Esther Friedman held the Book of Psalms with both hands as she peered over her glasses at the fertility lab monitor. There were eight beautiful round eggs, retrieved from a young woman earlier that day.

“A good number,” Friedman said, nodding.

A technician grabbed a long glass tube, filled it with sperm and, within a few minutes, the eggs were fertilized. Eight potential new lives had just been conceived.

Friedman — an Orthodox Jewish rabbinical observer hired by the prospective parents — took a step back, lowered her eyes and began to pray.

Forty years ago this July, the world’s first “test tube” baby was born at a British hospital in the industrial city of Oldham, heralding a radical change in the creation of human life. Until Louise Joy Brown arrived, hopeful parents had been at the mercy of fate, and a barren marriage could feel like divine punishment.

Afterward, as one of the doctors involved in Brown’s birth put it, it seemed that science — not God — was in charge.

Since then, in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and related technologies have produced some 7 million babies who might never have existed — roughly the combined population of Paris, Nairobi and Kyoto — and the world’s fertility clinics have blossomed into a $17 billion business.

The procedures have amplified profound questions for the world’s theologians: When does life begin? If it begins at conception, is it a sin to destroy a fertilized egg? What defines a parent? Is the mother the woman who provides the egg or the woman who gives birth? What defines a marriage? If a man’s sperm fertilizes an egg from a woman who is not his wife, does that constitute adultery?

The moral questions are rapidly becoming more complex...READ MORE