In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF)

Fun fact: ‘in vitro’ is Latin for ‘in glass’, and IVF is so called because the procedure used
to be carried out in glass dishes 

What?
- IVF is a fertilisation technique for couples who are unable to conceive children
naturally.
1. Multiple egg cells are taken from a woman and multiple sperm cells from a man.
2. These egg and sperm cells are combined in a laboratory to allow fertilisation,
creating multiple embryos.
3. A cell can be removed from an embryo before the embryo is placed in the uterus to
check for genetic disorders etc.
4. 1 or 2 healthy embryos are inserted in the mother-to-be’s uterus to develop further.
5. Any healthy embryos which have not been used in the first attempt at pregnancy can
be frozen and stored for use another time.

Potential Issues
- Procreation, for the Catholic Church, must result from intercourse which is both
marital and unitive.
- IVF is frowned upon by the Church because it necessarily separates procreation from
the condition of unity and potentially from the condition of marriage.
- The Church would argue that a woman who is infertile has been made this way by
the will of God. Children are a gift from God and, if God chooses not to give this gift,
humans should not try to bypass God’s will.
- The IVF process includes the creation of multiple embryos. Many will be discarded if
they are not of good enough quality to present a healthy chance of pregnancy.
o The doctrine of the sanctity of life, in conjunction with the Church’s teaching
that personhood begins at conception, is in vehement opposition to this
practice. It may be considered murder to discard of the excess embryos.

Support for IVF

- IVF is legal in many countries, including the UK.
- IVF is justified by more liberal ethical stances like utilitarianism and situation ethics.
o Consider a married couple, a wife and a husband, who find out that the wife
is infertile. They are both eager to raise children. The most loving thing to do
is to allow the wife to undergo IVF so that the couple can realise their dreams
and form a happy family.
o This goes also for infertile women who are unmarried; if they wish to raise a
child and pledge to do so responsibly, why should they be prevented from this
by a biological barrier which is easily surmountable?
- Infertility is basically an illness which medicine has the power to treat. If we can treat
other illnesses without hesitation, we should be able to treat infertility similarly.
- The issue of the discarding of embryos shares much with the issue of abortion, and
some arguments for abortion apply here too (personhood, law of agapē).
- Secular thought does not require that procreation result from unitive and marital
intercourse.