35 Years Ago, Venerable Jérôme Lejeune Warned Us About IVF
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is back in the headlines.
In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen human embryos constitute children under state statute. The nine-judge court said in an 8-1 ruling that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is “sweeping and unqualified,” and extends its provisions to children “regardless of location.”
This decision, along with the debate it has prompted about the legal status of frozen human embryos, invites us to revisit events from 1989. It was then in a Tennessee courtroom that the nature of such embryos was investigated with expert witness testimony given by the eminent French pediatrician and geneticist, Dr. Jérôme Lejeune (1926-1994), the scientist who discovered the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome.
The case in question was Davis v. Davis and involved a dispute over cryopreserved embryos. Mary Sue and Junior Davis married in April 1980. Subsequently, Mary Sue experienced several ectopic pregnancies. After her fifth such pregnancy, she chose surgically to seal her left fallopian tube, leaving her unable to conceive conventionally. The couple then tried IVF but this too failed. In November 1988 they embarked on a round of IVF that cryopreserved unused embryos for later transfer.
When the couple later divorced, seven such embryos remained cryogenically preserved, but without agreement on what to do with them. Mary Sue wanted to use them to have a child; Junior disagreed; the matter ended up in court. Junior Davis asked the court to give both parents joint custody over the embryos, thereby preventing Mary Sue from doing anything with the embryos without his permission.
In February 1989, the case came before Judge W. Dale Young in Blount County, Tennessee. One of the expert witnesses called to testify was French geneticist and pro-life champion Lejeune.
“Each of us has a unique beginning, the moment of conception, we know,” he declared. “And all the genetics and all the zoology are there to tell us that there is a link between parents and children. And this link is made of a long molecule that we can dissect: the DNA molecule, which is transmitting information from parents to children through generations and generations.” He went on to explain how each human being “has never occurred before and will never occur again” — what he described as “an entire novelty.”
When asked by the court to comment on the difference between conception in the body of a mother and conception via IVF, he explained as follows: whereas the former conception occurs within the mother’s fallopian tube, in IVF, conception occurs inside “a tube of glass.” It is there, he said, that the egg that has been removed from the body of the woman is placed, and the sperm is added.