Test Tube Babies, Sexchange Operations, Organ Donation

Contemporary Issues: Test Tube Babies, Sex Change Operations, and Organ Donation

Lecture by Dr. Bilal Philips

Opening

(بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ - bismillahir-rahmanir-rahim)

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Most Merciful. I'd like to welcome you, dear viewers, to this segment of our program, Contemporary Issues. In this segment, we'll continue to look at some advancements in modern science, their implications, and the Islamic position with regards to them.

In the previous segment, we looked at cloning. In this segment, we're looking at something related to it.

Test Tube Babies and Artificial Insemination

What Are Test Tube Babies?

That is what they call test-tube babies, or artificial insemination, where they will take the egg (the ovum) from a woman and the sperm cell from a man, and put them together in a test tube—where actually it's in Petri dishes.

From that, they will grow a fetus and then put it back in the woman's womb, and the child comes. This is being done mainly for men or women who are infertile, for one reason or another. They've been doing this for some years now.

Of course, when it was first done, it was put in the newspaper as "test-tube babies." That's what it was called then. And people got the idea that they were actually making up kids inside of test tubes and growing them up there.

But of course, this is a gross exaggeration of the facts. The fact is, as we said, they're extracting ovum and sperm from a living male and female, and putting them in a Petri dish, letting them in an environment which is similar to that of the womb, so that they can unite. And they start to divide.

Once they start to divide, then they take them and put them back in a female, and the baby is grown to term. That's the actual process.

Limitations of the Process

Now, they've tried to continue that process outside, but they found that the eggs will divide and divide for a while, then they go haywire. They cannot sustain that development outside of the womb. So it has to go back in.

And in the beginning, they have to start with an ovum and a sperm. They're not taking random chemicals. You go to the chemical shop and you buy these chemicals which are what a sperm is made of—definite chemicals, its components are known. You can buy them. And what an ovum is made of, these chemical components are known. You can buy them.

But they're not doing that. They're not taking these chemicals and these chemicals, dropping them into test tubes, stirring them all around, and then all of a sudden you're getting a baby. No. They're nowhere near that.

And they will never achieve it.

The Islamic Perspective on Creation

As Allah said: if the whole of humankind and the jinn got together to create a fly—something which is so despicable, we kill them all the time, spray them and everything else, they're nasty, the fly—if the whole of humankind got together along with the world of the jinn (call the jinn the aliens, right), get the whole of the universe together, they could not even create a fly.

That is, get those chemicals, mix them all together, and out pops a fly. No way. They can never do it.

Why? Because we cannot create life from inanimate matter. Modern science thinks that life is a product of matter, meaning that once you get these molecules and atoms and DNA, RNA, cell walls, and you got this all together, got all these pieces together, life is a product of that process. They don't look at life as being something external which has been added to it.

The reality is that's what it is. It is external. It is not a product of matter.

Matter is created and life is created by God. So whatever they do of living things, they can only use other living things to do it. They cannot use inanimate matter to create life or to manipulate it so that they end up with a living anything.

They're not able to do this, and they will never be able to do this. This is God's promise. So human beings, they can try all they want. It is a waste of their time, their energy, and their monies. They will never be able to create life.

The Islamic Ruling on Test Tube Babies

So back to our test tube baby, so-called test tube baby. Now, what does Islam say about this?

Basically, Islam permits one format, one way:

A man and a woman—man and his wife—they're unable to have children for one reason or another. So you combine the ovum from that woman, the sperm from the man, your product, you put back into the womb of that same woman. She gives birth to her child.

That is permissible. Islamically, that is permissible. That is only helping them to produce children.

Forbidden Formats

Now, all of the other versions that are out there—because right now you have mothers bearing the children of their daughters. A woman, she can't deliver the child herself. So after combining the sperm of her husband along with her ovum, the resulting product, they can't put it back in her womb because, for whatever reason, maybe they've taken out her womb or whatever, she can't have the child.

So they're taking the child and putting it in her mother's womb, or her sister's womb, or her best friend's womb, or her daughter's womb. We have all of these different pictures. They've done these things now.

All of those are forbidden in Islam. Forbidden.

Why? Because you've got a genealogical bomb, a maze, confusion here. A mother giving birth to a child who belongs to her daughter. But that child, in fact, if the mother gives birth, that child is the woman's sister, not her daughter.

