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(LifeSiteNews) — The following is an argument from the natural law and Catholic teaching on the intrinsically immoral nature of impregnation through heterologous embryo transfer, also commonly called “embryo adoption.” The issue has returned to the public forum in light of a recent Alabama court ruling and an ensuing political debate over in vitro fertilization (IVF). The relation of the issue to conjugal chastity and the marriage bond is one that is all too often overlooked. It is this aspect of the matter that is considered in depth in this article.
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“In a time of new medical discoveries, rapid technological developments, and social change, what is new can either be an opportunity for genuine advancement in human culture, or it can lead to policies and actions that are contrary to the true dignity and vocation of the human person.” [i] This insight of the Catholic bishops of the United States proves especially true when dealing with advances in technology that bear upon the procreative order of human nature.
Heterologous embryo transfer, the impregnation of a woman with an embryo not fertilized from one of her own ova, has been made possible in our day only through the progress of technology and poses a poignant question because of the existence of hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos throughout the world due to IVF. Women who desire children and cannot have their own feel it would be an act of compassion to rescue or adopt such embryos, and prominent Catholic theologians have published moral justifications for such actions and such an approach.
However, if heterologous embryo transfer is morally evil, as I outline, it is of such a nature that it is akin both to marital infidelity and to contraception. The latter is harder to see, but, in my estimation, reveals the root error in the modern mentality of those that wish to be lord over life and nature.
The issue has generated much debate on both sides. In The Object of the Acting Woman in Embryo Rescue, [ii] William May argues that it is morally lawful for a woman to impregnate herself through heterologous embryo transfer – “embryo rescue” – because arguments to the contrary mistake the natural species of the act for the moral species. He argues that the procreative order ends with fertilization, and that the “rescue” of frozen embryos that have been conceived in vitro is good and praiseworthy.
READ: Former IVF user says procedure killed 30 babies to create one who survived
On the other hand, Christopher Oleson, in The Nuptial Womb, holds that heterologous embryo transfer is intrinsically evil because it infringes “on the unity of the marriage covenant, specifically on the unity of becoming a father and mother only through one another.” [iii] He supports this with the teaching of the Magisterium in Donum vitae, which affirms that “the bond existing between husband and wife accords the spouses, in an objective and inalienable manner, the exclusive right to become father and mother solely through each other.” [iv]
Following this teaching of the Magisterium, in this essay I draw upon an understanding of marriage and sexuality that is grounded in both nature and divine revelation. I argue that heterologous embryo transfer is intrinsically evil because it violates the integrity of the natural procreative order determined by God the Creator, in which impregnation is intended to be the natural effect of the bodily union between a man and a woman lawfully joined in marriage. I will show that the procreative order includes everything that naturally leads up to or follows from such a union, beginning with arousal and extending all the way to the birth of a child. Impregnation is included within this order.
Then I will show that the whole procreative order, inclusive of impregnation, is handed over in its integrity to one’s spouse in the marriage vows. I will here consider the matter of marriage vows, specifically, the jus in corpore, the right over the body of one’s spouse in sexuality. This will make clear that to become pregnant by any means other than the bodily union with one’s spouse violates the exclusivity included in the marriage vows concerning the sexual use of one’s body.
Finally, I will argue that the root problem of heterologous embryo transfer is that it violates the natural integrity of the procreative order established by God as Creator of human nature. In this way it can be seen that such an act not only violates the spousal unity of marriage, but attempts to place within the determination of human choice something that God has reserved to Himself as first agent cause of human nature. It is this attempt to supersede the determinations that God has placed within human nature that constitutes the most fundamental evil of this sin, since by such an act man seeks to make himself lord of life and of nature, a prerogative enjoyed by God alone as Creator and cause of the natures of things.
READ: Bishop Strickland sheds light on the reality of IVF after Alabama Supreme Court ruling
I. Impregnation is included in the procreative order of human nature
The first thing to be clear about when considering heterologous embryo transfer is that there is a natural order to the whole process of procreation. Certain things are naturally determined regarding the coming to be of another human life. These things are determined to one, prior to the causality of human choice. Such things include the differentiation of male and female sexual organs, the hormones of the male and female body, the arousability of the human body through sight, touch, and imagination, the penetration of the ovum by the sperm, the dependence of the embryo upon the woman’s body for full development, and such things as the place and sequence of conception, implantation, growth, and birth. All these things are part of one natural bodily process called procreation. It is important to understand that although procreation names in a particular way the conception of a child – since this is specifically when a new creation or life begins – the name is also used to refer to the whole unified process that has conception at its center.
