Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

The news last week that Robert Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on the in vitro fertilization of human eggs may have seemed a little surprising to some observers: IVF has become so mainstream that we hardly see it as an innovative technology anymore.

It has also stayed largely out of the headlines, with little of the moral controversy that surrounds other reproductive issues, such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Since its introduction, IVF has been widely embraced across the religious and political spectrum. This is particularly notable in the evangelical movement, whose leaders have kept abortion and stem cells on the political front burner, but have staked out a variety of compromise positions that allow them to accept this scientific form of family-building.

Behind IVF and embryonic stem cell research, however, lie the same sort of technology, the kind Edwards and his late colleague Dr. Patrick Steptoe developed. Both depend on embryos created in a lab by fertilizing an egg extracted from a woman. And both practices generally result in the destruction of embryos--in the case of stem cells, for research; in the case of IVF, as a common side effect of creating more embryos than a woman ultimately chooses to implant.

Should evangelical Christians accept IVF so easily? No, says Jennifer Lahl. The director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network in San Francisco, Lahl has become a lone voice for a message that many of her fellow evangelicals are uncomfortable hearing: If embryos are human lives, she argues, then it is time for Christians to be consistent about their moral objections and unite against IVF.

For Lahl, the regular destruction or freezing of human embryos that occurs during the course of most IVF cycles amounts to ending human lives. And she suggests that the whole process is undermining human dignity. "The minute the egg comes out of body, it is graded, the sperm is graded, then the embryo is graded," she says. In addition to determining which sperm and which eggs are most likely to produce a viable embryo, doctors often use a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to sort out which embryos may have defects. "I see the whole enterprise as being highly eugenic," says Lahl.

To make her case, Lahl travels the country, testifying in favor of legislation that would restrict IVF, or at least regulate it more heavily. She speaks to religious groups and secular ones. And now she has put a part of her message on film. This week, "Eggsploitation," a movie that Lahl produced to describe the medical dangers of egg donation, will be shown at Harvard Law School and Tufts University.

Last Saturday at Grace Chapel in Denver, Focus on the Family (in collaboration with the Colorado Department of Human Services) hosted an information session for parents interested in adopting children out of the foster-care system. More than 150 families were represented and 55 of those have already begun the process. It was a successful and fitting end for the summer of 2010, which turned into a season of adoption for evangelicals.

In May, megachurch pastor Rick Warren held a "civil forum" on the subject. An audience of 800 attended and thousands more watched the webcast from their homes. "Orphans and vulnerable children are not a cause," said Warren. "They are a biblical and social mandate we can't ignore. A country half the size of the U.S—that's how many orphans there are in the world. We're not talking about a small problem."

Adoption was the cover story of Christianity Today in July. It included a feature by Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in which he described in heart-wrenching terms the circumstances of his own adoption of two brothers from a Russian orphanage.

Mr. Moore, the author of a book called "Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches," has become a sort of go-to person for evangelicals on the issue of adoption. In trying to explain why Christians have a particular duty to adopt, he told me that "every one of us who follows Christ was adopted into an already existing family."

Which is to say that unlike Judaism or Islam, faiths that one is born into, Christianity requires each member to have an individual relationship with Christ. And so, in that sense, it is as if each Christian is adopted.