[Question:]{.underline} What is the morality of “embryo adoption”?
[Answer:]{.underline} As is well known, one of the by-products of artificial fertilization as a treatment for infertility or for genetic selection, is that many more ova are fertilized than can in fact be used. This is inseparable from the process of artificial fertilization, on account of the high rate of loss in the process. Consequently many more embryos are produced than can in fact be used. These embryos are frozen for future use. This has caused a huge moral dilemma. To discard these embryos is nothing short of murder of the innocent. Is it licit for Catholics to “adopt” these embryos by having them implanted in the womb of a married woman, who will then carry the child to term? Many have thought that this would be a great act of charity, and not a few Protestants actually promote this practice, based upon the observation that hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos exist in those countries in which in vitro fertilization takes place, and that they all remain orphans, abandoned by their parents, and indeed of whose parents in general all trace has been lost.
DIGNITAS PERSONAE
This difficult and delicate question has in fact been resolved, in a little-known instruction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on certain bioethical questions, published December 12, 2008, and entitled Dignitas personae. This instruction, approved by Pope Benedict XVI on June 20, 2008, gives a moral analysis of a host of modern issues concerning life that have arisen as a consequence of modern medical technology. Although one might find the continual insistence on human dignity, rather than God’s law, to be humanistic, it must nevertheless be admitted that, all throughout, this document defends the principles of the natural law.
Before understanding the Church’s answer to the question of “embryo adoption”, it is important to understand why it rejects all forms of surrogate motherhood, by which it means any technique that would enable a mother to carry in her womb a child conceived other than by the natural process of the marital act.
PIUS XII
This was already clearly declared by Pope Pius XII in an allocution of May 19, 1956 on Artificial Insemination to the Second World Congress of fertility and sterility. In that declaration, the Pope taught the fundamental principle on the basis of which all the difficult modern situations can be resolved: “The relation which unites mother and father to their child is rooted in the organic fact, and further still in the deliberate action of husband and wife, who give themselves one to the other and whose will to surrender themselves is revealed and finds its true result in the being they bring into the world. Only this consecration of self, generous in its principle and arduous in its realization, with the conscientious acceptance of the responsibilities it carries, can guarantee that the work of educating children will be followed with the diligence, courage and patience required.” (In Papal Teachings, Matrimony, Solemnes, 737). It is consequently in the natural law that the engendering of children be accomplished ONLY via the marital act. It is, therefore, permissible, for medicine to do all that it can to enhance fertility through the marital act, but reprehensible for it to do anything to promote fertility that bypasses that act.
Pope Pius XII goes on to apply this teaching to the question of artificial insemination: “Artificial insemination exceeds the limits of the right which the married couple has acquired by the matrimonial contract, namely, the right to exercise fully their natural sexual capacity in the natural accomplishment of the matrimonial act. … The matrimonial contract does not confer this right, because it has for its object not the offspring but the natural acts capable of procreating a new life and which are destined to this. So it must be said that artificial insemination violates the natural law and that it is contrary to justice and morality”. (Ib. , 740). A clearer statement of the Church’s teaching on morality could hardly be made.
The most recent instruction embraces this same teaching, although expressing it a little less clearly: “The Church moreover holds that it is ethically unacceptable to dissociate procreation from the integrally personal context of the conjugal act: human procreation is a personal act of a husband and wife, which is not capable of substitution” (16). Consequently the immorality of using artificially fertilized embryos is not just a question of freezing embryos and deliberately allowing for the destruction of large numbers of them, in itself entirely immoral. It is much more fundamental than that. It lies in the role that marriage and the marriage act play in the natural law, in God’s plan for the engendering of children. Consequently in vitro fertilization would remain immoral even in the impossible case that there would be no deliberate destruction of excessive embryos, and even if the fertilization were accomplished from the seed of both parents who were to raise the child.
NO SURROGATE MOTHERHOOD
The above-mentioned instruction has this to say: “The proposal that these embryos could be put at the disposal of infertile couples as a treatment for infertility is not ethically acceptable for the same reasons which make artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood”. (Ib. 19). It goes on to condemn the proposal of “embryo adoption” or “prenatal adoption”. “It has also been proposed, solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction, that there could be a form of ‘prenatal adoption’. This proposal, praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above.”
NO MORAL RESOLUTION
The instruction goes on to teach that in fact there is no moral resolution to the question of these frozen embryos: they cannot morally be adopted, and they cannot morally be destroyed. Hence the gravity of the moral crisis that the practice of in vitro fertilization has created. “All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved. Therefore John Paul II made an ‘appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be [no morally licit solution]{.underline} regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be proected by law as human persons’” (Ib.).
This teaching has certainly to be considered as a teaching of the Church’s Authentic Magisterium, clarifying her unchanging teaching, according to true and unchanging principles. It consequently binds Catholics in conscience. It is not permissible for a Catholic to ask for the implantation of such an embryo, nor to adopt it, no matter how good his intentions might be. It is to participate in a process that denatures God’s plan of procreation and destroys the sanctity of marriage, and in particular of the marriage act, as clearly explained by Pope Pius XII. A Catholic who knowingly would refuse to follow this teaching would be objectively guilty of serious sin. We can only admire the depth of Catholic moral teaching, going beyond simple good intentions to the real and profound nature of man’s acts, which when vitiated cannot be made right by good intentions.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.