The Why: Contraception, IVF, and Surrogacy

We have an education crisis on our hands and, as a result, the blood of a great many victims. I am not referring to the state of formal education, including, sadly, at many schools that call themselves Catholic. Rather, I am referring to the lack of awareness of the truth about certain social and moral issues of our time—issues the Catholic Church has very clear positions on, yet a great number of Catholics and non-Catholics alike don’t know what these positions are. With such a lack of knowledge, many people are swept up in the tide of popular, or vocal, opinion.

Abortion, obviously, is a main socially controversial issue on which the Church has a very clear stance. And, in the early days of legalized abortion, there was a lack of knowledge among many about what exactly took place during an abortion. It was a lack of awareness of what, precisely, an abortion did and was that led so many well-intentioned people to accept it in the early days of Roe v. Wade.

Ultrasound was the final nail in the coffin of any lack of understanding there. The truth that abortion kills a living human being is there in black and white. Those who choose not to believe it are denying a visible and provable reality. Choosing personal autonomy over the life of another person, one’s own progeny in many cases, provides a sad commentary on the individualistic nature of our society. But the education is there. The facts are there. People just choose not to see and believe.

Now it is time to educate the public on the truths of other matters—namely, contraception and in vitro fertilization (IVF). A great number of Christians in general and Catholics in particular accept these grave evils not because they themselves are evil, not because they don’t care about morality or Church teaching per se, but rather, because they simply don’t know why these things are wrong. We need to change that.

So, why is contraception harmful to human flourishing? Well, as the Church teaches, marriage—the only acceptable venue for sexual intimacy—should be total, faithful, and fruitful. In a teaching statement from the USCCB called “Married Love and the Gift of Life,” the bishops reflect:

Our culture often presents sex as merely recreational, not as a deeply personal or even important encounter between spouses. In this view, being responsible about sex simply means limiting its consequences—avoiding disease and using contraceptives to prevent pregnancy.

This cultural view is impoverished, even sad. It fails to account for the true needs and deepest desires of men and women. Living in accord with this view has caused much loneliness and many broken hearts.

I don’t think it is difficult to find examples of this. The divorce rate and the trend of avoiding marriage in the first place both speak to the loneliness and broken hearts wrought by a self-centered and autonomous view of human sexuality.

So, what do total, faithful, and fruitful mean?

Total: Husbands and wives are called to give themselves totally to one another. As Christopher West—whose life’s work has been the proclamation of the truth on marriage and sexuality—says,

Marriage is the closest and most intimate of human friendships. It involves the sharing of the whole of a person’s life with his/her spouse. Marriage calls for a mutual self-surrender so intimate and complete that spouses—without losing their individuality—become “one,” not only in body, but in soul.

Faithful: Marriage is also an exclusive relationship between husband and wife. Again, West explains what this means:

As a mutual gift of two persons to each other, this intimate union excludes such union with anyone else. It demands the total fidelity of the spouses. This exclusivity is essential for the good of the couple’s children as well.

Fruitful: The marital embrace must not impede the possibility of conception. This doesn’t mean every act of intercourse must be undertaken with the intention of conceiving a child; it simply means that one must not do anything to intentionally prevent the possibility of that result.

It is ironic that you have, on one hand, people hell-bent, literally, on defending their autonomy at the expense of their own children—whole segments of the population, and not a few vocal celebrities, are maniacally dedicated to ensuring that women are able to kill their own children in utero (and, sadly, as the recent case of Lindsay Clancy shows, many who will make excuses for women who kill their born children). On the other hand, you have couples so desperate to have children that they will go to great lengths to conceive children through unnatural means, either storing up embryos or renting wombs. There is, of course, a perfectly natural answer to this dilemma: adoption.

Unfortunately, modern technology has opened a Pandora’s box of issues surrounding the creation of children.

A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The “supreme gift of marriage” is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged “right to a child” would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,” and “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2378)

There’s a concise saying in the Church that sex is for bonding and babies. As illustrated above, the marital embrace is to be free, total, faithful, and fruitful. Nearly every Protestant denomination has accepted contraception at this point, so there is a big difference between the Catholic and Protestant views of sexuality. With that allowance has come a descent down the slippery slope of other allowances; and sadly, many uninformed Catholics have been swept along with the current.

