INDIANAPOLIS — Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization. The vote was an indication that ordinary 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 Wednesday was the first time that attendees at the Southern Baptist meeting have addressed the ethics of in vitro fertilization directly. In 2021, the group passed a resolution declaring “unequivocally that abortion is murder.
” The resolution proposed 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 IVF 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 .