The Simple Case of in Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer
M any people, both Catholic and non-Catholic, can readily understand why the Catho li c Church teaches that it is morally bad to generate human life by inseminating a married woman with sperm provided by a man who is not her husband or by having sperm provided by her husband inseminate another woman, a so-ca lled "surrogate" mother, who would, after bearing the child, turn it over to the married couple. They recognize that choosing to generate human life in this way does violence to marriage and to human parenthood and does an injustice to the child. Such people can likewise understand why the Catholic Church rejects the deliberate creat ion in the laboratory of human lives which will be discarded or frozen or used for experiments designed only to gain knowledge which may benefit others, but which only poses harm to the lives upon which the experiments are performed. They recognize that such procedures do violence to the dignity of the human lives deliberately brought into existence in the laboratory. And such people also understand why the Catholic Church opposes the monitoring of human lives in utero for the purpose of detecting and then destroying, through abortion, those discovered to be of poor quality. Again they recognize that choosing to act in this way does a terrible violence and injustice to unborn human lives. But many of these same people, Catholic as well as non-Catholic, find the teaching of the Catholic Church (as recently expressed in the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's "Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Human Procreation"), on the immorality of the "simple case" of in I'itro fertilizat ion, a different matter. I n this case, there is no use of gametic materials from third parties; the child conceived is genetically the child of husband and wife, who are and will remain its parents. In this case, there is no deliberate creation of