Tag Archives: IVF

Out of Voting Options?

October 23, 2024Abortion, American Founding, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of LifeCommon Good, Election, IVFtwowingstogod@gmail.com

With the usual turmoil that comes with a Presidential election it is easy to miss an overall cultural movement that has occurred: it has become increasingly harder for Christians to participate in the political process without compromising their principles. It seems that during this Presidential election cycle we are out of options. The candidate on the Left is radically pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ “rights”, and has been part of an administration that has repeatedly used lawfare, especially against Catholics. The candidate on the Right during his last administration did much to help the pro-life cause, favors the rule of law, and, as his record shows, favors peace both home and abroad. The choice seems rather easy, except the latter also has recently Donned himself “the Father of IVF” and promises, through his party’s platform, “to promote policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).” Can a Catholic, in good conscience, still vote for the Republican candidate?

Voting and the Common Good

As with any moral examination, it is important to begin by looking at the act in question and to frame it in its context. Since voting is a social action, its moral evaluation must always be in relation to the common good. Admittedly in our atomistic, “are you better off than four years ago?” culture this is a very un-American way of looking at it. Still, voting is a duty because we each have a duty to contribute to the common good. Voting is the means by which the individual chooses a representative whom he thinks will best protect and promote the common good (which is the overarching purpose of the State).

In an ideal world (and assuming our two-party system), any harm done to the common good by a chosen representative would be merely accidental in the sense that the implementation of a policy failed or had unintended consequences. In other words, the ends would be good even if the means were not; a failure in political prudence. Put another way, neither candidate would support what is intrinsically evil and any evil that does arise would be accidental. In that setting, an honest, non-partisan evaluation can occur in which the voter essentially comes up with a pros and cons list for each candidate.

This is why the Church has often spoken as if support for an intrinsic evil is an automatic disqualification. To that end the CDF, under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger in 2002, said:

A well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals… When political activity comes up against moral principles that do not admit of exception, compromise or derogation, the Catholic commitment becomes more evident and laden with responsibility… This is the case with laws concerning abortion and euthanasia… Such laws must defend the basic right to life from conception to natural death. In the same way, it is necessary to recall the duty to respect and protect the rights of the human embryo. Analogously, the family needs to be safeguarded and promoted, based on monogamous marriage between a man and a woman.

Because the candidate is openly advocating for a policy that can never be ordered towards advancing the common good, he or she is eliminated as an option. As an important aside, it is necessary to note that there is a distinction between toleration and active promotion. Sometimes the common good dictates that some evils be tolerated because of the moral condition of the polity. You cannot make laws that will eradicate every evil and sometimes the best you can do is contain it or limit it (e.g. John Paul II’s “Art of the Possible” in Evangelium Vitae) .

But what can we do when both candidates are advocating for policies that promote intrinsic evils? “Birth control” and IVF may be of a different moral quality than abortion, nevertheless they cannot be ordered to the common good. The Republican has moved from merely tolerating these things to actively promoting them. It could certainly be argued that because of the sheer number of children killed by both IVF and the Pill (because of its abortifacient properties) that it represents a greater threat to justice in our society than abortion. While it is impossible to quantify the effects, the movement in this direction is certainly a betrayal of those social conservatives who rightly place a premium on the foundations of society in life and the family. It is noteworthy that, in an attempt to avoid being outdone in evil, the Democratic candidate also promises unfettered access to both birth control and IVF as detailed in her party’s platform.

Voting and the Catch-22

There seems to be then a moral justification for not voting for either candidate or, at least, writing in some other worthy candidate. This would be in hopes of sending a message to President Trump that he has lost pro-lifers and he will reverse course. Edward Feser, among others has made a compelling case for that here. The problem with that approach is that, while it may be a political solution, it does not fulfill one’s duty to the common good which is relative to the here and now. The potential harm to the common good should Vice-President Harris win far outweighs the harm President Trump will do to it (this is a point Feser concedes). You must vote to limit the evil as it presents itself here and now; “Sufficient for a day is its own evil” (Mt 6:34). Cardinal Burke made a similar point when he was Archbishop of St. Louis in 2004:

