<a><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-black-color">Most people have a strong and natural desire to have their own children. In Church teaching the gift of a child is one of the great goods of marriage. However, about one in seven couples have difficulty conceiving or carrying a baby to term and discovering this in your own life can be devastating.</mark></a>
Infertility is a tragedy for women and for men who want to become mothers and fathers and grandparents. There was a time when couples lived with this tragedy and accepted that having their own child was not meant to be. But the development of IVF technology in the 1970s opened up the possibility of bypassing the causes of infertility and going straight to pregnancy. With a lot of luck.
Today, IVF has now become not only commonplace but also big business and the first port of call for couples having difficulties. So, it comes as a shock to many couples to discover not only the financial, mental, physical and emotional cost of IVF, plus the medical risks, but also that the success rate for women under 35 is only 32 per cent. As Robert Winston, a scientist working in the field of fertility has said, the fertility industry is “selling a dream”.
Given that IVF is now routine, some people find it surprising that the Church is pro-life and yet Church teaching is against IVF. If the technology exists to enable couples to create their own child, even if the chances of achieving this are slim, should the Church not change her mind and embrace the technology that can bring about such a great good?
Thinking about the fundamental principle of human dignity may help us work through this question. According to this principle, every human being, from the beginning of his or her existence, has full human dignity which can never be lost. This dignity is not earned or bestowed on us by others, while this dignity asks that human beings come to be through a truly human act of marital love. This dignity is a gift, the kind of gift that is deepened and affirmed in our care for others, especially for the least and the weakest.
Church teaching is founded on deep and rich insights into the human condition, insights that are often neglected, ignored or forgotten by those who demand that its teaching should accommodate to changes in society, to new scientific developments or to the wishes of the majority.
Church teaching is not against science or technology. It is not simply a case of “Church says no”. Indeed, there are various departments in the Vatican dedicated to exploring new and emerging technologies in the light of Church teaching on human dignity and authentic human progress.
One problem with technology is that science rushes far ahead of ethics and we too easily get into the situation that whatever can be done, should be done. IVF is a good example of this: when Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards first started experimenting with human eggs and sperm based on technologies used in the farming industry, many in their scientific community saw this research as unethical.
However, women desperate to have children volunteered to take part in their experiments and the method of creating human beings in a laboratory rapidly became a matter of quality controlling and experimenting on embryos, selecting embryos with certain characteristics, grading embryos and throwing away the “less good” ones, storing and freezing embryos, destroying them in research, using them in stem cell research, manipulating their genes, giving them away or tipping them into medical waste.
Now, new research projects involving embryos do not intend to grow these embryos “to make” babies, but to explore what happens as early life develops. As a result of IVF technology, countless numbers of embryos are being used and destroyed in research projects and in the IVF process itself. Couples going through IVF are desperate to find out if their fertility clinic has managed to make “good embryos” from their eggs and sperm; “less good” embryos are discarded or used in further research.
If the experiment has worked, one embryo will be chosen from the others to be implanted leaving the fate of the other “spare” embryos in the balance. Only “good quality” embryos are chosen for freezing for use in later treatment, or are donated to research, or used in training technicians, or donated to someone else.
If more than one embryo is implanted, the procedure recommends foetal reduction, selecting one to be aborted, because multiple births are considered to be dangerous for mothers and children. By its very nature IVF creates injustice. Desperate couples often find themselves going along with whatever the technology demands with more and more add-ons being offered by the burgeoning fertility industry.
Couples go through all of this because of their great desire and hope to have and love their children. Nevertheless, whatever the intentions of parents and however much they long for children, IVF inevitably requires devaluing and depersonalising human life at its very beginning and reducing the smallest of human beings to raw material: “products of conception”. Without this objectification, technicians would not be able to manipulate embryos as they do in IVF.
Church teaching has long recognised the power of technology to control people instead of people being in control of technology. While the Church appreciates the promise of technology, her teaching asks, does this technology make human life more truly human, and does this technology respect human dignity?
