Experts: Church must better educate Catholics about IVF moral objections, alternatives

(OSV News) -- In vitro fertilization is a topic that received significant national attention during the past election season as candidates made it a policy issue. A costly, but widely accepted option in society for conceiving children through artificial means, IVF also involves significant moral and ethical concerns.

The Catholic Church teaches the use of IVF is morally impermissible -- and that's something that's not generally known or understood among American Catholics.

According to a Pew Research Center survey from April on attitudes toward having access to IVF, 70% of Americans view it as good. Among American Catholics, that number is 65%, and 27% say they are not sure whether this is good or bad.

IVF is fraught with moral issues from beginning to end, explained Joe Zalot, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, as the process severs conception from sexual intercourse and also destroys innocent human lives at a very early stage of development.

"The church teaches that procreation must come through an act of marital intercourse between a husband and wife, and IVF obviously substitutes for it," Zalot said. "IVF works where you have to stimulate the woman to hyperovulation with drugs. That can have medical challenges. Sperm is obtained through masturbation, which raises moral concern.

"A child or children are manufactured in a petri dish" he continued. "After being manufactured, they are graded -- subjectively graded by whoever the tech person is -- to try to determine who's the most 'viable,' so they call it. Others are thrown away or kept in storage."

Out of more than 413,000 artificial reproductive technology cycles recorded in 2021, only 112,088 resulted in pregnancy. Of those, only 97,128 babies were successfully born, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Bioethicists have said that for every IVF cycle that results in embryo implantation an average of seven to 12 embryos are either cryopreserved or terminated, amounting to the loss or suspension of life on a significant scale.

Some studies estimate as many as 1.5 million human embryos may be frozen in storage.

The church teaches that at the moment of conception a human life begins. "Donum Vitae" ("The Gift of Life"), the church document issued in 1987 by the Vatican's Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith that raises moral objections to IVF, clearly states that every stage of life from a zygote (upon the fusion of egg and sperm) to an embryo to a fetus is a stage in a human being's development.

"Development of the practice of in vitro fertilization has required innumerable fertilizations and destructions of human embryos," it stated, explaining that "through these procedures, with apparently contrary purposes, life and death are subjected to the decision of man, who thus sets himself up as the giver of life and death by decree."

In "Dignitas Personae" ("Dignity of a Person") -- issued by the doctrinal congregation in 2008 -- the church recognized the suffering of that couples who can't conceive, but counseled that "the desire for a child cannot justify the 'production' of offspring."

"There's a whole host of ethical issues" regarding IVF, Zalot said. "And most people have no idea."

Since many Catholics are unaware or confused about church teaching on IVF, or feel that the desire for a child overrides it, Catholic clergy have a task that requires both informed clarity and pastoral sensitivity.

"When (married couples) meet the cross of infertility, it's a painful journey," Father Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, told OSV News. The priest travels to dozens of countries yearly training clergy and health care workers in how to navigate bioethical issues, including IVF. "And that pain can be very powerful and make someone make a decision that ... they just feel drawn to make because that yearning is that strong and that want is so deep."

He said, "But here again, that's where we've turned the child into a thing and a right, versus the fruit of conjugal love, the fruit of the marital embrace, the fruit of a belonging and yearning in an embrace, and it's so important to help people to see that."

Father Boquet, a priest of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, emphasized the need to affirm the children conceived by IVF. He explained parish clergy must be "prophetic," but respectful, when broaching the topic, which "is not a morally neutral issue," when speaking to people in the pews, since some of those very people in the pews may have been conceived through IVF or have used the procedure.

"A child conceived through IVF has equal dignity to any other human being, and the good of parents welcoming that child is a great good, of course," he said. "But it sparks people to think, and it may make people uncomfortable a little bit. But that's OK, because the goal here is to open the opportunity and say that to the people, 'I'd love to meet with you one on one. If there's someone here that has questions about any of this. I'd love to ... talk to you about this in greater detail,' so it opens the conversation. We should not be afraid of it."

At the same time he stressed, "We don't want to just be like a dump truck and just dump information. … 'OK I've done what I'm supposed to do.' … That could cause great harm because you don't have a follow-up."

"We need to be pastors," he said.

Catholic bioethicists field questions from Catholics concerned about artificial reproductive technology like IVF by referring them to the practice of restorative reproductive medicine, or RRM.

The field, which encompasses fertility-awareness based methods for conception, or natural family planning, uses highly specialized means to detect and address the causes of infertility. And it incorporates advanced methods that predict optimal times for fertility.

One of the field's main components is to restore or optimize normal reproductive function, especially in women who are having fertility problems. It helps couples to conceive children through natural means at a quarter of the price of an average IVF cycle, according to Dr. Paul Carpentier, medical director of the Long Island Gianna Center for Women's Health and Fertility at Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip, New York.

Carpentier told OSV News he has been a practitioner of natural family planning for almost four decades and sees an average of 14 patients daily.

"Infertility is a symptom," said Carpentier, explaining it affects men and women alike. "It's a symptom of many underlying disorders. So a good doctor, his job is to figure out what caused the symptom, and in the case of infertility it could be 70 or 80 different things."

Carpentier said visits to his clinic are covered by health insurance just as any primary care physician visit would be. He said sometimes there is additional uncommon lab work and diagnostics such as ultrasounds of the uterus.

Carpentier explained that IVF has been well funded and well marketed over the years, receiving far more media attention than RRM as a way to address infertility and raising it to a much higher profile. When the science of IVF was new in the late 1970s, he said, news outlets captured the public's imagination with the thought of resolving infertility by making human beings in a lab.

At the moment, IVF accounts for around 2.5% of births in the U.S. and an estimated 8 million children worldwide born since 1978.

Father Boquet said that even if IVF has become widely accepted, the church must press forward with educating people with its teaching on the moral concerns regarding IVF.

"Pastors care about their people and they love them and they want them to have the good as we want the good," the HLI president said. "And we live in the midst of the community because we are one with them."

"So we need to be there," he said, "in good times and bad, and richer or poorer ... to address these morally important issues even when they may not be welcomed."