In Some Moral Contraindications to Embryo Adoption, Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk develops this line of reasoning.
A proper understanding of the term ‘procreation’ must extend well beyond the biological events of fertilization, and take into consideration the entire process of pro-creation, or that which is done ‘on behalf of’ the creation of a new child through conjugal acts of self-giving love. . . Thus, procreation, I would argue, properly includes ample recognition of how new human beings arise, as extending from and including the conjugal act, through fertilization, implantation, pregnancy, and birth. This is the way we beget children–and this is a rather standard concept of procreation. Procreation in this broad context encompasses the inscribed intentionality of the conjugal act up to its implied finality at birth, and includes all the stages of pregnancy. Pregnancy is thus not some kind of addition to procreation, a form of nurturing or fostering which is an incidental after-thought; it is rather an integral and deeply expressive manifestation of human procreation. [v]
Taken in its causal and natural unity, procreation includes everything that leads up to or follows from conception. There is a natural order to the bringing forth and early development of a new human life, and it includes pregnancy.
When this natural order is preserved, or left untouched, the active role that human choice plays in the process simply has to do with the conjugal act. In reference to this part of the procreative process, we can distinguish between what naturally disposes for the act and what naturally follows as an effect from it. (And as studies have shown, the presence of the man’s semen in the body of the woman does more than just cause conception. Such things as the reception of the embryo into the uterus are assisted by the presence of the semen because the woman’s body is less likely to reject the embryo as a foreign body).
Understood in this way, there is a causal unity to the procreative order that has the conjugal act between a man and woman as the natural agent cause of all else that happens, including conception, implantation, and finally, birth. In other words, everything that happens in the woman’s body after the conjugal act happens because of it. The marital act begins a whole process – naturally determined by the way that the woman’s body is made – that terminates in a fundamental way at the birth of a child, when the body of the child is separated from the body of the mother.
The procreative order, then, includes everything that naturally leads up to or follows upon the conjugal act. The natural determinations of this order are in the male and female body. This order begins with the arousal of a man and woman immediately prior to and in preparation for the union; it includes the act itself, conception, and implantation; and it terminates in the birth of the child. Within this process, impregnation is the natural effect of the conjugal act, as are all the changes in the woman’s body that follow upon it. So the natural termination of the whole procreative order is not simply fertilization or conception, but birth. The unity of this order is intuitively understood by the ordinary person and is confirmed through biology and anatomy.
The unity of the procreative order as extending up to birth is also taught by the Church in her articulation of the ends of marriage. Pope Pius XI declares in Casti Connubii,
Let us sum it all up by quoting once more the words of St. Augustine: “As regards the offspring, it is provided that they should be begotten lovingly and educated religiously.” And this is also expressed succinctly in the Code of Canon Law: “The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children.” [vi]
Commenting on this division of the primary end of marriage into the stages of procreation and education, Pacholczyk writes that,
What is implicit is the idea that birth identifies a significant boundary where procreation transitions into education; that is to say, birth is a threshold where something comes to an end and something else begins. Broadly speaking, that which precedes the education of children would be “procreative” in character. This understanding of procreation as the expression and fruit of conjugal love, penetrating the various stages of early human life until birth, is thus distinct from, but complementary to its counterpart, education, which we generally envision as beginning at birth and extending a number of years thereafter. [vii]
Procreation and education, then, mark two distinct stages within the primary end of marriage, the good of children. Procreation is the fruit of the conjugal love of the spouses expressed in the marital act, and it extends not only to conception, but all the way to birth, when the child is brought forth from the body of the mother.
READ: Bishop Strickland champions sanctity of life, turning America into ‘one nation under God’ at CPAC
II. The whole procreative order in its natural integrity, inclusive of impregnation, is handed over to one’s spouse in the marriage vows
Within the procreative order, the only part that is left undetermined by nature and, therefore, properly within the lawful determination of human choice is with whom and when to carry out the conjugal act. One lawfully chooses with whom to do so when one marries. When to do so is then mutually chosen by the spouses.
