How does Islam view lab grown organs and modern reproductive medicine?

Whatever helps God’s creation to preserve itself is permitted and even encouraged. Whatever seeks to change creation against its nature, or bypasses marriage as the basis of the family, is wrong.

Medicine keeps taking new steps. Researchers grow tissue that is later to be transplanted into a person, and couples who cannot have children seek help through fertility treatment. Islam judges all of this by one clear principle.

Any technique that helps God’s creation to preserve itself is permitted. More than that, the Holy Qur’an encourages it. But where a technique works against creation and tries to change it, a person is following a wrong impulse. The second verse above describes this, and such actions ultimately rebound on those who do them.

An example makes this clear. If someone has lost an ear and receives a new one without harm to anyone else, that is good. But if the new ear were given the shape of a rabbit’s ear, that would go against the nature God has made.

The same applies to reproduction. When husband and wife use their own cells to have a child, the natural order is preserved. It is different when women sell their eggs and men their sperm to strangers. Then reproduction is cut off from marriage.

Society rests on marriage and family. Whatever damages this foundation is not permitted. Giving one’s cells to strangers may also have effects on the children that nobody can foresee today. With this single standard every new technique can be assessed.