Facts About In Vitro Fertilization

In our last post, Time to Talk About IVF,  we reported on how the government is trying to pass a bill that will make available to women unfettered access to reproductive technologies that fertilize their eggs devoid of the conjugal or married act.  The bill will undoubtedly make the reproductive technological industry quite profitable on the backs of taxpayers.

Some are adamantly against GMC’s position on the immorality of IVF procedures, citing that a loving couple should not be denied a child of their genetic material just because they cannot conceive in the usual way. GMC is not unsympathetic to those couple’s plight, but no matter how much the desire, it can never be accomplished with immoral means. If you take the logic of any means necessary, then you would have to agree that a person without enough money should have the green light to rob a bank of his choosing. The means is robbery, and the end is that the person has more money than before the theft.

Even though means justifying ends leads to ludicrous conclusions, today’s culture still dismisses this argument, and IVF is no exception. The term used for the means justifying the ends is called proportionalism, denounced by St. John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor.  This is precisely what is going on with IVF and other reproductive technologies that separate the conjugal act from procreation.

Without getting too deep in the weeds, there are three significant things a Catholic should know about the immorality of IVF.  They are as follows:

• Children are a gift from God and not the right of a married couple
• A child is not an object but a human person
• IVF destroys and freezes fertilized eggs (human persons) to achieve one pregnancy

Children are gifts, not the right of a married couple

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is quite clear on this topic. “A child is not something owed to one, but it is a gift. The ‘supreme gift of marriage’ is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged ‘right to a child’ would lead.

A child is not an object but a human person

By the nature of the procedure of IVF, the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act are separated. Not only is the process an affront to the sanctity of marriage by producing a child outside of God’s plan for creation, but it also denigrates the child born in the lab as nothing more than an object instead of a person.

Donum Vitae succinctly makes this point: “The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, ‘the supreme gift’ and the most gratuitous. gift of marriage and is a living testimony of the mutual giving of his parents. For this reason, the child has the right to be the fruit of the specific act of conjugal love of his parents, and he also has the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception.”

IVF Destroys and freezes fertilized eggs to achieve one pregnancy

The two previous moral considerations concern the rejection of God’s plan for creation. In contrast, the last immoral objection concerns the procedure that fertilizes at least 12 fertilized eggs, of which only one will be used. The others are discarded or frozen.

It is commonly known that IVF is not an exact science insofar as the procedure is not 100%, meaning many attempts often fail. With over 400,000 attempts, only one-quarter were successful in pregnancies. The live birth rate is less than the number of pregnancies.  And of those births, a good proportion of those children have medical issues.

What needs to be kept in mind is that each fertilized egg is a human person; some are frozen and never used again and held in some state of suspended life, while others are destroyed—the moral crisis of having these nascent persons frozen or destroyed is a challenge for every civilized society. 

There are other moral options a couple can utilize to start or add to their families, such as adoption or the use of fertility-enhancing drugs and measures that do not offend the will of God; IVF isn’t one of them.