“Understanding Church teachings and defending the dignity of life” by Fr. John for The Texas Catholic.
As another election concludes, Catholics should remember we are responsible for helping to unify our country. One way to do that is to announce together the Church’s prophetic call to both parties.
In this election cycle, politicians from the two major political parties in the country unfortunately agreed on at least one thing: support for In-Vitro Fertilization. Whichever party we support, we should try to pull it away from this error striking at the relationship between technology, marriage, and life.
There are different reasons people use IVF. Some use it to bypass the natural order and produce children outside of a heterosexual union. Others use it to control their children by selecting them for life (or death) according to the desirability of their genetics. The grave immorality of such actions is, I think, still easy for most people to understand. But the judgment becomes more difficult for many people, when IVF is used to overcome the great suffering experienced by infertile spouses. Spouses who suffer infertility deserve our solidarity and compassion. Given the tremendous joy of children, and the natural purpose of marriage, it is hard to imagine how acutely they might suffer from infertility, at least until God shows them His plan for their union.
Why does the Catholic faith oppose IVF? “The Catechism of the Catholic Church” devotes many passages to infertility and such technological interventions (#2373-2379). In such a short space as this, let me quote just one passage and develop it. Interventions such as IVF “dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that ‘entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.’ ‘Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses’ union.’”
From this passage, it is clear that the Church’s objection to IVF is not concerned simply with immoral side effects, like the terrifying moment someone assumes the authority to let one embryonic human being live and to destroy another because of its perceived weakness; or the tortuous separation that I suspect often happens when “surrogates” give up the children they have carried in their wombs, cruelly severing all the physiological and psychological attachments our nature is designed to foster during pregnancy and birth. The objection concerns more than such things, because the Church understands that something is wrong with IVF itself and not just what could surround the procedure. The essential problem is that IVF replaces the marital embrace and separates it from procreation. Like contraception, IVF separates conception from the delight of spousal union – to the detriment of both.
Children deserve to come into this world through the embodied union achieved by their parents. Thus, they are to be desired as love’s literal fruit and to be received as gifts of God rather than as products of our own artifice.
Of course, every child conceived through IVF shares in the same dignity as every other person. IVF is just one of many ways in which our human origins — for all of us — can be burdened by the reality of sin. (Besides Jesus, we know only one immaculately conceived person!) The Church’s teaching does not in any way imply that there is something wrong with the children themselves; on the contrary, she insists as she does precisely to affirm their human dignity.
Our culture sometimes tries anxiously to find solutions to our problems through technology, with the sad effect of ignoring and even harming our nature further. I’m not a doctor, but those I trust lead me to believe that infertility can have many causes, and some of them can be traced to our culture’s hubristic reliance upon technology. Infertility is rising at the same time that artificial endocrine disrupters are being found in our products and our environment; and important facts about women’s health are not known by doctors who blithely prescribe things like hormonal contraception without a holistic understanding of its effects — to give only two examples. Technology is very good when we use it to serve nature, but not when we use it cavalierly to ignore or even override nature.
I imagine the pain of infertility can be immense. Let us pray that spouses struggling with infertility find good doctors — those who are experts in the marvelous and multi-dimensional design of our nature, and who know how to serve that nature physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Let us also pray and advocate so that society will be led by politicians who cherish nature and promote truly salutary resources to overcome infertility.