Inherently Wrong

Back when I was in seminary, I once argued fiercely about the morality of I.V.F. with a friend of mine. He and his wife had recently been married, a bit later in life, and had been struggling to conceive. My friend and I stayed up late into the night over some break during the school year, drinking bourbon and looking through the history of the Church’s relevant magisterial statements. I took the hardline approach expressed in Donum vitae and reiterated in later documents: artificial fertilization was intrinsically immoral. My friend agreed with a lot of the supporting points, but was not able to square that final dogmatic statement with his and his wife’s desire to have kids and start a family. There was no resolution to the argument. He and his wife opted to pursue I.V.F. and have had several children. The first of these was born shortly after I was ordained a transitional deacon. I was asked to do the baptism, and so the second baptism I ever performed was of a baby conceived by in vitro fertilization. Along with those of all the other people I have baptized, that baby’s name and date of baptism were written in my little prayer notebook to be remembered every year on the anniversary.

While the recent decision of the Alabama Supreme Court has made the morality of I.V.F. a subject of widespread debate, the public conversation is not at the same level as the argument my friend and I were having. The legal decision was about whether the destruction of embryos preserved in an I.V.F. facility could be grounds for a suit under wrongful death legislation. The court did not comment on the personhood of the embryos in question, only whether or not they counted as “children” under current Alabama wrongful death law. Subsequent arguments surrounding the question have all focused on the death or right to life of such artificially fertilized embryos. There was comparatively little discussion of whether the artificial fertilization of embryos at all was immoral. Secular commenters, whether in favor of or opposed to abortion, argued over whether or not frozen embryos could be killed. It did not seem like anyone was asking whether or not I.V.F. should be used in the first place.

The secular pro-choice responses argued that such embryos are not human, that they do not deserve human rights, and that any embryos lost along the way are all the cost of doing business, as it were. A journalist mentioned on Twitter that, when her son had been born, she had all of her other embryos conceived by I.V.F. destroyed. That moment was the “happiest day of her life,” as it meant her family was complete. The discarded embryos had never been human. One could suppose that their loss of life was considered one necessary, scientific part of the process of a couple getting the family they wanted.

This is very much the view of doctors interviewed by secular news outlets for their descriptions of the case. Dr. Eve Feinberg of Northwestern University discussed the subject on N.P.R. She brushed away the death of any number of embryos as an inevitable part of a couple’s getting the baby they want. The broadcast used blunt and clinical language to describe the “reality” of pregnancy, in which fertilized eggs do not “make it.”

This is certainly true. If it happens outside of anyone’s control in natural pregnancies, certainly death must be a fact of life when trying to manufacture a pregnancy. As Feinberg pointed out, even in the “best” clinics, only around half of embryos reach the blastocyst stage (i.e., the infamous “clump of cells”). All of this death and failure to create a child are a necessary cost of the I.V.F. process, and the Alabama ruling jeopardizes the financial viability of the whole industry. Feinberg was very clear about the financial dimension, lamenting that the ruling may also make offering I.V.F. too expensive for providers, who might have to pay more for malpractice insurance where embryos are protected as people.

This seems to be the real tragedy of the issue in her eyes. After all, couples spend thousands of dollars attempting to have children conceived in glass vessels in this way—or, as some proponents put it, “Many people go into debt to achieve their dream of having children.” The statement put out by the Medical Association of Alabama levies the same objection: ruling that destroyed embryos are subject to wrongful death lawsuits “will likely lead to fewer babies—children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins—as fertility options become limited for those who want to have a family.” Children are valuable in their relation to the family that desires them, and any other children lost along the way are a medically necessary result of the process. Failure to come to terms with this reality of death at life’s beginnings, and to insist upon the personhood of babies preserved in freezers, is an unscientific and ignorant moralism. According to secular public opinion, anyone who insists that the embryos involved in the I.V.F. process deserve legal rights simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I am not at all surprised by this response, as the pro-choice position is either that the unborn are not human beings, or at least not human beings with legal rights. But even secular pro-life groups echo similar logic. The same is true of Republican politicians, some of whom claimed to oppose the court’s ruling while insisting that they believe (as Nikki Haley said) “an embryo is an unborn baby.” The personhood of these unborn babies, central to the pro-life position, apparently does not preclude the idea of their being conceived artificially in the lab.

The story is similar for larger, secular pro-life groups. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which does not profess any religious affiliation while describing itself as “the political arm of the pro-life movement,” supports the use of I.V.F. as long as the right to life of artificially fertilized embryos is respected. In a statement on the Alabama ruling, the organization posited, “It is unacceptable [that] the Alabama legislature has advanced a bill that falls short of pro-life expectations and fails to respect the dignity of human life. Alabama can do both: allow the continued practice of I.V.F. with care for those suffering from infertility and respect life created through the IVF.” The group Secular Pro Life has made similar pronouncements over the years. In an article in 2017, a member of the group opined, “From my perspective, there is nothing inherently wrong with IVF if it were done on one embryo at a time, which gives every embryo the best possible chance of life.” As long as no selective reductions were performed or embryos were lost, I.V.F. would be just fine.

The logic seems to be this: babies are good, pro-life people want more babies, and so I.V.F. practiced in a way that does not result in death would be an expression of the pro-life position.

