Open to Life: Assisted Reproductive Technologies

If you are new to this series, I recommend starting at the beginning: Open to Life Series: What is Openness to Life?


Doing the research for this post completely shocked and saddened me. I only looked up articles and documents related to reproductive technologies on Catholic websites (mainly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ site). Nevertheless, what I found on there was beyond words.

One of the worst things I read was how New Jersey passed a law in 2004 making it legal to clone embryos, implant them into women, and then abort them for use in research. Yes, you really did read that correctly. Here is the link. There is actually a whole page full of links related to this topic, but I did not have the courage to read them after that.

Why is it that we do not hear of all these “scientific advances” and research studies in the news? Could it really be that no one in the news media cares about these issues?

We must remember that God’s ways are not our ways. There is holy mystery in God’s choosing to bring human life into being in one manner and not another (ART and the Family).

There is a reason why the Catholic Church teaches that it is immoral for technology to replace the marital act and it is not because of where the use of these procedures will lead. It is because life is sacred, the marital act is holy, and nothing should come between the union of man and woman in their sharing of the creation of new life with God. We may think that warnings of future problems will change people’s minds and hearts, but prophetic warnings from Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae did not prevent people from using contraception. (I will talk about this in a coming post.)

Very few assisted reproductive technologies available today are moral. Those that are include medications that help with fertility and surgeries that repair or reconstruct reproductive organs or that remove blockages. Natural family planning charting (using the sympto-thermal method) is one of the best ways to help identify specific fertility issues in women.


Up Next: What is Wrong with ARTs?

For full texts of the documents used, see my Open to Life Series: Introduction