The marriage vows, “I take you to be my lawful wedded wife,” and “I take you to be my lawful wedded husband,” include the exclusive right of the man and woman to those bodily actions performed with the other spouse that are naturally ordered to the generation of children, what is called the jus in corpore. This exclusive right to these bodily actions is included in the very notion of husband and wife, since to be a husband or wife is to be the person with whom another lawfully brings forth and raises children, with all the love, responsibilities, and privileges this includes.
The principal action that is the matter or content of the jus in corpore is obviously the bodily conjugal union, but this right also includes such things as the sexual arousal of another, since this naturally disposes for, inclines toward, and prepares the body for the conjugal act. Because of this, it is not only mortally sinful to have sexual relations with a person who is not one’s spouse, whether through fornication or adultery, but it is also mortally sinful to sexually arouse or provoke another through touch or sight. Such arousal is included in the exclusive rights of spouses toward each other, and to engage in it outside the bonds of marriage constitutes a sin against the conjugal unity of marriage.
Now, since within the natural order of procreation, the conjugal act is the efficient cause that sets in motion the whole rest of the procreative process up to birth, then, in handing over exclusively the use of the body in the marital act to one’s spouse by the vows of marriage, one also hands over exclusively to one’s spouse the whole procreative order that is the natural effect of the act.
This is not to say that one’s spouse may do as he or she pleases with the procreative order. Indeed, the whole point of the first part of this essay was to show that much of this order is already determined to one by nature. But by leaving the efficient cause that sets the whole procreative process in motion within the determination of certain lawful human choices, namely, the choice of whom to marry and when to carry out the conjugal act with one’s spouse, the whole process that naturally follows from the act is also by consequence included in the very notion and intention of performing the act. It is included in the way that a natural effect is included in the notion and intention of its efficient cause.
In other words, to engage in the conjugal act is to begin an entire process that follows naturally and progresses (when possible) through conception, implantation, growth, and birth. In handing over to one’s spouse the one part of the process that nature has not already determined to one and that stands as efficient cause to the rest of the process, one also, by consequence, hands over the whole rest of that process in all its natural determinations and integrity, not for the sake of determining differently what has already been established in nature itself, but for the sake of elevating this process to the dignity of being an object of rational, human choice and the effect of the personal, intimate, mutual love of spouses in marriage.
Commenting on the natural unity between the procreative order and the conjugal love that is expressed in the marital act, Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczck states that this unity has been taught continuously by the Magisterium. He states:
Pius XII stresses the intrinsic connection between conjugal love and procreation when he condemns the pursuit of either of these realities in isolation from the other. He puts it in this way: “Never is it permissible to separate these different aspects so as to exclude positively either the aim of procreation or the conjugal relation.” In embryo adoption one is systematically obviating the conjugal relation while pursuing a procreative aim or outcome by initiating a pregnancy through embryo transfer. Embryo adoption thus represents a procreative aim or outcome in strict separation from its required conjugal relation. [viii]
So procreation must always be united to the spousal, conjugal relationship. Why must it be so united? First, because God has determined that the only natural way of begetting a child is through the union of a man and a woman. Second, because the lawful right to such a union is handed over to one’s spouse in the vows of marriage. So, the procreation of a child is only rightly sought as an effect of union with one’s spouse – when a child comes forth from and within the conjugal relationship of the spouses.
Pacholczyk argues further that, because of the separation of impregnation from the marital act in heterologous embryo transfer, the very parenthood of the spouses is damaged with a kind of “rupture” or “fissure.” He explains:
This fissure is introduced into both motherhood and fatherhood by virtue of the fact that embryo adoption fails fully to respect the exclusive nature of the couple’s marital covenant and the exclusive reality implied by their conjugal union. A passage from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1987 document Donum vitae stresses this point: “The bond existing between husband and wife accords the spouses, in an objective and inalienable manner, the exclusive right to become a father and mother solely through each other.” In other words, it is only in and through marriage, and specifically through conjugal acts that a man and woman are each capacitated to become true father and true mother. [ix]
If this is so, if the procreative and conjugal aspects of marriage cannot be separated, so that husband and wife have, “in an objective and inalienable manner, the exclusive right to become father and mother solely through each other,” [x] then to separate the motherhood of a woman from both her spousal relationship to her husband and from his fatherhood, both of which happen in embryo transfer – since the child now in the womb has not been conceived through the conjugal embrace of the spouses (thus excluding the husband from being father of the child) – to separate the motherhood of the woman thus, which is already a strange motherhood in which without conceiving in her body she carries in her womb, is to sin gravely and deeply against the unity of marriage and the exclusive right of the husband to cause his wife to be with child.