Many people will argue that IVF is creating life, and aren’t we all about life? But the means is crucial. You cannot legitimately separate the creation of life from the marital act. All of this is not even to mention the many, many lives left in deep freeze or discarded—so much collateral damage being the cost of laboratory conception.

We aren’t being mean-spirited when we say IVF, as well as surrogacy, is not the way. The costs are too high and the means are dehumanizing, turning the gift of a unique, unrepeatable life—and soul—into a commodity to be sought, bought, and sold.

It’s a tricky issue because, at this point, I think we all know people who have taken this path. Human Life International has an excellent podcast episode on what to do “When a Family Member Chooses IVF” to have a child. Children have a fundamental right to be “begotten, not made,” as Fr. Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, says in the episode. The 1987 document Donum Vitae, from the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, states the issue in the simplest and clearest of terms, as the USCCB summarized: “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 in order to engender life, it is not moral.”

It is an inexcusable tragedy that well-meaning Catholics would opt for IVF simply because they’ve never been presented with the truth of what it is and the Church’s very sound basis for rejecting it. This lack of education has created a complicated situation for families, not to mention for those children conceived in this manner.

So there is no confusion, here is a summary of how IVF works from an excellent article on the USCCB’s website:

In vitro fertilization brings about new life in a petri dish. Children engendered through IVF are sometimes known as “test tube babies.” Several eggs are aspirated from the woman’s ovary after she has taken a fertility drug which causes a number of eggs to mature at the same time. Semen is collected from the man, usually through masturbation. 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.

This short paragraph exposes a number of problematic issues with IVF. First, the means of conception is removed from the participants. Egg and sperm are removed from the mother and father and joined in a laboratory by a technician. Second, the sperm is generally garnered by means of masturbation, a grave evil in itself—fundamentally, for the same reason: it separates ejaculation from its proper context in marriage. Third, “several eggs are aspirated” and multiple embryos are implanted in the mother’s womb “in the hope that one will survive to term.” Sometimes, multiple embryos take and “selective reduction” is performed. In other words, babies are aborted. Likewise, “extra” embryos are frozen for future implantation that may or may not take place.

Another issue that the USCCB article goes on to discuss is that some cases of IVF involve donor sperm, which obviously removes any relationship between the father and mother and, therefore, is clearly immoral. Sliding down the slippery slope of IVF, one ends up in the sci-fi territory of surrogacy. As the National Catholic Bioethics Center’s article “The Wrongs of Altruistic Surrogacy” points out, “this can go to the absurd heights of five separate carefully planned parents; a biological mother and father, adoptive parents, and the ‘mother’ who carries the pregnancy.” It isn’t hard to see how this can create a host of problems, as exemplified in the recent case of surrogate McKenna West.

Likewise, the lack of knowledge of the legitimate and effective alternative, Natural Procreative Technology (NaPro), indicates a huge failing of catechesis to the laity as well as clergy. Infertility is a heartbreaking path, as I’ve written before. But there are answers.

The ob-gyn I saw while I was pregnant with my fourth child was a practicing Catholic. I’d see him at Mass on Sundays. Yet he had no idea what I was talking about when I said we had used NaPro to overcome infertility issues. That seems astounding to me. How could practicing Catholics in the field of obstetrics not know about NaPro? And if they don’t know, we can hardly fault the average Catholic in the pew for their ignorance on the matter.

That being said, sometimes even with natural means, infertility cannot be overcome. In addition to the physical issues of infertility, there are emotional wounds that form from the unsuccessful struggle for a child. This cross, however, is also an opportunity.

The Gospel shows that physical sterility is not an absolute evil. Spouses who still suffer from infertility after exhausting legitimate medical procedures should unite themselves with the Lord’s Cross, the source of all spiritual fecundity. They can give expression to their generosity by adopting abandoned children or performing demanding services for others. (CCC 2379)

The answer here is to unite one’s suffering to the Cross—not wrest the reins of control from a loving God who sees our longing, pain, and heartbreak yet also sees the big picture and can and does bring great good out of our suffering.

Though we humans have an uncanny ability to overcomplicate every issue under the sun, the truth is quite simple, if only we are humble enough to accept our limitations as the created and not the Creator: contraception is wrong; IVF is wrong; and surrogacy is wrong. And these prohibitions are in place for our own good.