Question:
Answer:
The wrongness of IVF often gets obscured by people pointing to the children who came from IVF and assuming that their intrinsic goodness validates the method that brought them into existence. Children who came into existence through adultery, fornication, rape, prostitution, or via surrogacy are just as intrinsically good, but that doesn’t mean that the way that they came into the world is good or should be defended.
Arguments against IVF include that human embryos are often purposefully destroyed in this process when they are not implanted, which is the direct killing of innocent human beings. The documentary Eggsploitation exposes how college-aged women, who are often struggling financially, are coerced by offers of tens of thousands of dollars to donate their eggs, even at great risk to themselves. IVF also frequently relies on women acting as surrogate wombs to birth these embryos. Pope Francis, in a January 8 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, has recently called for a global ban on surrogacy, saying, “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
Another practical argument against IVF is that there is no objective way to stop its use at just infertile married couples. The United States once tried to make contraceptives legal only for married couples, but the right of single people to have what married people can access was later upheld in the 1972 US Supreme Court case of Eisenstadt v. Baird. So there’s nothing to keep an unmarried man from contracting for a sperm donor and an egg donor, have embryos created from that in IVF, use a surrogate womb to gestate the child, and then have the child delivered to the consumer.
The most basic reason that IVF is wrong is because children have a right to come into existence in their mother’s body and be protected from coming into existence in a laboratory, where they might be shipped off to their mother’s womb, or a stranger’s womb, or to cold storage indefinitely. The Catechism says, children have “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 [their] conception’” (2378).