By Father Tom Knoblach
Matters of human sexuality is often met with opposition, from eye-rolling to outright scorn. It is among the most counter-cultural messages the Church proclaims. Where an estimated 90% of couples in the United States use some form of contraception (the rate is higher for those not married, but still around 88% within marriage), the idea of “openness to life” and children as the supreme gift of marriage” seem absurd to many and even harmful to others.
The Church obviously favors the procreation of new human life, always including their protection, nurturing, education, and all their other needs for healthy parenting and love. Why, then, does Catholic teaching oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF)?
It seems contradictory. These are children who are clearly wanted by those who seek IVF assistance, most often for cases of infertility and at times for genetic concerns. These couples are willing to invest significant costs and persevere in attempts to bring a child to birth despite repeated failures in the process. The potential mothers undergo hormone treatments to stop the natural cycle of ovulation and stimulate the ovaries to ripen a number of ova (egg cells) at once. Then there are invasive procedures to retrieve ova and have the presumed “best” embryos conceived in vitro (literally, in glass in the clinic) implanted in their wombs. With such clear sacrifices in the search to become parents, how can a pro-life Church say no to this?
There are practical objections to IVF. The cost (from $15,000 to $35,000 per cycle) means only more prosperous couples have access. Medicare, Medicaid and most private insurance does not cover IVF, although there is a patchwork of policies depending on location, employer and type of coverage; even well-off couples can face financial stress. The rate of fetal anomalies and long-term health problems from IVF conceptions are unknown, but some research suggests there are some unclear protective factors in sperm and egg selection within natural fertilization that are lost in using IVF.
While IVF clinics are more likely to implant fewer embryos than in years past, there is still the risk of multiple children developing in the womb simultaneously, with the attendant medical risks to mother and babies. At times, the unwanted embryos are aborted to allow the one or two survivors a better chance at survival.
Further, there are perhaps 10 million frozen embryos worldwide, around 1.6 million in the US alone. As early as 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith raised this problem in its instruction Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life): “In consequence of the fact that they have been produced in vitro, those embryos which art not transferred into the body of the mother and are called “spare” are exposed to an absurd fate, with no possibility of their being offered safe means of survival which can be licitly pursued” (n.5).
More recently, the Instruction Dignitas Personae (2008) repeated this striking teaching: “All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (n. 19, emphasis in original). With the laboratory creation and storage of embryos, many of whom will die without any way of knowing it, we have created a moral dilemma for which there is no answer. Thus St. John Paul II urged that such manipulation of embryos – often used for research into stem cells and other proposals, and destroyed in the process – be halted worldwide. Needless to say, that appeal was ignored.
Yet that papal appeal and other Church teaching points us to the deeper concerns with IVF – moral concerns rather than only practical or economic ones. For Catholic teaching, successfully conceived embryos, whether in utero or in vitro, are human beings, subjects of rights and therefore protection of those rights, especially the most basic, the right to life itself. Donum Vitae states: “the fruit of human generation, from the first moment of its existence … demands the unconditional respect that is morally due to the human being in his bodily and spiritual totality. The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception” (Foreword).
It is hard to think of these microscopic cells as human; yet it is the way each of us began. While we have grown and gained so much, we are the same individual person as we were in our first moment.
A further moral concern is focused on the dignity of marriage and being co-creators with God of new human life. While St. Paul V’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae is usually associated with rejecting the use of contraception, that is only the consequence of a larger truth. In Humanae Vitae, n. 12, we read that the critical truth it conveys is “based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.”
That “inseparable connection” works both ways. One may not choose the unitive meaning of sexual intimacy while intentionally excluding the procreative good it also entails – thus contraception is morally excluded. But by the very same logic, one may not choose the procreative end – conceiving a child – apart from the unitive good of the married couple’s sexual act.
From this core truth expressed in Humanae Vitae, both contraception and IVF are morally excluded from being authentic expressions of the created good of human sexuality.
I readily admit this may sound complex and abstract. Yet whenever the Church says a moral “No,” it is always in the context of a greater “Yes” to underlying goods – in this case, a great “Yes” to life (Dignitas Personae, n. 1). I am writing this, and you are reading it, because God has said that “Yes” to us so we may live.
Above photo: A medical lab technologist carries out an embryo vitrification protocol during an intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection process at a laboratory in Paris Sept. 13, 2019. (OSV News photo/Christian Hartmann, Reuters)