Why the Church does not agree

One of the most prominent signs in the world today is the advance being attained in biomedical sciences. The Church has followed this development, so much so that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith felt the need to publish, on February 22, 1987, the instruction Donum Vitae (The Gift Of Life). The scope was that a moral evaluation be done about the interventions on the embryos and the various forms of artificial fertilisation.

The Congregation stated, among other things, that there must always be an absolute respect towards the dignity of the human being from the very first instant of existence and towards the uninterrupted protection of the originality of the transmission of the human life by acts proper to the married couple.

These principles and moral evaluations were authoritatively confirmed by John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel Of Life) of March 25, 1995.

In the last few years, biomedical sciences have made great progress; the biological structures of the human being as well as the process of his conception have been better known. The new technology has opened the door for new prospective therapeutics, such as the therapy against infertility. But new questions of ethical nature have also arisen, such as the freezing and the destruction of thousands and thousands of embryos, and research on the stem cells of the embryos.

In the year 2002, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith felt the need to study in depth the new issues that have arisen in the field of bioethics. On September 8, 2008, Pope Benedict approved the new instruction Dignitas Personae (The Dignity Of The Person). This instruction, of a doctrinal nature, showed that the perplexity was not just about the biomedical techniques; it has also shown that there have arisen serious repercussions about the very procreation of the human being and the irreplaceable role of marriage in the transmission of life.

The second part of the instruction Dignitas Personae tackles the new problems of procreation. It declares, as the Church has done several times in the past, that every human being has the right for his own dignity from the moment of conception up to his natural death. He has the right for life and for his physical integrity.

The values, specifically human, of sexuality demand that the procreation of the human being must be realised as the fruit of the specific conjugal union of love between the married couple. It is an act that concerns the totality and the reciprocity of the married. It is in such an interpersonal relationship that the existence of a new life can realise itself in a decent manner.

The instruction Donum Vitae says that the conjugal union is inseparably corporeal and spiritual, of the body and of the spirit of the human being, of the whole human being; it is in their body and through their body that the spouses consummate the marriage and may become father and mother. The marriage union demands that the couple have the reciprocal respect towards the right in marriage to become father and mother only by the other spouse in marriage.

All this clearly shows that the procreation of a new baby demands the intervention of the conjugal act of marriage. From this, therefore, it results that no artificial fertilisation (IVF) satisfies that which God himself asks of the human being. In fact, in number 12 of the instruction Dignitas Personae it is said that all the techniques of artificial fertilisation, both heterologous (that is to say with an element which is not of the married couple) and also the techniques of homologous (that is, with the element of the same married couple) have to be excluded because they take the place of the conjugal act.

In the case of an artificial fertilisation, instead of there being the direct and immediate meeting of the married couple between themselves, the new life will be the result of a technical procedure. This may be perfect from the technical point of view but it remains completely impersonal. The Church states that the separation of procreation from the completely personal context of the conjugal act is unacceptable. The human procreation is a personal act of the couple, man and woman, that does not accept any type of a replaceable proxy; that is, it can never be substituted.

In the light of these norms, as we have already stated, all the techniques of artificial fertilisation, both heterologous and homologous, that substitute the conjugal act must be excluded. Nevertheless, the techniques that are of help to the conjugal act are accepted. The homologous artificial insemination in marriage cannot be accepted except when the tehnical process used does not take the place of the conjugal act but is only of help to facilitate its natural scope.

The instruction Donum Vitae remarks that the fertilisation in vitro many times involves the voluntary destruction of the embryos. Some used to say that this used to happen because the technique was imperfect.

But today experience shows that, in fact, all the techniques of in vitro fertilisation work as if the human embyo is a disordered mass of cells that are used so that some of them will be selected while others are discarded. The number of embryos that are destroyed is enormous. The embryos produced in vitro that will have some defect are usually discarded.

The commandments that God had given to Moses are the fundamental precepts of the natural law that tells us to do and to love what is good and to avoid what is evil throughout our whole life. There are acts expressly prohibited by the law of God, such as idolatry, blaspheming, theft and fornication.

Together with these expressly-prohibited acts there are also other acts that are only implicitly prohibited, that is in a deduced manner from the explicit: these are those acts that the Magisterium of the Church disapproves from time to time and which are dependent on the progress of science, such as contraception, cloning and artificial fertilisation.