III. The root problem with ’embryo adoption’ is the violation of the natural integrity of the procreative order established by God as Creator
In addition to harming in a fundamental way the unity of marriage, heterologous embryo transfer – “embryo adoption” – strikes even more deeply at the created order. To see this clearly, we must take a step back for a moment to consider how modern man looks at nature in general and particularly how he understands human nature in relation to scientific and technological advances.
Predominant not only within the scientific academy but in our culture at large is the Baconian maxim that knowledge is power – that man does not really know the nature of a thing until he can exercise power over it. This attitude underlies much of the drive within scientific experimentation. And it is applied in turn to human nature itself. The project of modern science since Francis Bacon has been to dominate nature by controlling, using, and manipulating at will – man knows nature when he has brought it under his power.
This power-hungry, experimental, Baconian approach to nature arises from the Cartesian failure to understand the substantial unity of man, in which the matter of the human body is taken to be separate (not simply distinct) from the immaterial human soul. Modern man thinks of human nature in this Cartesian way, in which the body is wholly separate from who a person is.
Opposed to this, there stands the Aristotelian, Thomistic, and Catholic understanding that the body is materially constitutive of the human person together with the immaterial soul that is man’s form. Without the composite substantial unity of the human body and soul, taught by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the only relationship left for Descartes to posit between body and soul was that of use and dominion. By consequence, this was also how man would come to relate to the rest of nature.
Following upon too sharp a divide between the body and the person, modern science now takes the human body – particularly the sexual procreative order – as its final project for domination. It is this mentality (at the service of unrestrained lust) that drives the contraceptive culture at its deepest root. Michael Waldstein, detailing the controversy over the contraceptive pill and the rejection of Humane Vitae expressed in the “Majority Report” of 1967, points out that
In Humanae Vitae, Paul VI accurately reports the important place of the Baconian program in the debate as exemplified by the “Majority Report.” He mentions the argument from “control over matter by technical means” last in a list of reasons for reconsidering contraception and qualifies it with an adverb close to the superlative, namely, praesertim, above all. “Finally, one should take note above all that that man has made such stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature that he tends to extend this domination to his own total life: that is, to the body, to the powers of his soul, to social life and even to the laws which regulate the transmission of life.” [xi]
Waldstein shows that Pope St. John Paul II, in defense of Humanae Vitae, also considered “the issue of power over nature… as the very heart or essence of the Catholic understanding of the transmission of life.” [xii] In the Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II, speaking of the root problem underlying contraception, declares,
The problem lies in maintaining the adequate relationship between that which is defined as “domination…of the forces of nature” (HV 2), and “self-mastery” (HV 21), which is indispensable for the human person. Contemporary man shows the tendency of transferring the methods proper to the first sphere to those of the second. [xiii]
What Waldstein concludes concerning the teaching of these two pontiffs on the root problem of the sin of contraception can equally be said of heterologous embryo transfer:
The Baconian project of technological mastery over nature lies at the heart of the issue… The manner in which the Catholic advocates of contraception see the nature of sexuality seems to be formed precisely by the way of seeing nature that emerged from the scientific-technological project. [xiv]
Just as the contraceptive mentality looks upon nature, particularly the procreative, sexual order within human nature, as something separable from human personhood to be dominated, controlled, and manipulated according to man’s own design and the advances he achieves in technology, so too in heterologous embryo transfer, man seeks to determine according to his own pleasure and technological ability a naturally determined part of the created order of human sexuality and procreation that God has reserved to Himself alone as Creator.
READ: US Senate bill attempts to codify right to artificial reproductive technologies
Is, then, the natural species of the act of heterologous embryo transfer mistaken for its moral species by those who object to the lawfulness of embryo transfer, as William May claims? Far from it.
