IVF and Contraception

IVF and Contraception

To listen to this in mp3 format click here

Some people have the following confusion about the Church’s teaching on In-Vitro Fertilization: If the Church is so preoccupied with procreation as to forbid the use of contraception, why does it teach that IVF is morally wrong if our only intention is to bring another child into the world.

There are two answers to this question. The first is that IVF often creates more new lives than it ends up implanting into a mother’s womb. The remaining un-implanted embryos are then discarded or used for scientific research, both of which mean the loss of innocent human life.

The other reason is more profound. You see the problem with contraception is not that it prevents human life from coming to be (if that were the reason, then celibacy would be wrong), but because it separated the act of self-giving conjugal marital love from the act of procreation. What does IVF do? Exactly the same thing, but in the reverse. According to the Church’s wisdom, it is no less wrong to deprive marital love from an openness to procreation than it is to separate procreation from marital love. Such are the problems with manufacturing human beings in a petri dish as is the procedure of IVF.