Q. I have friends who just had a baby via in vitro fertilization. They are thrilled with this baby, and I don’t understand why the Church is opposed to this method when a couple is unable to have children in the normal way. — KR., Connecticut.
A. You are right that it is hard to understand why the Church would oppose IVF when the process has brought joy to so many couples. So let’s look at some facts that are not usually included in the discussion.
First of all, the process is not at all like the loving union of a husband and wife. It involves drugs designed to produce not one but multiple eggs, most of which are then fertilized in the laboratory and several of which are put into the mother’s womb in the hope that at least one will be viable. What happens to the tiny human embryos that are not implanted? They are either experimented upon or they are frozen for future implantation. There are an estimated half a million frozen embryos in cold storage in this country at the present time.
What happens when the woman finds herself pregnant with several babies? The doctors then kill the extras through a procedure with the euphemistic name of “selective pregnancy reduction.” Once in a while, you have a victim of the fertility industry like Nadya Suleman, dubbed “Octomom” by the media, who first conceived and delivered six babies using IVF and then wanted a dozen frozen extras implanted in her womb. Eight of them were born to this single woman on welfare, who now has 14 children, some of whom have serious handicaps.
As columnist Dale O’Leary has noted, “Babies born using IVF are more likely than naturally conceived children to have major and minor congenital malformations, cancer, cerebral paralysis, and genetic brain disorders.” Columnist Wesley Smith tells of a study reported in the London Daily Mail in 2013 that said: “Scientists said those born after fertility treatments were 33 percent more likely to have childhood cancer. They were 65 percent more likely to develop leukemia, and 88 percent more likely to develop cancers of the brain and central nervous system.”
There is also the harm caused to women who undergo this hugely expensive ($12,400 for an average IVF cycle) and often unsuccessful procedure. Following passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in Britain in 1990, nearly 4 million human embryos were created between 1992 and 2006, but only 122,043 live births resulted — a success rate of 3.2 percent. The success rate in the United States is much higher, between 25 and 30 percent, but that still means that 70 to 75 percent of women do not have the children they desperately wanted, and millions of tiny humans are sacrificed in the process.
Wesley Smith reported last year on an op-ed piece in The New York Times entitled, “Selling the Fantasy of Fertility,” in which two women — Miriam Zoll and Pamela Tsigdinos — who had painful experiences trying to have a child said that “those contemplating treatments have a right to know about the health risks, ethical concerns, broken marriages, and, for many, deep depression often associated with failed treatments. They need objective, independent advice from health care and mental health professionals focused on the person’s well-being instead of the profit.”
These women expressed concern about the “millions of men and women who have engaged in a debilitating, Sisyphus-like battle with themselves and their infertility, involving daily injections, drugs, hormones, countless blood tests, and other procedures. Big Fertility uses the desperation of want-to-be parents to gain market share. But what they are selling is packaged in hope and sold to customers who are at their wits’ end, desperate and vulnerable. Once inside the surreal world of reproductive medicine, there is no obvious off-ramp; you keep at it as long as your bank account, health insurance, or sanity holds out.”
So what sounds like a nice clean process actually involves egg and sperm donors who get paid for their donations (cf. the book Eggsploitation for the disturbing details); surrogate mothers who sometimes balk at giving up the baby they have carried for nine months; masturbation and artificial insemination; production of babies not just for husbands and wives, but also for single men and women and for same-sex couples. And some of the IVF-conceived children are growing up angry because they cannot find out who their biological father is. Their traumatic experience can be seen on the video Anonymous Father’s Day.
In addition to these practical problems with IVF, there is also the moral dimension. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 2376):
“Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques…infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ ‘right to become a father and a mother only through each other’.”
In summary, said Dale O’Leary, “a child should be conceived in an act of love between a man and a woman committed to each and the child for life. One woman who tried and failed to have a child through IVF said it felt like she was trying to have a baby with her doctor, not her husband.” Mrs. O’Leary said that “children are not commodities to be bought and sold, a product to be ordered. In opposing IVF, surrogate motherhood, and artificial insemination donation, the Church puts the right of the child before the desires of the adults. Unfortunately, it is a hard teaching to sell.”
It should also be pointed out that while the Church cannot approve conception of a child via in vitro fertilization, nevertheless, the Church says that “every child which comes into the world must in any case be accepted as a living gift of the divine Goodness and must be brought up with love” (Donum Vitae, part II, 5).
Those couples interested in a moral solution to the problem of infertility should contact the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction in Omaha, Neb. Founded in 1985 by Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers, the institute is internationally recognized for its outstanding achievements in the field of natural fertility regulation and reproductive medicine. Contact fcco@popepaulvi.com or www.fertilitycare.org.
Q. If a married person who has been surgically sterilized for contraceptive purposes later repents of that action, is he or she obligated to have the procedure reversed? — Name and State Withheld.
A. According to moral theologian Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, “the Church has never declared this to be a required step, in part because of the risks and burdens associated with surgical interventions, in part because of the high uncertainty of a successful outcome, and in part because of the potentially significant expenses involved.”
He says that “even though a reversal may not be feasible or obligatory, the repentant couple may nonetheless become aware of the need to order their sexual activity and appetites in the face of their original sterilization decision and its extended consequences. They may recognize a pressing need to grow in the virtue of marital chastity and to engage in a lifestyle that authentically embodies their new, albeit delayed, rejection of the contraceptive mentality.”
What can these repentant couples do? Fr. Pacholczyk says that “in these situations, clergy and spiritual advisers will often encourage couples to pattern their sex life on the same cycle of periodic abstinence that fertile couples follow when using Natural Family Planning (NFP). During times of abstinence, the couples actively exercise self-control, thereby reordering the sensual and sexual appetites. This strengthens spouses in their resolve not to reduce each other to objects for pursuing sexual self-gratification. This is important because various forms of contraception, including permanent sterilization, often involve the phenomenon of the woman feeling as if she is being ‘used’ by her husband.”
He says that “by abstaining during fertile times, then, the sterilized couple reintegrates the same positive behaviors that they might have practiced had they not chosen to be sterilized. In this way, the science of NFP offers the repentant sterilized couple a school of opportunity to acquire virtue within their marital and their conjugal relations.”
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