The multi-layered immorality of In Vitro Fertilization

In 2004, The Final Cut was a science-fiction thriller about a future in which chips implanted in people at birth record their lives. After a person dies, a professional editor, played by Robin Williams, assembles the recordings into a memorial film called a “Rememory.” The Jim Caviezel character leads a movement opposing the technology and seeks to expose its dangers.

Maybe a sequel could help us begin to close the Pandora’s box that In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) technology has opened.

God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The Church witnesses to the dignity of every human being from the moment of conception. God willing, conception itself is a beautiful culmination of human love and the marital embrace.

Man meets woman. They fall in love, marry, and celebrate their honeymoon. Following marital intimacy, a baby is conceived. Mom carries the baby to term, and the baby is born into, one hopes, an intact and loving family. The family is the “domestic Church.” The Church and the domestic Church are interdependent. So goes the family, so goes the Church. So goes the Church, so goes the family.

Just as the bridegroom goes out to meet his bride in matrimony, Jesus, the Divine Bridegroom, goes out to meet His bride, the Church, at every Mass. The covenant of matrimony images the New and Everlasting Covenant of the Mass.

Husbands and wives likewise participate in God’s creative love through marriage, particularly in the marital embrace. Although couples may forgo the marital embrace for serious reasons, its intimacy is a profound expression of human love. The pattern of the embrace reflects the generous love of the Blessed Trinity and honors God’s handiwork.

As Pope Paul VI wrote in Humanae Vitae, the unitive and procreative aspects of the marital embrace are inseparable. We follow nature uplifted by grace. In short, “bonding and babies” reflect human nature, the dignity of new life, and the complementarity of male and female in marriage. When a baby is born, its parents do not look upon the child as a possession, but as a mysterious and wonderful gift from God in which Mom and Dad were privileged participants.

IVF undermines marital love by separating conception from the marital embrace and placing it under technological control:

• Healthy ova are medically extracted from the woman.
• Separately, a man provides sperm, usually through masturbation.
• Technicians supervise fertilization, select embryos for implantation, and may freeze surplus embryos, discard others, or use them for research.

Believing Catholics—and indeed, anyone concerned about human dignity—should consider these objections:

• IVF dispenses with the marital embrace and makes conception a laboratory procedure.
• Sperm collection ordinarily involves masturbation, which may also involve pornography, violating Catholic teaching on the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.
• Human life begins at conception. The deliberate destruction of embryos, in the Church’s moral understanding, violates the Fifth Commandment.
• Freezing embryos leaves human lives in a precarious and unresolved state—a morally troubling scenario.
• A baby may be treated as a “right” to be fulfilled rather than God’s gift entrusted to parental stewardship.
• Destroying embryos because of disabilities, including Down syndrome, raises grave questions about discrimination and the value of human life.
• The IVF industry can facilitate other abuses, including commercial surrogacy, the sale of reproductive material, and serious misconduct by fertility professionals.

Supporters argue that infertility is widespread and IVF offers hope to couples who long for children. They contend that medical science should not be restricted by religious objections, that IVF brings wanted babies into the world, and that regulation can prevent abuses. They may argue that some discarded embryos are unlikely to develop successfully and, in any case, cannot experience pain or conscious awareness at this early stage.

Church ethicists respond that the desire for a child, however understandable, does not by itself establish that every means of conception is morally permissible. Nor does the birth of a healthy child resolve the ethical questions surrounding other embryos conceived in the process.

The Church has few reliable political allies on IVF. Democrats often frame reproductive policy in terms of “reproductive freedom,” while critics of IVF may be labeled extremists. Yet during the 2024 presidential election year, all 49 Republican senators, including Catholics Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, supported IVF. At the time, I sent each senator a respectful letter of protest by snail mail. Not one had the courtesy to send even a boilerplate reply.

Suppose, hypothetically, that the IVF industry came to its moral senses and stopped. What would we do with the inventory of frozen embryos? Catholic ethicists have considered two perplexing and problematic options: allowing the embryos to expire naturally when storage ends, or transferring them to other women who would carry them to term.

Allowing frozen embryos to die raises a difficult question: Who would turn off the electricity? Is discontinuing storage morally equivalent to deliberately destroying embryos, or must we distinguish between directly causing death and allowing death to occur?

Embryo adoption may initially seem appealing. Women would volunteer for embryo transfer and bring the babies to term. Yet even if some embryos could be brought to birth, embryo adoption would not resolve the underlying ethical problems of IVF or the fate of all frozen embryos. Alas, the IVF industry might treat embryo adoption as another market opportunity, encouraging continued embryo production.

IVF has introduced moral evils that will continue to multiply unless we confront them honestly and reject IVF. We cannot rely on politicians alone. Perhaps a screenwriter could produce a film like The Final Cut to awaken popular culture to the dangers of treating human life as a technological product.

In the meantime, Church leaders must do their best to form the faithful to grow in their understanding of the splendor of human sexuality, marriage, family, and the dignity of each and every human being.