Without doubt, all human beings, however they come to be, have full human dignity and this dignity can never be lost. A baby produced through IVF has the same dignity as all other babies and is to be cherished, loved and celebrated as all other babies.
The Church also teaches that human embryos have dignity and are owed the respect we owe to other human beings. Embryos should be cherished and protected. After all, both science and theology recognise that the <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-adventure-of-being-born-g-k-chestertons-150th-anniversary/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">adventure of a human life</mark></a> begins with the early embryo possessing its own unique genetic structure.
Every embryo, including a frozen embryo, is the daughter or son of its parents. While some argue that the embryo has no serious moral status because it does not “look like us”, this is precisely what each one of us looked like at the beginning of our lives.
In Catholic thinking, human beings have dignity in both natural and <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcast/the-problems-posed-by-private-revelations-with-simon-caldwell/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">supernatural dimensions</mark></a>. In the natural dimension, each human being from his or her very beginning as an embryo has intrinsic dignity as a human being. In the supernatural dimension, from the very beginning of their existence and as images of God, all human beings are called to share in the life of the Trinity. Unconditional respect is owed to every human being at every moment of their existence.
Embryos should not be made into objects or treated as experimental material to be selected over others, tested for quality or graded as “good” and “less good” or treated as raw material to be used for the desires of others, or stored or frozen.
This unconditional respect includes respect for the specific character of the personal act that transmits life. The truly human act that brings another human being into being is the act of sexual love between that human being’s parents. Precisely because we have dignity from our very beginning, we deserve to come to be through the loving embrace of our parents.
We should be begotten, not made in a laboratory through the intervention of technicians in an experiment to see if putting their components together gets results and where embryos are treated like failed experiments. We should not be the result of a manufacturing process; we are not products. The real suffering of infertility cannot override the dignity of every human life and the justice owed to that life.
The Church appreciates that not being able to have children is a real trial for people. She encourages medical research and treatment to find ways of overcoming infertility and recurrent miscarriage, provided this research is ethical, respects the dignity of human life and promotes truly human action.
In essence, Church teaching distinguishes between interventions that help or assist the marriage act so that the act remains truly human, and interventions that <em>replace</em> the act. This is why the Church supports fertility care such as NaProTechnology (Natural Procreative Technology). Rather than simply by-passing problems, this type of fertility care looks at the sources of infertility. Fertility care explores ways in which fertility can be restored or improved. Such care works with the couple to identify times of greatest fertility, providing hormone treatment and medication to improve ovulation or sperm count and quality, and surgical treatment to correct and treat tubal blockages, fibroids, polycystic ovaries and endometriosis.
Significantly, fertility care is at least as successful as IVF, looking to the underlying causes of infertility and promoting long-term reproductive health.
The Church recognises that good people struggle with her teaching on IVF precisely because good people long for children; they want to produce children in love. Many of us know and care about couples who are struggling and couples who have tried IVF. For those who want to remain faithful to Church teaching, this struggle is often isolating because infertility is a private pain. Look at the people in the pews on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and there will be some regular parishioners who are missing, who simply cannot face the heartache.
More often than not, there is no “fix it” solution, and the biblical narratives of Sarah, Rachel, Hannah and Elizabeth, with their happy outcomes, are of little comfort.
As caring communities, we need to learn how to educate people early on about infertility and fertility care during marriage preparation programmes; to walk alongside people, listen to their stories, allow people to share their pain and grief if they so choose; to be sensitive and not compound pain by ultimately unhelpful comments; to offer support – and above all pray to God, who can heal all wounds.<br><br><em>Photo: A laboratory worker introduces embryonic stem cells into a mouse embryo as part of research to understand how genes work at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML), Marseille, France, 9 February 2012. (Photo credit ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP via Getty Images.)</em><br><br><em>Dr Pia Matthews teaches Bioethics and Medical Law at St Mary’s University, Twickenham</em>.<br>
