The past several columns have looked at some of the serious moral objections the Church has regarding in vitro fertilization (IVF). These have dealt with the lack of proper respect toward life, marriage and the children themselves. But IVF is also connected to other moral issues, and in some cases has created them.

An obvious one is the fate of the huge number of frozen embryos that exist. These embryos were frozen after being created during IVF to be used later or to be maintained as “spares” should an IVF cycle not result in a birth. In our country alone estimates come in around 500,000.

The reality is that most of those embryos are doomed to either a perpetual frozen existence, are discarded or used for research.

Even those that may be donated to other couples (something that happens occasionally) or eventually used by their parents, are likely doomed. Between the freezing and thawing and the degradation that happens over time, along with the low success rates that already exist under the best of circumstances, the odds of an embryo transferred actually being born into the world as a healthy child are depressingly low.

Often the parents who helped create these children find themselves in an unforeseen new dilemma: what to do with our leftover embryos? Far more uncertain than those parents may be however, is the fate of their frozen children.

This reality is another manifestation of the moral problems inherent in IVF. Where else would it be morally acceptable to freeze and store human beings? Of course it is unacceptable to treat any human being in that way.

Given the uncertain fate of so many members of the human race, some couples, in an effort to become parents to these largely forgotten or abandoned children, have tried to adopt them while still at the embryonic stage. Catholic theologians continue to debate the morality and merits of such efforts, but the Church has in no way condoned that approach to dealing with the dilemma.

Trying to “save a life” shows a good intention, but the moral concerns regarding marriage itself still exist, not to mention the guarantee that many more lives will be lost than saved through those actions.
Good intentions alone do not exonerate us from the responsibility to continue to choose only good actions. The Church rightly points out that IVF has created a whole new set of moral problems that have no good answer. It is a moral dilemma of the worst kind.

In addition to this immediate dilemma, there are also several others which are related. IVF opens the door to unprecedented control and manipulation of human life in its earliest stages.

The technology involved in IVF is a prerequisite for any number of other attempts to control not only the creation of human life, but also to determine its genetic makeup. IVF clinics already advertise the possibility to choose egg and sperm donors who possess desired physical traits. But this could be taken to a whole new level as biotechnology grows ever more advanced and control over the genetic makeup of individuals becomes ever more real.

In animals this has meant cloning and the ability to make species display traits of unrelated species by mixing DNA (cats which glow in the dark for example). We are not yet at that level of control in humans, but it is almost within sight. There are already legal debates surrounding the mixing of genetic material from more than two human parents in the creation of a child through IVF. In other words, three or more people would biologically be “parents” to a single child.

In the last 15 years or so another issue related to, and in many ways made possible by, IVF, has been hotly debated: embryonic stem cell research. The morality of this issue will be the basis of my next column.