Victor Penney:

It sounds strange, but it’s true: the best player in college basketball this year was made in a lab. His name is Cameron Boozer. The 18-year-old just had an incredible season in the NCAA, and yet, underneath the accolades, there’s a wound at the heart of this young man’s origin story, a scar which is no fault of his own, but one that’s sure to raise difficult questions for some in the pro-life movement. I’ll get to the controversy in a moment, but first, a look at his laurels.

Boozer is a gifted athlete, receiving a number of prestigious awards this spring, including the 2026 Naismith College Player of the Year. The 6-foot-9 forward with the Duke Blue Devils is now in the mix to be selected first overall in next month’s NBA draft, which ain’t too shabby.

In a way, basketball is in Cameron’s DNA. His father is Carlos Boozer, a two-time All-Star who played 13 seasons in the NBA. In 2006, Carlos and his then-wife CeCe had a son named Carmani who was born with sickle cell anemia, a disorder that causes incredible pain when red blood cells mutate into rigid crescent-like shapes, a condition known to dramatically shorten one’s lifespan. It’s a wretched scenario for any family, so it’s no surprise that desperation took hold in the Boozer household.

Doctors said the best chance to cure Carmani was a bone marrow transplant, and in this case, the optimum donor wasn’t some random stranger – they needed stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of a sibling. Those stem cells didn’t exist, though, and this is when the parents turned to eugenics.

Reports say the couple used in vitro fertilization on 34 eggs that were harvested from CeCe. Out of those attempts, 10 became sickle-free embryos, but only two screened as perfect matches. The saviour siblings were then implanted into their mother’s womb and on July 18, 2007, Cameron and his fraternal twin Cayden were born. Right after the births, their stem cells were harvested for Carmani’s procedure, and with a regimen of high-dose chemotherapy, the eldest Boozer brother made a full recovery. I’m glad he’s better now, but the question remains: what happened to the other embryos? It’s not clear.

In the bigger picture, the number of destroyed and forgotten IVF embryos is frightening, at a level where only God knows the exact figure, but we do get glimpses here and there. In 2024, for example, the Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics cited an estimate that suggested that there were 1.2 million frozen embryos in storage throughout the US. Across the pond, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the regulating body of the fertility industry in the U.K., released its own figures in late 2012. According to their numbers, which date back to 1991, nearly 1.7 million embryos created through IVF had been thrown away during or after the process. There are many reasons why in vitro embryos are destroyed, from being the wrong sex to having the wrong genetic profile. For whatever reason, they don’t make the grade.

It’s a cold way to look at it, but all that death and disregard for humanity is inevitable with IVF along with many of its other consequences, like separating the procreative nature from the marital act – injecting an egg in a petri dish will never be the same as the intimate embrace of a loving, married couple. This is difficult for some to accept, I know, especially those struggling with the burden of infertility, but this is what happened in the story of the Boozers, and I don’t think the gravity is lost on the family.

In the 2008 ESPN documentary “Blood Brothers,” CeCe addressed the emotional weight of her experience, saying it felt like she was “having a baby for the wrong reason.” She felt guilty because conceiving the twins “was more out of love for Carmani, it wasn’t out of love for them.”

Cameron and his brother Cayden, though, are still created in the image and likeness of God, and IVF doesn’t change that, but the cost is too deadly, too inhumane, and it can never be justified. After all, you can’t do evil in the hope of achieving good. We can always love the IVF children, but we must reject the eugenics.