The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos should be considered children has forced Americans to grapple with a jumble of complex realities regarding law, infertility, medicine, and politics.
At the heart of the decision, there is also Christian theology. “Human life cannot be unjustly destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God. » the chief judge of the courtTom Parker, wrote in his decision.
Among conservative Christians, the belief that life begins at conception has for years been a driving force behind anti-abortion policies. Among the most ardent opponents of abortion, this thinking has also led to uncompromising opposition to in vitro fertilization.
“It’s the fundamental principle of our entire movement,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, which opposes abortion. IVF, she said, “is literally a business model built on disposable children and treating children as commodities.”
But on the morality of IVF, there is a sharper divide between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic teaching expressly prohibits it. Protestants tend to be more open, in part because there is no similar top-down authority structure requiring shared doctrine.
The evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many followers are inclined to view IVF positively because it creates more children. Pastors rarely preach on fertility, but they may preach on abortion.
But Alabama’s decision “is a very morally honest opinion,” said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The decision, he said, shows the direct reasoning between the belief that life begins at conception and opposition to abortion and IVF.
“This 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 to oppose IVF. Almost all modern fertility interventions are morally prohibited.
The IVF process generally includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There is masturbation – an “offense against chastity,” according to the catechism, or teaching – often necessary to harvest sperm. There is the fertilization of an egg and a sperm outside of a woman’s body – outside of the sacramental “conjugal act” that is the sexual relationship between husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos which 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. Written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, the document discussed various fertility technologies, such as artificial insemination, IVF and surrogacy.
Last month, Pope Francis condemned surrogacy as “despicable” and called for a global ban on practice. An unborn child should not be “turned into an object of trafficking,” he said.
Many Catholics use contraception and IVF in violation of Church teaching. But for practicing Catholics, opposition to IVF is part of an ecosystem of beliefs about marriage, family and especially sex.
The marital sexual act must be performed from conception and the embryo must not be subjected to “different indignities, prodding and prodding” by scientists, said Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
In cases of infertility, some “assistive” technologies might be acceptable, he said, but not “replacement” ones like IVF. This distinction may seem insignificant, but it highlights the importance of sex in Catholicism as a sacred act exclusively for a husband and wife who want children.
For example, Mr. Meaney said, he and his wife faced fertility problems and used methods to conceive, including surgery to treat scar tissue and deep tissue massages. “Helping means there has to be sex,” he said. “Replace means no sexual act takes place. »
But the bioethics of IVF is not a topic that most conservative Christians have on their radar. Evangelicals generally rely on literal readings of the Bible, not centuries of Catholic social philosophy and anthropology. And the Bible, an ancient text, of course does not mention IVF
Mr. Walker said that when he considered introducing a resolution on artificial reproductive technology to the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, his friends and colleagues reacted with hesitation.
But evangelical and Catholic communities are increasingly mixing around shared conservative political beliefs. Now America’s inevitable fertility policies may shape evangelical belief and practice regarding IVF.
Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, hopes evangelical pastors will work to educate their churches on the theological reasons to oppose IVF, as Catholics have done. She sees potential openings with Gen Z evangelicals who oppose hormonal birth control and the broad avenues through which technology has infiltrated their lives.
“IVF is just the very beginning of reproductive technologies,” she said. “We are unfortunately not prepared to face the onslaught of problems ahead. »
