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Sun, Jan 18, 2009 - Page 9　News List

Thirty years of test-tube babies

More than 3 million healthy people have been born through in-vitro fertilization, but some religions are still opposing it as against nature

By Peter Singer

Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned 30 last year. The birth of a “test-tube baby,” as the headlines described in-vitro fertilization, was highly controversial at the time. Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair for US President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of producing an abnormal infant was too great for an attempt at IVF ever to be justified. Some religious leaders also condemned the use of modern scientific technology to replace sexual intercourse, even when it could not lead to conception.



The Roman Catholic Church has not moved away from its opposition to IVF. In a recently released instruction, Dignitas Personae, the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, objected to IVF on several grounds, including the fact that many embryos were created in the process, and few survived. This outcome was not, however, very different from natural conception, for the majority of embryos conceived by sexual intercourse also fail to implant in the uterine wall, with the woman often not even knowing that she was ever “pregnant.”


In addition, the Vatican objects to the fact that conception is the result of a “technical action” rather “a specific act of the conjugal union.” But while any couple would prefer to conceive a child without the intervention of doctors, that option is not available for infertile couples. In those circumstances, it is harsh to say to a couple that they cannot have their own genetic child at all.

It also appears contrary to the broad thrust of the Church’s teaching about marriage and the family as the appropriate context for rearing children. Dignitas Personae said that new human life should be “generated through an act which expresses the reciprocal love between a man and a woman.”


A better objection to IVF is that in a world with millions of orphaned or unwanted children, adoption is a more ethical way of having a child. If that is the argument, however, why should we single out couples who use IVF? Why not, for example, criticize Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas couple who recently had their 18th child? Yet Michelle Duggar was named “Young Mother of the Year” in Arkansas in 2004, when she had already given birth to 14 children. I haven’t noticed the Vatican telling them that they should be adopting instead of conceiving so many children.


Religious opposition notwithstanding, the use of IVF by infertile couples of normal reproductive age has been widely accepted around the world, and rightly so. But in countries where the Church’s influence remains strong, IVF’s opponents are fighting back. In Poland, for example, proposed new legislation would drastically restrict its availability.

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