Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
February 7, 2025
1889 Words
A year ago, the Supreme Court of Alabama brought long-needed attention to the practices, lack of regulation and dearth of ethics in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) and assisted reproductive technology industries. By an 8-1 margin, the Court determined that cryogenically frozen human embryos were to be considered unborn children under Alabama law and that businesses and families that decide to destroy or discard human embryos may be liable to punitive damages. Though the decision was sadly overridden by the Alabama state legislature, it shone a spotlight on the ethical wasteland of the artificial fertility industry, an $8 billion annual business in the United States that manufactures nearly 100,000 children a year, about one of every 40 kids born.
Since 1978, when the first IVF child, Louise Brown, was born, the Catholic Church has been a voice crying in the wilderness about the many ethical issues involved. While the Church affirms the humanity of every baby, however conceived, praises the desire for parents to have children, and compassionately recognizes the enormous suffering involved for parents struggling with infertility, she stresses that children are always a divine gift, not a right to whom parents are entitled.
The Church has catalogued the many moral issues involved: in IVF, children are manufactured, not begotten; women are impregnated not by a husband but by a technician with a pipette; men must masturbate to obtain the sperm for the laboratory insemination; excess embryonic children are created, with some implanted, others deep frozen in huge cryogenic orphanages, and others simply thrown away; pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is routinely done to design babies and discriminate among embryos based on sex, eye color, hair color or other qualities; some implanted embryos are selectively aborted; children are often prevented from ever discovering their biological parents’ identity; doctors have surreptitiously substituted their own sperm and become the father of hundreds of children; the surrogacy industry, banned in most countries of Europe for the exploitation of vulnerable women, is enabled; and children are put in a situation of multiple parental claims, from egg mom, sperm dad, surrogate mother, legal (paying) dad(s), legal mom(s) and, with new techniques for the manipulation of eggs, even stranger combinations.
Relatively few have had the courage to confront these issues. Everyone feels immense compassion for couples struggling with infertility and no one wants to offend the dignity or hurt the feelings of the 12 million children fabricated through in vitro worldwide. Abortion supporters recognize that if the humanity of the embryo out of the uterus is conceded, it will have enormous consequences for how embryos are treated within the uterus. Even some abortion opponents, who know well the humanity of the human embryo, express their support for IVF on the basis of “family values” and “children,” without addressing any of the ethical issues involved in freezing and destroying innocent human life, or the abortion-supporting logic that embryos are the “property” of parents who can let their tiny biological children live, die, or be put in the freezer.
That’s why the January 24 pastoral letter by Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, is so important and timely. Entitled The Christian Family, In Vitro Fertilization, and Heroic Witness to True Love, the letter is a bold and compassionate response to couples struggling to conceive children. “Fertility and in vitro fertilization,” the Virginia bishop writes, “are incredibly sensitive topics and deserve to be treated with a spirit of accompaniment, compassion, and understanding.” That’s what he seeks to do and help all Catholics to do with him.
“As priest and bishop,” he writes, “I have heard consistently of the heartache experienced by so many relating to the desire for family. … [Yet] I have observed with pastoral concern the growing acceptance of IVF as an apparent solution to the heartache of infertility. More darkly, I have also observed the growing demand for IVF as an instrumental means to procure a child through surrogacy outside the context of marriage and family life or even to create a child eugenically with specifically desired characteristics while eliminating other children in the process.”
The previous head of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities notes that 82 percent of Americans and, scandalously, 65 percent of American Catholics view IVF as morally acceptable, while clearly stating, “IVF is contrary to justice and remains replete with moral difficulties.” He specifies the “great moral injustice” of the discarding of undesired embryos and freezing unnecessary ones. “Every successful IVF procedure results in a living child with many missing siblings,” he laments, while clarifying, “IVF would remain unjust and morally wrong even if no embryonic children were destroyed or discarded … [because] the natural and loving embrace of man and woman expressed in marital love is effectively replaced by a laboratory procedure made possible by the subjugation of man and woman to a technological process.”
IVF, he adds, “subverts human dignity by reducing human persons—man, woman, and child alike—into objects of a technical process” and “treats human beings like products or property,” making it possible “for virtually any single individual or unmarried couple, including those practicing lifestyles at odds with family happiness and stability, to obtain a child either directly or by means of an often economically vulnerable surrogate.”
He calls attention to how recently “some in the public square have advocated a greater role of government in providing IVF as an entitlement,” which he labels “a misguided attempt to respond to challenges surrounding marriage, family formation, falling birth rates, and fertility.” He announces that while the Church resolutely “stands in solidarity with all those experiencing infertility and proclaims the dignity of all who come into existence as a result of IVF, … she stands absolutely opposed to any federal or state governmental action that would involve every citizen with a grave moral injustice.”
He calls upon the federal government to play a positive role in supporting the growth and health of American families, encouraging earlier marriage and family formation, and helping families with pregnancy and childbirth related expenses. Presently, he says, the government is incentivizing the opposite: “Tragically, current federal law unjustly promotes sterility by subsidizing contraceptives and even forms of sterilization. Consequently, American law effectively discourages fertility and its procreative consequences. It is simply wrong that federal healthcare policy socializes the cost of sterility while privatizing the basic costs of pregnancy and childbirth or the cost of restorative fertility treatments for conditions like endometriosis.”
He concludes the letter by noting that “threats posed by IVF to human dignity and human rights are … knowable to all” and asking everyone “to engage in greater thoughtful and rational reflection on the costs associated with the IVF industry, which are evident by human reason” and to “come together to work toward the highest good possible to ensure that law is ordered to the good of all human persons and, particularly, the good of the family.”
All people are urged to read his pastoral letter, available on the website of the Diocese of Arlington, and to act on the summons he makes on behalf of the Lord of Life in defense of those made in his image and likeness.