WHY DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH OPPOSE IN VITRO FERTILIZATION (IVF)?

The pain and suffering brought about by infertility to millions of couples can never be overstated. The Catholic Church is at the forefront of encouraging any morally permissible means to overcome infertility. The Catholic Church understands the desperation that leads many couples to seek IVF as a solution to their situation but teaches that it is morally wrong.

IVF refers to the fusion outside of the female genital tract (in the laboratory) of a human egg and sperm so as to conceive a new individual. It is an increasingly popular means of treating infertility. Regardless of the way a child is conceived in the eyes of the Church they are infinitely valuable: Louise Brown (the first child born via IVF) is just as precious as you or I. However, there is a difference between looking at the means of achieving something and the end that is achieved. I personally think the pyramids of Egypt are a “wonder of the world”, beautiful to look at and a marvel of engineering. However the way they were made using thousands of slave labourers would have made me stop the production before it started if I happened to be the site manager, and I guess you would feel the same.

The rights of children are paramount. Catholics believe that children have an inalienable right to be conceived by parents who are loving, stable and sufficiently resourced both financially and emotionally. Few people would disagree with this.

As Catholics we also believe that the rights of a child include that their genesis is related to a specific sexual intercourse, or in other words we believe in the intense personalism (a man and a woman joining together in love) rather than biologicalism (sex can be just about sperm and eggs getting together). If one looks at the psychological nature of human beings this is what corresponds to the truth: you are too valuable to be reduced to mere biology. It is a paradox that Catholics are seen in the area of sex as the people who are hung up on biology and the world is not, when actually the Church opposes biologicalism most of all! If one really believes that the union of the couple contributes to the value of sex and not just the children conceived then it should matter always.

There are absolute right and wrongs. If something is very, very valuable then everybody says it is always wrong to attack it, whatever the circumstances: take rape or racism as examples. Coital integrity (sex the way God made it) is such an absolute good.  Ask yourself whetehr one act of racism is ever justifiable if, say, you could earn a billion pounds to help the poor? I hope you think the answer is no, the end cannot justify the means.  What is more we are not prepared to say that sometimes procreation is the only goal of sex and the union of the couple does not matter: they are both valuable and therefore should be treasured in each and every act of sex. This is the logical position to hold if one really believes that sex is very, very good and not just a biological act.  Personalism is the exact opposite of contra-“ception” and also contra-“union”.

With this personalistic understanding about sex a child not only inherits body fluids/gametes via sexual intercourse, they also "inherit" in a mysterious way the promise of their parents’ love: i.e. the bonding aspect of sex is between the man, the woman, the child and God. We should not just produce babies like we produce a car or a bicycle: human reproduction should always be more than biology. Perhaps the best, though far from adequate, analogy of this truth is the feeling communicated by the reception of a Christmas gift rather than the physical gift itself: "it is the thought that counts". Similarly, simply getting a box of chocolates from Tesco’s is a whole lot different than getting them from your 10 year old son who has saved up his pocket money for three months to get them for you!

What about the loving, stable married couple that can only conceive a child by IVF? Surely this is a justifiable case? Is one act of IVF really such a big deal? Quite obviously, given the intense and legitimate good desire to have children, there are mitigating circumstances when one is analysing moral responsibility: nevertheless one act of conception divorced from sexual intercourse really is such a big deal. Leaving aside the serious practical objections to IVF due to the purposeful wastage and sex selection of human embryos, the achievement of conception in this situation is still wrong.

 Sometimes to be virtuous demands sacrifice. The end cannot justify the means. Apart from our duties toward God to use sex in the way He intended, there is one other very good reason that even those who do not share a belief in God can understand. In anything that we do, if we are really interested in justice we should try to protect the common good. The common good is that situation which protects the rights of the most vulnerable in society over and above our own rights. If a society accepts the principle that the constituent parts of the sexual act, i.e. the bonding and the procreative, can be separated, then serious threats to the common good ensue. When the bonding function is held over and above the rights of children inherent in the procreative function of sex, we see the justification of adultery, multiple sexual partners, etc. Conversely when procreation is seen as divorceable from a bonding, loving sexual act, then children become commodities rather than gifts, opening the door to the right of homosexual couples to parent children, IVF for sixty year old Italian women (if you have the money you can have the baby), eugenic selection of embryos for implantation (i.e. if you want a product, better get a good one), assisted single parenthood etc.: there is no logical reason to oppose them.

All of these things in our society cause immense damage. Therefore the intense personalism of each and every act of sexual intercourse is a principle worth fighting for, a fight which undoubtedly can cost an infertile couple dearly. Historically we know that once the moral absolute position is neglected for the hard case, then quite logically liberalisation occurs: e.g., abortion, initially just for rape, now all but on demand, the pill just for married women now freely available to all, artificial insemination of a husband’s sperm into his wife, now the insemination of a medical student’s semen into any woman, married or single, and IVF for stable, young, married couples, now for sixty year old single Italian women (yes, it really happened!).

If you would like a more in depth response to this challenging subject and related topics I can recommend The Catholic Truth Society website: www.cts-online.org.uk  as a source of inexpensive pamphlets and books.