IVF, Pregnancy, Fertility, Baby Dreams…

The Roman Catholic Church opposes all kinds of in vitro fertilisation because, as with contraception, it separates the procreative purpose of the marriage act from its unitive purpose:

This particular doctrine [of "observing the natural law"], often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act. The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church,

Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) [...] dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that “entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.”

The Catholic Church advocates that infertility is a call from God to adopt children because

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.

Also, embryos are sometimes discarded in the in vitro fertilisation process, resulting in their death. Catholics and many people of other faiths see embryos as human lives with the same rights as all others and therefore view the destruction of embryos as the loss of innocent lives.

Gamete Intrafallopian Transfer (GIFT) is not technically in vitro fertilisation because with GIFT, fertilisation takes place inside the body, not on a Petri dish. The Catholic Church nevertheless is concerned with it because “Some theologians consider this to be a replacement of the marital act, and therefore immoral.”

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