Gozo Bishop Mario Grech has launched a scathing attack on in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), describing it as “a highly abortive” technique, while he lambasted the culture of death promoted by “liberals and progressives”.
It hurts when politicians take up the front seats in liturgical celebrations but are ethically absent when they take up their seats in Parliament
In a homily during Mass on Friday to mark Our Lady of Sorrows, Mgr Grech urged Catholic politicians not to encourage the culture of death when IVF legislation is debated in Parliament.
“It hurts when politicians take up the front seats in liturgical celebrations but are ethically absent when they take up their seats in Parliament.”
Mgr Grech’s words come at a time when a law on medically assisted procreation is still at drafting stage.
Various parliamentary committees have discussed the ethically contentious topic since 2005 but there is currently no deadline for the presentation of the Bill to Parliament.
IVF has long been offered at a high cost by private clinics in Malta but the sector is unregulated. Mater Dei, a public hospital, is fully equipped to offer the service but it does not pending legislation.
Mgr Grech started the homily by urging Catholics to reflect on the sorrow of those who wanted to have children but could not. “I feel it is my duty to empathise and accompany these people.”
He said Church and state could not remain indifferent to the suffering of infertile couples and appealed to the scientific community to find “ethically good ways” to help them overcome their difficulties.
Mgr Grech painted a picture of doctors offering IVF as a first option to infertile couples rather than trying to find other medical and psychological ways of accompanying them.
He listed three reasons why the Church objected to IVF: procreation could not be separate from the conjugal act as happened in medically assisted procreation; the procedure did not respect parents, especially the mother because it heightened expectations when the success rate was low; and IVF was “a highly abortive” technology that did not respect life.
He then criticised embryo freezing and adoption, two proposals on which cross-party consensus was achieved in a parliamentary select committee that discussed the issue two years ago.
The select committee had urged government to include embryo freezing in any legislation on IVF and allow the possibility for unclaimed frozen embryos to be adopted.
However, Mgr Grech said embryo adoption was like “a showcase” where people could “buy human life”. He claimed that since 1978, when IVF was invented, three million children were born as a result of medically assisted procreation and of these only 100,000 were born healthy.
Pity should not be used to justify ethically wrong choices, he added, urging the state to invest in psychological help for infertile couples because “many such cases often resolved themselves after proper psychological preparation”.
Mgr Grech also proposed naprotechnology (an acronym for natural procreative technology), a scientific technique promoted by the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, as an alternative.
The technique provides medical and surgical treatments, which proponents argue cooperate completely with the reproductive system.
ksansone@timesofmalta.com