Dialogue Resource
Assisted Reproductive Technology and the Family by Helen Alvare, Esq. (2007)
Assisted Reproductive Technology and the Family by Helen Alvare, Esq.
At the beginning of the 21st century, it is impossible to avoid news reports on the subject of the “changing American family” – high rates of cohabitation, out-of-wedlock parenting, same-sex marriage debates. One lesser-noted phenomenon, changing people’s experience of family from the inside out, is the increasing use of assisted reproductive technologies (“ARTs”). In the United States alone, there are thousands of fertility clinics, sperm banks, egg brokers and surrogate mothers annually producing about 10,000 children.
Many people, including many Catholics, are unaware of the Church’s moral responses to these practices. Perhaps not surprisingly, many find it difficult to imagine that our faith would have moral objections to married couples “making babies” by any means. Yet the Church does firmly object. Church documents such as Donum Vitae and Evangelium Vitae explain the arguments against substituting a technological act for married love as the source of procreation. The ART industry tends to “commodify” children, and ART processes may also involve freezing, destroying or donating (for experiments) embryos “left over” from clients.
Another Catholic perspective on ARTs concerns their effects upon the family, and by extension, society. Parts of this teaching will appeal immediately to our commonsense. Other parts require one to accept with good will that God’s ways are not our ways—that there is holy mystery in God’s choosing to bring human life into being in one manner and not another.