Southern Baptists Vote to Oppose Use of I.V.F.

Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted on Wednesday to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization. The vote was an indication that evangelicals are increasingly open to arguments that equate embryos with human life, and that two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “fetal personhood” may be the next front for the anti-abortion movement.

More than 10,000 delegates, called “messengers,” have gathered in Indianapolis for the denomination’s annual meeting, which is closely watched as a barometer of evangelical sentiment on a variety of cultural and political issues. The vote on Wednesday was the first time that attendees at the Southern Baptist meeting have addressed the ethics of in vitro fertilization directly.

The resolution proposed on Wednesday called on Southern Baptists “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the I.V.F. process.”

It also exhorted them to “advocate for the government to restrain” actions inconsistent with the dignity of “every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.”

A vast majority of the delegates oppose abortion, but fertility treatments are widely used by evangelicals. Although the process of in vitro fertilization often results in the destruction of unused embryos, many Southern Baptists see that as fundamentally different from abortion because the goal of fertility treatments is to create new life.

Before the vote, messengers heard several emotional testimonies, some from Baptists who hoped to soften the language of the resolution, titled “On the Ethical Realities of Reproductive Technologies and the Dignity of the Human Embryo.”