So you see, you've got all kinds of ethical problems that come here, because the point is that the process—though the child is growing within the womb, separate from the woman in the sense that, as we pointed out in issues of abortion where we were opposed to it before, separate from the mother, blood not mixing with that of the mother's—but still the child is under the influence. There are influences in growing within that womb.

There are influences that perhaps we don't recognize them now.

Later on, 10 years from now or whatever, they will recognize some things which are coming from that mother into that child, which makes that child linked to the mother in a unique way. These things—this whole process now—destroy the proper genealogy if we are putting these ova into other women.

Third-Party Gamete Donation

Now there's another format, too, which is also absurd and unacceptable Islamically. And that is the man—for example, the man and his wife, and this is very common today. That's why you have sperm banks and ovum banks. A man and his wife, the man has a low sperm count. His sperm just cannot fertilize the egg of his wife.

So they go to a sperm bank and they get somebody else's sperm, and they fertilize his wife's egg and produce the child. Hey, this child is not the man's child. This is the child whose father now is unknown. This is an illegitimate child. This is, relative to the woman, some form of adultery, producing an illegitimate child.

Similarly, you have the other scene where the woman, for whatever reason, she can't produce ova. So you go and get ova from another woman, along with her husband's sperm, and then put it in that woman's womb, and she gives birth to the child, calling it her child.

It's not her child, really. It's got the ovum from somebody else. I mean, it may be from the point of view of it coming out of her—she's delivering the child—so you could say, okay, it's her child from that perspective. But in terms of its origin, its essence, it's not her child. And this is a child out of wedlock.

Homosexual Couples and Children

And what you even find now is that you have homosexuals, males—they can't have children if they marry, and you have them marrying today. There's a big case in England of two rich homosexuals who—what they did was they found women to bear their children. They impregnated, without sexual relations, impregnated women.

They bore the child, and now the two men are going to raise these children as their own.

This is absurd, unacceptable Islamically.

Or two lesbians, for example, female homosexuals. Of course, by themselves, they cannot produce any children. So they go to the sperm bank, they buy some sperm, have it inserted in themselves, they get pregnant, so they're having children.

This is madness. This is going beyond the people of Lot, and only inviting the destruction of God on their society.

Summary: The Only Acceptable Format

So these are unacceptable formats. As we said, in summary, the only acceptable format is:

A husband, his wife, the husband's sperm, the ovum of the wife being put in the womb of the wife and delivered by that wife. That's the only acceptable format.

All of the others are rejected by Islam from:

1. The confusion of genealogy that can come

2. The corruption that is promoted through homosexual couples being able to have children and raise those children as their own

Sex Change Operations

The second area which we'd like to look at, related to this, is that of sex change operations, which is also a means now of homosexuals. Whether it's male or female, they feel, as they like to say: a man claims, "I'm a woman trapped in a man's body," or a woman claiming, "I'm a man trapped in a woman's body."

So medical science changes them into what they are not. You find a man who spent all his life as a man, all of a sudden he goes in and has his operations, and then they load him up with hormones, etc., so he can grow breasts and things like this, and he's now living the life of a woman, and vice versa.

This, from an Islamic perspective, is totally unacceptable. No way can we accept this at all.

Satan's Deception

Now, this in fact is part of Satan's trickery, as mentioned in the Quran, where Allah said, quoting Satan as saying:

"Indeed, I will take my share of your servants by leading them astray and filling them with vain desires, and I will command them and they will cut pieces of the ears of cattle, and I will command them and they will change Allah's creation." (Quran 4:119)

This is what people are trying to do today. This kind of surgery is totally unacceptable.

Exception: Hermaphrodites

However, where we have cases of hermaphrodites—people who are born having both male and female sexual parts, but one is dominant—for them to remove the other, close off the orifices or whatever, and that person can live a complete life as that one dominant feature, this is something acceptable.

This is correcting something which you could say is a birth defect, correcting it, and Islam doesn't really have any problem with that.

Cosmetic Surgery

Just as cosmetic surgery in general—because this could be called a form of cosmetic surgery, these kinds of operations—they're acceptable Islamically.

Acceptable Cosmetic Surgery

A person is born with:

• A defective ear
• A cleft palate
• A harelip
• A variety of different things