A new statement from the Catholic Church condemns virtually every form of medical science utilized to help couples with fertility problems have children:
The Vatican issued its most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years on Friday, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology and reinforcing the church’s opposition to in vitro fertilization, human cloning, genetic testing on embryos before implantation and embryonic stem cell research.
The Vatican says these techniques violate the principles that every human life — even an embryo — is sacred, and that babies should be conceived only through intercourse by a married couple.
The 32-page instruction, titled “Dignitas Personae,” or “The Dignity of the Person,” was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, and carries the approval and the authority of Pope Benedict XVI.
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the Vatican’s opposition to in vitro fertilization seemed neither moral nor intuitive to Josephine Johnston, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y.
“For a married couple who go to get in vitro fertilization, the Vatican’s idea that it’s not done with a serious amount of love and commitment is very bizarre to me, because it’s such a deliberate act, done in the cold light of day, with enormous amounts of thought and intention attached to it,” she said. “The idea that it’s not done within the spirit of marital love, I find very strange.”
Which is why, much like earlier pronouncements about birth control, it’s likely that this will be largely ignored by American Catholics.
I can understand the need for ethical guidelines in this area, but a wholesale condemnation of IUI, IVF, and other methods principally designed to help married couples have children strikes me as emblematic of a mind-set still stuck in a pre-scientific, pre-rational age.
