case in point: Emma Wren Gibson, frozen as an embryo in 1992, was born on November 25 of last year. Her birth mother was a one-year-old when Emma was conceived in a lab dish 25 years ago.

This incredible situation pushes the debate to the limit. It’s one of those rare occasions when each of us must ask ourselves what we truly believe. Will extreme circumstances lead some to question the viability of frozen embryos? I pray not. Norbert Gleicher, a fertility physician, told New York magazine, “We’ve been disposing of thousands and thousands of completely normal embryos, with normal potential and nobody has the guts to stand up and say we are sorry.” Believers must realize that compromise here is to surrender the sanctity of human life. And if the trend continues, it could one day mean your own life.