Infertile couples supported in search for ethical solutions

Lea Singh

BY GLEN ARGAN
WESTERN CATHOLIC REPORTER

EDMONTON – The new Vatican instruction on reproductive technologies takes a positive approach that could lead many couples to find ethical alternatives to in vitro fertilization, say two Catholic bioethicists.

“The Church is very aware of and understands the suffering of infertile couples and walks alongside such couples,” said Lea Singh, assistant director of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family.

The Church accompanies such couples through prayers of intercession and through support for ethical research to help overcome barriers to fertility, she told an Edmonton news conference.

Singh and Paul Flaman, a bioethicist at St. Joseph’s College of the University of Alberta and the author of a book on genetic engineering, spoke to local reporters Dec. 12, the day the Vatican released Dignatis Personae (The Dignity of a Person).

Paul Flaman

Singh, now pregnant, said she had to have a surgical procedure that would enable her and her husband to conceive a child.

Lives enriched

Flaman noted that his wife had an ovarian pregnancy that made future conception impossible. Rather than opting for in vitro fertilization, they chose to adopt.

“We adopted three special needs children and it has enriched our lives enormously.”

Dignatis Personnae restated the Church’s opposition to in vitro fertilization, but also supported several methods for overcoming infertility.

The document judges it morally acceptable to perform surgical techniques to repair or remove blockages in the fallopian tubes, provide hormonal treatment to women who are not ovulating and to seek ways to prevent sterility, Flaman noted.

“The Catholic Church is not against technology. The capacity to create technology is one of the abilities God gave to human beings,” he said.

Singh said the development of ethical procedures for restoring fertility has been “pushed to the sideline because the focus has been so much on in vitro fertilization and on genetic screening through pre-implantation diagnosis.”

Human rights

Science needs ethical guidance so that it respects the human rights of every person, she said.

“The desire to have a child, as the document says, while legitimate and good, should not override the dignity of every human life to the point of absolute supremacy.”

In vitro fertilization

The Catholic Church has opposed in vitro fertilization for several reasons including:

• Most embryos created through the process are frozen and eventually destroyed.
• The technological means of conception does not respect the child’s right to be conceived through an act of sexual love.
• The means of obtaining the male sperm is not morally licit.

Singh, a lawyer, said if the teachings of Dignatis Personnae were reflected in Canadian law, several current practices would have to be halted.

Those would include in vitro fertilization, the freezing of embryos, embryonic stem cell research, and hybridization (the joining of human and animal biological material).

But the document would also encourage governments to promote adoption, which “has fallen by the wayside because of our rate of abortion,” she said.

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