Why is IVF morally wrong?

06-01-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The current administration in Washington is unfortunately promoting and is in favor of IVF, in vitro fertilization, popularly called test tube fertilization. The rationale for this procedure is to help infertile couples have a child. People ask what can be wrong with that?

NOTE: The Church has clearly and unequivocally judged to be immoral in vitro fertilization or IVF. Unfortunately, most Catholics are not aware of the Church's teaching, do not know that IVF is immoral, and some have used it in attempting to have children.

If a couple is unaware that the procedure is immoral, they are not subjectively guilty of sin. Children conceived through this procedure are children of God and are loved by their parents, as they should be. Like all children, regardless of the circumstances of their conception and birth, they should be loved, cherished and cared for. Here are some points to understand the Church’s teaching on the problem with IVF:

- The use of technology to overcome infertility is not wrong in itself. Some methods are moral, while others—because they do violence to the dignity of the human person and the institution of marriage—are immoral.

- There is an obligation to protect all human life when married couples use various technologies to try to have children.

- If a given medical intervention helps or assists the marriage act to achieve pregnancy, it may be considered moral; if the intervention replaces the marriage act to engender life, it is not moral.

- In vitro fertilization brings about new life in a petri dish. Several eggs are taken from the woman's ovary after she has taken a fertility drug which causes several eggs to mature at the same time. Semen is collected from the man, usually through masturbation, which is itself immoral. The egg and sperm are ultimately joined in a glass dish, where conception takes place and the new life is allowed to develop for several days. In the simplest case, embryos are then transferred to the mother's womb in the hope that one will survive to term.

- IVF eliminates the marriage act as the means of achieving pregnancy, instead of helping it achieve this natural end. The new life is not engendered through an act of love between husband and wife, but by a laboratory procedure performed by doctors or technicians. Husband and wife are merely sources for the "raw materials" of egg and sperm, which are later manipulated by a technician to cause the sperm to fertilize the egg.

- Not infrequently, "donor" eggs or sperm are used. This means that the genetic father or mother of the child could well be someone from outside the marriage. This can create a confusing situation for the child later, when he or she learns that one parent raising him or her is not actually the biological parent.

- The identity of the "donor," whether of egg or sperm, may never be known, depriving the child of an awareness of his or her own lineage. This can mean a lack of knowledge of health problems or dispositions toward health problems which could be inherited. It could lead to half brothers and sisters marrying one another, because neither knew that the sperm which engendered their lives came from the same "donor." But even if the egg and sperm come from husband and wife, serious moral problems arise.

- Invariably several embryos are brought into existence; only those which show the greatest promise of growing to term are implanted in the womb. The others are simply discarded or used for experiments. This is a terrible offense against human life. While a little baby may ultimately be born because of this procedure, other lives are usually snuffed out in the process.

- IVF is also expensive, costing at least $10,000 per attempt. Over 90% of the embryos created perish at some point in the process. In a desire to hold down costs and enhance the odds of success, doctors sometimes implant five or more embryos in the mother's womb. This may result in more babies than a couple wants. In Canada, one woman gave birth to five children engendered by IVF. She had wanted only one, so she sued her doctor for "wrongful life," demanding that he pay for the cost of raising the four children she did not want. It is a terrible thing for a child to learn or find out that he or she was not wanted.

- To avoid the problems of carrying and rearing "too many" babies after several have been implanted, doctors sometimes engage in something euphemistically called "fetal reduction" or "selective reduction." Here they monitor the babies in utero to see if any have defects or are judged to be not as healthy as the others. Then they eliminate those "less desirable" babies by filling a syringe with potassium chloride, maneuvering the needle toward the "selected" baby in the womb with the aid of ultrasound, and then thrusting the needle into the baby's heart. The potassium chloride kills the baby within minutes, and he or she is expelled as a "miscarriage." If it cannot be determined that one baby is less healthy than the others, some doctors simply eliminate the baby or babies who are easiest to reach. Again, we see the unspeakable diminishing of the value of human life which can arise from this procedure.

- Human beings bear the image and likeness of God. They are to be reverenced as sacred. Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest wishes of an infertile couple. Husbands and wives engage in love in conceiving a child they do not "make babies." They give expression to their love for one another, and a child may or may not be engendered by that act of love. Marital acts are not a manufacturing process, and children are not products. Like the Son of God himself, we are the kind of beings who are "begotten, not made" and, therefore, of equal status and dignity with our parents.

- In IVF, children are engendered through a technical process, subjected to "quality control," and eliminated if found "defective." In their very coming into being, these children are thoroughly subjected to the arbitrary choices of those bringing them into being. Life and death are subjected to a human decision and thus the human being sets himself up as the giver of life and death by decree."

- There is the right of every person to be conceived and to be born within marriage and from marriage." To be within and from marriage, conception should occur from the marriage act which by its nature is ordered toward loving openness to life, not from the manipulations of technicians. The dehumanizing aspects of some of these procedures are evident in the very language associated with them. There is the "reproductive technology industry." Children are called the "products" of conception. Inherent in IVF is the treatment of children, in their very coming into being, as less than human beings where values is assigned to the child by others and this is a rampant attitude in justifying abortions on demand.

- A good goal does not justify an evil means to get there. These points are taken from the following article: https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/reproductive-technology/begotten-not-made-a-catholic-viewof-reproductive-technology