Rather, as I have argued, embryo transfer is evil because impregnation is understood to be related to the human and rational relationship of spouses to each other in marriage. It is related to the exercise of the rights and privileges of marriage in the conjugal act as its natural and intended fruit. And most fundamentally, it is related directly to God as Creator of the very natures of things, since He has established the order, unity, and integrity of human procreation in creating man “male and female” (Gen 1:27).
Therefore, however “pro-life” the rescue or adoption of frozen embryos might seem at first, at root it arises from the same error as the contraceptive culture, that of thinking that man can redetermine things that God Himself has already ordered within human nature, including the integrity of the procreative process, in which the only lawful and natural cause of impregnation is the bodily union of a man and woman joined in marriage.
The argument in summary
Drawing upon both sound reason and the teachings of the Church, I have argued that heterologous embryo transfer is morally evil in virtue of its very object because it violates both the exclusive conjugal union of spouses in marriage and the natural integrity of the procreative order that God the Creator has determined in human nature. I first showed that the procreative order extends beyond conception to include impregnation and birth. To do this, I demonstrated that procreation names the whole process that naturally follows as an effect from bodily, conjugal union, inclusive of both conception and impregnation, and terminating at birth.
Then I explained that this whole process is handed over to one’s spouse in the marriage vows with the exclusive right to the conjugal act, the jus in corpore. This act, the Church has always taught, is naturally and per se ordered toward the procreation of children, and for this reason, procreation and the conjugal union of the spouses can never be lawfully separated, so that “the bond existing between husband and wife accords the spouses, in an objective and inalienable manner, the exclusive right to become father and mother solely through each other.” [xv] I argued that, contrary to this exclusive right of spouses, heterologous embryo transfer constitutes a sin against the marital unity of husband and wife in the bringing forth of children.
Finally, I argued that, similar to the sin of contraception, embryo transfer expresses an attempt by man to undo and redetermine the sexual and procreative order that God Himself has placed within human nature. Founded upon an erroneous Cartesian and Baconian understanding of nature and human knowledge – which seeks technological mastery over the human body – the acceptance of heterologous embryo transfer amounts in the end to a rejection of God Himself as Creator. Man attempts to usurp God in His role as Lord of life and of nature. In this, it is not difficult to see the age-old temptation, “You shall be as Gods” (Gen 3:5). Resisting this temptation, may we love both life and marriage, as well as the order God has seen fit in His wisdom to establish between them.
[i] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, Sixth Edition, <https://www.usccb.org/about/doctrine/ethical-and-religious-directives/upload/ethical-religious-directives-catholic-health-service-sixth-edition-2016-06.pdf> 7.
[ii] William May, The Object of the Acting Woman in Embryo Rescue, in Human Embryo Adoption, Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life, (The National Catholic Bioethics Center: Philadelphia, 2006) 135-163.
[iii] Christopher Oleson, The Nuptal Womb, On the Moral Significance of Being with Child, in Human Embryo Adoption, Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life, (The National Catholic Bioethics Center: Philadelphia, 2006) 168.
[iv] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum vitae, n.2.2.
[v] Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Some Moral Contraindications to Embryo Adoption, in Human Embryo Adoption, Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life, (The National Catholic Bioethics Center: Philadelphia, 2006) 41.
[vi] Pope Pius XII, Casti Connubii, <https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html> n.17.
[vii] Pacholczyk, Some Moral Contraindications to Embryo Adoption, 42.
[viii] Pacholczyk, Some Moral Contraindications to Embryo Adoption, 44.
[ix] Pacholczyk, Some Moral Contraindications to Embryo Adoption, 45-46.
[x] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum vitae, n.2.2.
[xi] Michael Waldstein, Introduction, The Purpose of the Theology of the Body, in Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body, by St. John Paul II, translated by Michael Waldstein, (Pauline Books and Media: Boston, 2006) 101.
[xii] Waldstein, Introduction, The Purpose of the Theology of the Body, 102.
[xiii] St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body, translated by Michael Waldstein, (Pauline Books and Media: Boston, 2006) 603.
[xiv] Waldstein, Introduction, The Purpose of the Theology of the Body, 102.
[xv] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum vitae, n.2.2.
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