What Christian traditions say about IVF treatments
The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos should be considered children has forced Americans to grapple with a mess of complicated realities about law, infertility, medicine and politics.
Christian theology is also central to the decision. “Human life cannot be unlawfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, wrote in his ruling.
Among conservative Christians, the belief that life begins at conception has been a driving force behind anti-abortion policies for years. Among the most fervent opponents of abortion, this way of thinking has also led to uncompromising opposition to in vitro fertilization.
“That is the fundamental premise of our entire movement,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, which opposes abortion. IVF, she said, “is literally a business model based on disposable children and treating children like commodities.”
But when it comes to the morality of IVF, there is a clearer divide between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic teaching expressly forbids this. Protestants tend to be more open, in part because there is no comparable top-down authority structure that requires shared doctrine.
The evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents tend to view IVF positively because it produces more children. Preachers rarely preach about fertility, although they may do so about abortion.
But the Alabama decision “is a very morally fair opinion,” said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct reasoning between the belief that life begins at conception and the opposition to abortion and IVF.
“It will force conservative Christians to reckon with their possible complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,” he said.
The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes IVF. Almost all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden.
The IVF process typically involves many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There is masturbation – a “violation of chastity”, according to the catechism or teaching – which is often necessary to collect semen. There is the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body – outside the sacramental “marital act” of sex between a man and a woman. And there’s the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted – an ‘abortive practice’.
The church’s first major statement against IVF came in response to the world’s first “test tube baby,” born in England in 1978. The document, written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, covered a variety of fertility technologies. such as artificial insemination, IVF and surrogacy.
Last month, Pope Francis condemned surrogacy as “despicable” and called for a global ban on the practice. An unborn child should not be “turned into an object of human trafficking,” he said.
Many Catholics use contraception and IVF treatments contrary to church teaching. But for observant Catholics, the opposition to IVF is part of an ecosystem of beliefs about marriage, the family, and especially sex.
The marital act of sex must be performed during conception and the embryo should not be subjected to “various indignities, poked and prodded” by scientists, said Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
In cases of infertility, some “supportive” technologies might be OK, he said, but not “replacement” technologies such as IVF. That distinction may seem unimportant, but it emphasizes the importance of sex in Catholicism as a sacred act exclusive to a man and a woman who wants to have children.
For example, Mr. Meaney said he and his wife faced fertility issues and used methods to conceive, including surgery to address scar tissue and deep tissue massages. “Assisting means there has to be sex,” he said. “Replacement means that no sexual act takes place.”
But the bioethics of IVF is not a topic that most conservative Christians have on their radar. Evangelicals typically rely on literal readings of the Bible, rather than centuries of Catholic social philosophy and anthropology. And the Bible, an ancient text, obviously makes no mention of IVF
Mr. Walker said that when he had considered introducing a resolution on assisted reproductive technology at the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, friends and colleagues reacted hesitantly.
But evangelical and Catholic communities have increasingly intermingled over shared conservative political beliefs. Now the inevitable politics of fertility in America may shape evangelical belief and practice in IVF
Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, hopes that evangelical pastors will work to train their churches on the theological reasons for opposing IVF, as Catholics have done. She sees potential openings among Gen Z evangelicals opposed to hormonal birth control and the broad ways technology has infiltrated their lives.
“IVF is just the very beginning of reproductive technologies,” she said. “We are just woefully unprepared to deal with the onslaught of problems that are coming.”