A Catholic may vote for a candidate who, while he supports an evil action, also supports the limitation of the evil involved, if there is no better candidate. For example, a candidate may support procured abortion in a limited number of cases but be opposed to it otherwise. In such a case, the Catholic who recognizes the immorality of all procured abortions may rightly vote for this candidate over another, more unsuitable candidate in an effort to limit the circumstances in which procured abortions would be considered legal. Here the intention of the Catholic voter, unable to find a viable candidate who would stop the evil of procured abortion by making it illegal, is to reduce the number of abortions by limiting the circumstances in which it is legal. This is not a question of choosing the lesser evil, but of limiting all the evil one is able to limit at the time.

Despite the seemingly desperate situation, the only way forward morally is to vote for former President Trump. His policies in many ways advance the common good and he seems protective of the Church. He also seems committed to limiting abortion, although not as strongly as he once was. His pro-IVF and pro-contraception stance is unacceptable, but may actually be limited relative to the Democratic position. Because you cannot remain neutral with respect to your obligation towards the common good, it would be wrong to not cast a vote or to write-in another candidate even if it sends an important political message. That political message needs to be sent more directly and more vociferously by directly and clearly stating our objections to his stances on IVF and contraception.

On Embryo Adoption

May 4, 2019Abortion, Bioethics, Conscience, Culture of Life, Fatherhood, Human Dignity, Theology of the BodyAdoption, Dignitatis Personae, Embryo Adoption, Infertility, IVF, JPII, Marriage, Surrogacytwowingstogod@gmail.com

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there are over 620,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the United States. Even though the “vast majority” of them are still being considered for use for “family building efforts” and others have been “earmarked by the creating couples for use in research,” there are still as many as 60,000 unclaimed frozen embryos currently. With the growing popularity of IVF, we should expect these numbers to rise dramatically over the coming years. All this has left pro-lifers scrambling for ethical solutions that free these children from their cryogenic prison. One Evangelical Christian group called Snowflake Embryo Adoption matches the embryos with women who are willing to “adopt” them. In essence the embryos are implanted into the wombs of women who carry them to term and raise them as their own children. This solution, as we shall see, is not without moral controversy.

We must first admit that the plight of these cryogenically preserved children represents one of the greatest injustices of our age because of the sheer numbers alone. But because many of the “consumers” of IVF are couples struggling with infertility, very few people are willing to call it out. Instead it remains hidden away in laboratories and freezers. Despite intrinsic evil of IVF, we must never forget that the children themselves are not an evil but a good that came from the evil. They are members of the human community, regardless of how they were conceived, and thus are subject with rights, including the right to a safe environment in which they can thrive. These voiceless children are crying out for justice, a cry that we are obligated not to ignore. Therefore, it would seem that “embryo adoption” offers a compassionate solution. The adoptive parents did not bring the children into existence and are simply looking for a way to “right a wrong” by rescuing these children from a frozen existence.

Adoption?

When framed in this manner, it seems rather straightforward that this type of adoption is an irrefutable good. But this is a case where we must be careful with our terms. To label this an embryo adoption is really a form of begging the question. This is why many moral theologians prefer the term “embryo rescue”. For everyone know that adoption is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether this should be classified as a type of adoption. Adoption has always referred to a legal process by which a child (usually although not exclusively) enters into a family and assumes all the rights and duties of a biological son or daughter. Nowhere among these rights and duties however would we find the right to gestation. That right is reserved only for biological children. The question is whether this difference carries any moral weight.

The Church defines surrogacy as when “a woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of ‘donors’. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy” (Donum Vitae, A3). Based upon this definition, embryo rescue is more akin to surrogacy than to adoption. The only difference is in the intention of the pregnant woman—in one case she carries the child for another and in the other she carries it for herself. But surrogacy is not wrong because of the intention of the woman who is impregnated, but because of the nature of the act itself.

