By
Sounding the alarm on the ‘dystopian’ bling.
Catholics on social media have been sounding the alarm on a chilling new trend: turning embryos into jewelry.
Embryos — frozen children — who are no longer wanted by a family are literally killed to then become an adornment a woman can wear to mark a life that was snuffed out.
The Catholic Church has long condemned the IVF process and the production of these embryos, but those warnings have gone unheeded, and there are now an estimated 1 million frozen embryos in the U.S. alone — giving rise to profound and continuing moral dilemmas, including this disturbing fad of embryo jewelry that has been around since 2017.
Lila Rose of Live Action recently brought attention to the “dystopian” bling.
Catholic ethicist Aaron Kheriaty also reacted to these grim keepsakes, likening them to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
“Behold, our Brave New World of opulent, debonair nihilism. Human embryos encased in jewelry — a shiny memento of having created human beings in a lab and then destroyed them,” Kheriaty wrote on his X account.
The U.K.-based company behind all of this, Blossom Keepsake, is confused about the real business of death it is involved in. The website states:
“At the heart of our work is a deep respect for life and the incredible journey families take to create it. We specialise in crafting unique and meaningful keepsakes using unused IVF embryos.”
“Our mission is to offer families a beautiful way to honour this chapter of their story — by transforming these embryos into timeless pieces that can be cherished forever,” the description continues, omitting the fact that a life was destroyed for a keepsake pendant or other piece of jewelry.
A recent ad by Blossom was clearer with what the service entails: “POV: You’re an IVF mama who needs to decide what to do with leftover embryos.”
The Catholic Church teaches that IVF is morally illicit because it completely separates procreation from the marital act and violates the dignity of the child.
The 2008 Church document Dignitas Personae affirms that the human embryo cannot be treated as “mere laboratory material” because this violates its dignity, which “belongs equally to every single human being, irrespective of his parents’ desires, his social condition, educational formation, or level of physical development.”
In 1996, Pope John Paul II made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons.”
