Why is in vitro fertilization sinful?

Father Mitas, pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Union, answers this question in the Review's "Dear Father" column:

My wife and I are unable to have children on our own and we are good Catholics. We’d like to try the very expensive procedure of in vitro fertilization (IVF) before trying adoption. Why does the Church call IVF sinful?

The answer to your question is simple but difficult to accept.

Every childless couple knows your pain. You love each other. You love God. You want children to share that love. The Church encourages you and blesses you and prays with you that God’s will will coincide with yours and bless your love with a holy fertility that is a copy of God’s own fruitful love.

The Church, however, does not teach that every couple has an absolute right to have children, only a right to those means that God has ordained for their begetting. The bedrock principle that underlies all morality is that the end, no matter how good, does not justify bad means.

In the case of IVF the end is indisputably good, but the means are not. The teaching is this: Sex is for marriage and marriage is for Christ. Along with that is our teaching, backed by Scripture and tradition, that God established two inseparable elements in the marriage act: first, that it be unitive, and, second, that it be procreative. This is the key to understanding all of the Church’s teaching on sex.

It then becomes clear why the Church condemns artificial contraception (unitive but not procreative, IVF (procreative but not unitive), and masturbation and sodomy (neither unitive nor procreative).

In IVF the child is not conceived in his mother’s womb but in a petri dish in a laboratory, hence its name in vitro (Latin: "in glass"). The father’s sperm is usually supplied, and, even though only one fertilized ovum may be carried to term, several normally are fertilized, which are subsequently disposed of. This is unitive?

When popes Pius XI and Paul VI prophesied dire consequences if the world rejected the Church’s teaching against artificial birth control, the world laughed. The world did reject that teaching and all those evils (increases in divorce, child abuse, teen pregnancy, unstable marriages and abortion) resulted. The world still hasn’t caught on.

IVF ushers in the "Brave New World" described by Aldous Huxley in which children are produced in factories. Pope John Paul II never used the word "reproduction" in reference to the begetting of children. It’s a manufacturing word. He insisted on calling it "procreation," to remind us that parents work in union with God in a holy enterprise to create with him new life. Children are procreated; Volkswagens are reproduced.

Unhappily, there have always been childless couples. Unhappily too, there have always been unwanted children. The coincidence of these two problems provides a solution to both: adoption. Despite abortion there are still unwanted children, but adopting them has become much more difficult, that is, more expensive.

I ask you and all other couples like you to pray to God for the grace to accept his will. It may be his will that your burden of infertility is the instrument through which some unwanted and unloved child in this world becomes the accepting and appreciated gift that he intended every child to be.

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