Look folks, CATHOLICS CANNOT SUPPORT IVF.
I know there are lots and lots of arguments being made right now that “Harris is worse than Trump” and “at least Trump wants more babies” but I am going to say it louder this time for the people in the back: IVF is INTRINSICALLY EVIL and Catholics cannot support this. At all.
First, gametes (that would be sperm and egg for those whose high school biology class was in the distant past) are obtained illicitly. Men are given a cup and sent to a room filled with porn in order to obtain their sperm. I’m sorry to be blunt but this reality seems lost on people when words like “self abuse” are used to describe the process. So let’s get real for a minute: the future father is sent to a room in an IVF clinic to view porn and masturbate. The mothers are pumped full of exogenous hormones to stimulate their ovaries into HYPERovulation so that 20+ eggs can be retrieved. After the two gametes are obtained, lab techs get busy combining them in a Petri dish. This actively creates teeny tiny human beings without the unitive & procreative aspect of the marital embrace. Then, these tiny people are screened for suitablity and the undesirable ones are destroyed (this is the first point in the process where humans are murdered). Then, mom is again pumped full of exogenous hormones to prepare her uterus to be a hospitable place for an embryo to implant. During the implantation process, where the lab-created humans are transferred to the woman’s uterus in hopes of achieving pregnancy, many of the embryos will NOT survive. This is point number 2 where death of human beings occurs.
Once a woman becomes pregnant (notice I didn’t say “conceives” because the conception already happened….in the lab), the remaining embryos are cryogenically stored for future use. This means they’re frozen. If the woman becomes pregnant with more than one embryo, she is offered the opportunity for “selective reduction” which is a surgical abortion procedure to cull the number of unborn children in the womb to her desired number. This is point number 3 where death enters into the process.
After a baby is born (or miscarried as the failure rate of IVF pregnancies is very high), the parents may opt to thaw their frozen embryos and try again. Many of these unborn children do not survive the thawing process. This is death portal number 4. If they are successfully thawed, then they are subjected to another intrauterine transfer procedure, which, as we said above has a high mortality rate for remaining embryos. If the couple decides not to have any more children, the embryos can either be:
- Destroyed. This is a deliberate destruction of human life.
- Indefinitely frozen. It is estimated that right now in the United States there are more than 1.5 million embryonic human beings in cryogenic preservation tanks.
- Sold to the biotech industry to be used for research and development of medical treatments and/or medical experimentation.
It has been said that only 7% of created embryos actually result in a live birth, and that anywhere between 15 & 30 embryos are destroyed for every baby born via this technology.
This is just an outline of the process of IVF. This does not take into account how this technology is being used to produce children for single women who want to be single mothers as well as the LGTBQ+ alphabet people.
After reading this, does this process sound like something a Catholic can square with their conscience? I hope not, because as I said the entire thing, from start to finish, is intrinsically evil.
The GOP has made it very clear that they not only want access to IVF to be protected, but they want YOU to pay for it by requiring health insurance plans to provide coverage for it. The mental gymnastics from the MAGA Catholics who want to defend Trump on this is really something to behold. There is zero justification for this.
IVF is not pro-life, even if the desired end result is a child. The ends do not justify the means and we can’t commit grave evil to achieve good. Nope.
Sadly, there is no pro-life ticket this November. I won’t support either candidate; in the end, I’d rather lose an election than lose my soul.