A hypothetical will help to see why this is the case. Suppose a woman and her husband go through the IVF procedure and find that the woman will never be able to carry a child to term. She approaches her sister and tells her that they still have three “extra” embryos that are destined for destruction and asks if she would be willing to rescue one of them by offering her womb to carry the child. She tells her that it would not be surrogacy, but “embryo fostering” because she is simply fostering the child for 9 months. Verbal gymnastics aside, this clearly fits the definition of surrogacy, an action that the Church has always condemned surrogacy as an intrinsically evil act because it is an offense “against the unity of marriage and the dignity of the procreation of the human person.” In other words, no matter how good the intention is, it can never be deemed morally licit. Likewise, embryo adoption suffers a similar fate.

Surrogacy and the Rights of Spouses

Understanding why surrogacy is wrong will help to see why embryo rescue is not a real moral solution. Notice that Donum Vitae said surrogacy was an offense, not against the procreative aspect of marriage, but the unitive. A woman should only become a mother through her husband. He has an exclusive right to her procreative powers and faculties. When those powers are exercised without him, then the unitive good of marriage has been harmed. She is a mother of the child, but her husband is in no way the father. He neither had a hand in creating the child nor in its gestation (both of which a biological father does even in utero). He may become the child’s adoptive father when it is born, but until then he is not a father.

The unitive good of marriage is maintained when husband and wife must become parents through each other. Even in the case of adoption, they become parents together and not independently of each other. This is why we should hesitate to call embryo rescue, adoption. This solution then introduces a new injustice, mainly against the husband’s exclusive rights to his wife’s procreative faculties. This is ultimately why the Church has said this is “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (Dignitatis Personae, 19).

What can be done about this then? For the time being we have an obligation to keep the children already in existence alive until a solution can be found. This form of embryo adoption by which someone keeps the child from being terminated or subject to scientific testing would be laudable. When St. John Paul II spoke on the topic he made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”(quoted in Dignitatis Personae, 19). Putting an end to this sanitized barbarism then should be our primary goal.

The Danger of Playing House

April 10, 2019Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, MoraliltyIVF, Procreation, Reproductive Rights, right to life, Surrogacytwowingstogod@gmail.com

“Playing house” is a common children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually centering around family life. What happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable still like to play the game? Something along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a “61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself — acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.” Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into which our culture is descending.

Imagine little baby Uma, when she is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really creepy for us.” On it, she will find the name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge. Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her grandmother. Now this permanent public record will look like a case of incest. Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better? In truth she will know that she was pieced together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts. She will know she was a “product” of conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s sister’s egg.

Straight Out of A Brave New World?

As the origins of life grow to more closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to point out this injustice. Justice requires that equals be treated as equals. When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product. In essence this is, as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology.”

No one can measure the psychological effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has attempted to study it. Children of divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their parents “love them very much.” That is because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you came from love, that is, you are not an accident. Likewise children conceived in a laboratory could face a similar identity crisis.

If you doubt the person-product connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop into a healthy baby.” If you are going to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck. Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception. The article doesn’t say what happened to these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human experimentation. At least there was some semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the child was too much “like playing God.”

Procreation and the “Right to Make Life”

Perhaps the clearest indication of where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question. After laying out all of the specific costs of the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?” And this is, the battleground over which must fight if we are to rectify this injustice.

Humans do not reproduce, they procreate. This is more than a mere semantical distinction. Reproduction is a closed activity. It simply requires two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce offspring. Human procreation is different however. Like other material creatures, humans exchange genetic matter. But they lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their offspring. This must be created by Someone else and requires His intervention. Because procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed. Couples receive children rather than grasp at them.

The biological limitations that God has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own thriving. Seizing what should otherwise be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents. But it need not be so for the children. Even though the children conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product of technology, in truth they are not. They are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings, God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist. He still loved them into existence, even if their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.

One way to put a halt to the skid down this slippery slope is to change our rights language. Even if the State grants them, there are no such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly speaking, reproduce. As proof of this, notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people connected to these rights. In fact, they render children’s rights obsolete. What people do have are procreative rights. These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.

In closing, there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already lost. This is no mere “playing house” precisely because of stories like this. In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death or a frozen existence. This couple may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last. The demand for procedures like this (as well as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase unless we do something to protect these children.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"Pope St. John Paul II