In season two, episode seven of Severance, the hit show on AppleTV+, Gemma Scout suffers through two parallel trials. The first is in flashback, shot in warm, nostalgic sixteen-millimeter film, in which she meets, marries, and tries to start a family with her husband, Mark. She suffers a miscarriage. Devastated, she and Mark turn to I.V.F. Now their once-idyllic flashbacks include doctors’ visits, trigger shots, blood draws, disappointment, pain, and tears.

The second trial of Gemma Scout, in the present, is set in the less familiar, speculative world of the show, where a sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has invented a brain chip that separates—“severs”—a person into multiple distinct streams of consciousness. Gemma has been kidnapped by Lumon and is held prisoner in a top-secret basement laboratory, where she’s experimentally severed over and over into dozens of new personalities. She’s escorted from room to sterile room, receiving examinations, shots, blood draws, and scans, monitored at every moment by a cruel doctor.

It’s a bit surprising for a mainstream show to suggest a parallel between the suffering of infertility and I.V.F. treatments, which are broadly popular, and literal medical torture. But as we see needle after needle slipped into Gemma’s body, past and present, as she shudders at the threshold of each examination room, the connection becomes undeniable. So what is the show saying about I.V.F.? I think the series tells us a lot about “assisted reproductive technology”: why people seek it, and the unexpected ethical dilemmas associated with it, even if the show itself doesn’t seem to know it.

To understand the show’s deep connection with A.R.T., let’s look at the basic concept. The main characters of Severance have undergone the titular medical procedure, essentially reproducing a version of themselves. An “outie” is the person who undergoes severance, rather like a parent. The “innie” is the new stream of consciousness created through severance, and he becomes active only in certain locations, namely the office. Innies and outies share a body, but have no access to each others’ memories or experiences. Innies have no control over their lives; they turn up at the office wearing whatever the outie put on that morning. They may submit resignation requests to their outies, but these are generally denied. Lumon lies to outies about their innies’ working conditions. One innie repeatedly attempts suicide.

But as the series progresses, the innies become attached to their narrow existences. They fall in love with each other. They mourn retirements and firings as deaths of dear friends. They are aware of their captivity, but hostile toward attempts to end it—because then their lives would end too. There’s a third option between living and dying— “re-integration”—which offers the possibility of re-combining the innie and the outie into one single consciousness, but the procedure is experimental and dangerous.

If there’s no fair, safe way for the innie to continue living, or to die, then you might describe the very creation of the innie as “a situation of injustice which cannot in fact be resolved.” And that’s exactly what the Church says about the plight of frozen embryos created by I.V.F. in Dignitas personae. An embryo can stay frozen indefinitely, or be destroyed, two outcomes that map onto the plight of the innie. A frozen embryo can also be implanted, in the mother or in a surrogate, a procedure which carries risks for all involved. For one thing, embryo transfer requires extensive involvement from medical professionals who may or may not be trustworthy. (We need only look at last year’s Alabama Supreme Court case to see an I.V.F. clinic unworthy of the trust placed in it; the show even hints that Gemma’s own I.V.F. clinic played a role in her kidnapping.) And in Gemma’s flashbacks, we see just how painful and uncertain the process of biologically re-integrating her child—that is, receiving a fetal embryo transfer through I.V.F.—can be.

When confronted with severance naysayers, Mark insists that his consent to the procedure erases all ethical concerns about it: his brain, his choice. But severance was nobody’s first choice. When the show lets us in on each innie’s backstory, we typically learn that they turned to severance in moments of grief and desperation: inability to find another job; guilt over a troubled past; crushing grief at the loss of a spouse. Gemma, too, turns to the technology of I.V.F. in her moment of overwhelming grief.

So why don’t I think Severance “knows” it’s about A.R.T., despite these clear parallels? It locates the personhood of the innies in their human-like qualities, their fully-grown bodies, their ability to express themselves, to emote, to form attachments, to be “relatable.” The frozen embryo has none of this going for him. And yet he, too, was created in a moment of desperation, and possesses the instinct to live and grow as you and I do, and is prevented by his circumstances from doing so.

I’ve recently written for this magazine about the parallels between miscarriage and Purgatory, so I was interested to note that the title of Gemma’s episode is “Chikhai Bardo,” a reference to a Buddhist transitional state between life and death, not totally unlike Purgatory. Present-day Gemma, believed to be dead, lives a half-life in captivity, treated like a guinea pig while she awaits her eventual execution. She’s kept in literal isolation, locked in a cell. But past-Gemma, too, lives in the “bardo” of infertility and loss, waiting uncertainly, not physically isolated but emotionally estranged from her husband. The frank portrayal of Gemma’s reproductive ordeal resonates with many women, if responses in fertility sub-Reddits are any indication. (It’s worth noting, too, that undergoing Church-approved reproductive restorative medicine is no guarantee against feeling like a science experiment, and no protection from disappointment and loss, so aspects of Gemma’s story will likely resonate even with women who refuse A.R.T.)

In the world of the show, a Lutheran pastor teaches that innies have their own immortal souls. I haven’t clocked any Catholics yet, but I doubt the Church would agree. Confronted with severance, she would likely repeat her teachings on frozen embryos: the existence of the innie represents an irresolvable injustice. (Personally, I’d like to read our own Michael Hanby on the severance procedure in a parallel Lumon-verse.) “Severance,” in all its strangeness, invites us to see innies as the product of suffering seeking hope in new technology. But this hope is tragically misplaced, and results in a greater injustice. Rarely have the ethical dilemmas of A.R.T.—for all involved—been so clearly, if unknowingly, illustrated.