Published by the CDF in 2008, the Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions addresses manifold issues that had emerged with the widespread use of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs), especially IVF. Increasingly common as a “treatment” for infertility already at the time of the document’s publication, IVF had brought new and unforeseen problems in its wake. Unfortunately, these problems are still with us, and they continue to grow worse because of our refusal as a culture to acknowledge them as problems.
One such problem is the number of frozen embryos. Often in IVF procedures, multiple oocytes taken from a woman’s body are fertilized in vitro, but not all are implanted, while the rest are cryopreserved in case the woman wishes to implant more at a later date. This is just the last step in a process that is contra nature—both cosmic and human—from beginning to end. The whole thing is violent, from the use of pharmaceuticals to increase a woman’s release of eggs artificially, to the removal of these eggs, to the conception of a child outside the intimate embrace of its mother, to the implantation of the child––or, as in the case considered here, to its being frozen, often interminably.
The plight of frozen embryos grows worse every day as the practice of IVF continues to spread (President Trump recently signed an Executive Order to expand access to IVF). In addressing this “grave injustice,” Dignitas Personae makes it clear that such embryos may not be used for research for “the treatment of disease.” This would be to reduce them, with lethal consequences, to mere biological material.
Dignitas Personae also makes clear that the frozen embryos may not be used as a treatment for infertility “for the same reasons which make artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood” (§19). Here the document cites Donum Vitae, which states that “the tradition of the Church and anthropological reflection recognize in marriage and in its indissoluble unity the only setting worthy of truly responsible procreation.” In addition, “heterologous artificial fertilization violates the rights of the child; it deprives him of his filial relationship with his parental origins; . . . it objectively deprives conjugal fruitfulness of its unity and integrity; it brings and manifests a rupture between genetic parenthood [and] gestational parenthood” (II, A, 1–3).
At this point, Dignitas Personae turns to so-called “embryo adoption”:
It has been proposed, solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction, that there could be a form of “prenatal adoption.” This proposal, praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above.
All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of embryos represent a situation of injustice which cannot in fact be resolved. (§19)
The clear position of the then CDF has not been revised since 2008: embryo adoption is illicit. Indeed, it is really embryo transfer (ET) and surrogacy by another name. By the same token, it is as contrary to nature and the Church’s vision of the human person as these other practices are.
Despite this clear teaching, however, a number of Catholic philosophers and theologians publicly advocate embryo adoption. It therefore seems necessary to me to explain, perhaps in a different way, or using different language, why the Church has deemed this action illicit, however well-intentioned those who have recourse to it may be.
The evil of IVF and ET has been examined by many authors both within and without the Church. These practices treat the nature of sex and generation as if it were artificial, an object for a control that, under cover of a sentimental horror of suffering, to use Flannery O’Connor’s words, “ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” We think we have a better alternative to what God has given in and through the order of nature, and so we decide to take control, all in the name of eliminating suffering. But the attempt to eliminate the suffering of others by means of a Baconian control of nature opens the way to the attempted elimination of the sufferers themselves. However well-intentioned we may think such a bid for control may be, we are not exempt from this logic, to which these very good intentions may blind us.
But IVF and ET share this logic of control with contraception. Indeed, they are illicit on the same grounds that contraception itself is. In all these interventions, man violently puts asunder what God has joined together: the conjugal act, conception, and gestation; in all of them, we assume sex and generation can be split apart at our will. Contraception is sex without generation; IVF and ET are procreation without sex. The same is true of embryo adoption.
The oft-heard claim that embryo adoption is no different than infant adoption expresses a failure to perceive the phenomenologically given unity of sex, conception, and gestation. Indeed, I would suggest that the claim itself already entails a concession to the contraceptive logic that treats these three as separable events, rather than as moments in a whole that is fully manifested and actualized in the child.
It is true that infant adoption also involves a tragedy and a wound that cannot be fully healed—every child should of course be raised by his or her biological parents. Even so, the child adopted after birth has at least come into the world within the just-mentioned unity; he or she has not had his or her first moments of life violently dissected and treated as if they were incidental to his or her being. In infant adoption, the child has been allowed the due wholeness of his or her beginning, allowed to be conceived and gestated by his or her own mother, allowed to receive in her womb the intimate welcome that—whether or not she knows or intends it—the new human being is due from its biological parents. Whatever the intentions of the so-called “adoptive mother” in embryo transfer, by the very nature of the case she cannot provide this right and just environment for a child who is not the fruit of her own coition with her own husband.
The fact that embryo adoption both looks like ARTs and would not be possible without their application should also give us a clue as to its nature and inner logic. Of course, advocates of embryo adoption will argue that, since the embryos in question are children, we must do something to help them. The trouble is that “helping” them by embryo adoption would entail a grave attack on the dignity both of the embryos themselves and of the triunity of sex, conception, and gestation. Such “help” re-enacts the logic of eugenics, which assaults biological humanity in the name of enhancing mankind or sparing it suffering.
Catholic advocates of embryo adoption do not merely seem unaware of Dignitas Personae’s clear finding that the proposal of prenatal adoption, though “praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned” (§19; the reference is to other “use cases” for cryopreserved embryos). They also seem to forget that the Church has been through this before in the post-Humanae Vitae period. To be sure, most Catholic advocates of embryo adoption would condemn dissenters from the teaching of the 1968 encyclical. For this very reason, though, they should be anxious to avoid (unconscious) imitation of the priests, ethicists, and theologians who objected and obfuscated, claiming, in effect, that good intentions sufficed to justify the decision to contracept at the bar of individual conscience and vocation. Given that we are still suffering the after-effects of this effort to shift the focus of the debate about contraception from the nature of the act to the intention of the actor, advocates of embryo adoption should beware of committing themselves to the same type of shift––one that, as I have suggested above, blinds those who make it to the deep connection between embryo adoption, ET/surrogacy, and the contraceptive mentality.
The act of embryo or prenatal adoption, despite individual good intentions, is materially the same as ET and surrogacy, nor would it be possible without ARTs, which the Church has made clear are illicit. The intention of saving a child from a horrific and unjust situation—i.e., interminable cryopreservation—does not change this fact. Nor does it undo the logic of control––the same logic underlying contraception and IVF—that informs embryo adoption along with the ET and surrogacy with which it is materially identical.
There are many things in this world that cannot be changed by intention. Embryo adoption is one of them. This is why Dignitas Personae §19 states that these “embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved.” Suffering this injustice seems almost unbearable, which is why, I think, there is support of, and advocacy for, embryo adoption. But sometimes—most times—suffering is not for us to resolve, and we must instead throw ourselves on the mercy of God, and have faith that he can and will resolve a situation to which we can see no solution, even if the resolution is granted in the next life, not this one. This kind of faith is not easy, but it is, I think, required of us as Christians.[1]
[1] My thanks to Adrian J. Walker for his editorial support on this article.