It seems like a uniquely Catholic position, then, to oppose I.V.F. on principle. The broader pro-choice view is that since embryos die all the time and do not have rights, we might as well use science to make babies for the people who want them. The secular pro-life view is that using science to make babies for people who want them is fine, so long as we avoid killing any embryos ourselves. The idea that the embryo has a right to be conceived naturally never enters into the discussion. The news cycle around the Alabama I.V.F. ruling is entirely framed by the abortion debate, with the question of a right to life for the unborn or a lack thereof. Any other rights an embryo might have are never considered.

The Church, on the other hand, has a lot to say about the human dignity of the unborn beyond the fact that we shouldn’t kill them. In 1987, Donum vitae spelled out the rationale for the Church’s teaching against artificial means of conception on two fronts. First, it is an offense against the dignity of marriage. Every time a couple engages in intercourse, that sexual act is supposed to be both unitive and open to life. Separating sex from procreation is the sin of contraception; separating procreation from sex is the sin of artificial conception. This is an offense against the meaning of marriage itself, said the C.D.F.: artificial fertilization “objectively effects an analogous separation between the goods and the meanings of marriage.” To split the gift of new life from the sexual union of the spouses splits marriage itself. It contradicts the theological meaning of the body and human reproduction as an act of love, in the image of God’s own love.

Second, and more starkly, artificial fertilization violates the rights of the child. Donum vitae is insistent: “The child must be respected and recognized as equal in personal dignity to those who give him life.” This is not just outdated language from thirty-five years ago, either: the same argument was just recently used regarding surrogacy in the new document from the D.D.F. on human dignity, Dignitas infinita: “Because of this unalienable dignity, the child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin.” This logic might seem odd, but it is an ancient principle of Catholic sexual ethics to think that the dignity of a child, even before and during its conception, restricts the liberty of a couple. Saint Thomas argues that fornication is a mortal sin specifically because it offends against potential offspring: “since fornication is an indeterminate union of the sexes, as something incompatible with matrimony, it is opposed to the good of the child’s upbringing, and consequently it is a mortal sin.” Deciding to have sex in a way that fails to provide the best environment for raising children is an offense against the reproductive purpose of sex and the human dignity of those children. Thus, the Catholic Church has always held that children, even before they might be conceived, have a dignity that impinges upon the liberty of their parents. Parents are not free to do whatever they wish in bringing children into the world because those potential children have an equal human dignity to that of Mom and Dad.

Thought of in this way, it becomes possible to see the commodification and dehumanization inherent in artificial conception. To fertilize an egg in a lab with collected semen is to breed a child like cattle. To purchase the conception of a child from a lab is to buy and sell a baby like a slave. This language probably sounds harsh and is probably deeply offensive to couples who have chosen to use I.V.F. in the past. But this is the clear teaching of the Church, and to abandon this way of thinking would be to abandon our Catholic commitment to human dignity. To reduce the question of I.V.F. to a discussion only of whether or not we can discard frozen embryos is to reduce the human dignity of the unborn to only the right to life. Human life and human dignity are so much more than just a right to not be killed or thrown away like medical waste.

Rejecting artificial fertilization because of the embryo’s human dignity is perfectly consistent with being pro-life and with treating children conceived in that way with dignity and love. The sin of the parents is not the sin of the child. The fact that the parents and the doctors sinned in unnaturally conceiving a child is not and cannot be a reason to mistreat or devalue that child’s life. The whole point of the Catholic position is that children have an inviolable dignity. God’s love for those children, and His desire that we should treat them with love, does not vanish or become nullified if they have already been mistreated.

And it is God’s radical love of humanity, the foundation of our human dignity, that provides the final answer to all the objections. The pro-choice medical professional sees the children discarded during I.V.F. as no different from so many other pregnancies that end in miscarriage. Jesus Christ knows each of those babies by name, and unites their death to His Own on the cross. Only in that cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ does death find a satisfying answer. The couple feeling the ache of infertility sees I.V.F. as a means to satisfy a longing for fulfillment and love, without recognizing the lack of love in treating that child merely as an object of desire. Jesus Christ provides an answer to that longing and every lack of love in his own Precious Blood poured out on the cross for His spouse, the Church. Our suffering receives a purpose in God’s own suffering and death. The evil of every infant death, the unfairness of which couples can conceive and which cannot, and the reality that no couple and no family can ever really love as well as it ought finds its meaning and its answer in Jesus Christ crucified. As in every other thorny moral issue, the God Who became man to wear a crown of thorns reveals the true face of love. The death of the innocent unborn may seem too great an evil to face. The pain of an empty nursery might seem like too much to ask of a couple who struggle to conceive. But the Church’s response is not a soulless moral rule. It is the same answer that Saint Paul encountered on the road to Damascus and that he preached constantly: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

So the Church stands alone insisting that artificial conception is always wrong. This should not be a surprise. As Vatican II declared, “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” Only in the knowledge that God loved us enough to take on our flesh and die for us do we find the courage, grace, and insight to truly uphold human dignity. The Catholic Church does not reject artificial fertilization because it does not understand the science or because it does not love babies enough. The Church rejects I.V.F. because it alone has been given the fullness of the truth of the human person in Jesus Christ and the grace to face even death by the death of God. We can face the reality that so many embryos are horribly mistreated in labs. We can face the reality that so many die without the chance of birth. We can face the reality that all of this is our fault. We can face all of this, not out of ignorance or lack of love, but because we actually trust the powerful mercy of Jesus Christ to overcome sin and death.