INFERTILITY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The Catholic Church believes that life comes from God and only God alone can give us the ability to have children if it is according to his will. Infertility already existed even in the olden times. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was barren. However, Sarah was able to conceive and bore Isaac even in her old age because God allowed it to be so.
On the issue of infertility, the Catholic Church has acknowledged that it is a genuine medical problem. However, what greatly trouble the church are the methods that are being adopted to help couples bore children. According to the Church, children are the supreme gift of marriage, which means that procreation is conception by sexual intercourse between married couples.
Though the Catholic Church sympathizes with the pain and heartache of infertile couples, they are questioning the morality of conception through artificial methods. Sperm or egg donation is gravely immoral according to the Church because it involves a third party to the marriage. The child should be born out of the same man and woman who committed to marriage. Even homogenous artificial insemination and fertilization is still morally unacceptable.
What makes homogenous artificial insemination or fertilization morally unacceptable to the Catholic Church is that the process of the sperm meeting or joining the egg is done in a laboratory. The Church’s argument is that procreation using this method does not come about as a result of the physical union of a couple. And because of the process of selecting and discarding of embryos, this makes the child a commodity instead of a gift to the couple.
The Catholic Church only approves of such methods that do not separate love from life. One such method is the NaPro Technology. These scientific methods look for the underlying factors causing infertility and then correct them. The success rate of the NaPro Technology has turned out to be much higher than that of the artificial methods, proving the validity of the Church’s teachings.
However, no program or infertility treatment is 100% successful. The Gospel also shows that infertility is not an absolute evil. Adoption can still provide a fulfilling family life to couples with infertility problems. And if all legitimate medical procedures have already been tried and the couple will not consider adoption, the Church says that the couple can always turn to the Lord and perform services for others.
