Why does the Catholic Church see IVF as wrong?

Answer 1

The Church considers IVF immoral for a number of reasons. The main concern is that in the process a number of eggs are fertilized but only a small number are implanted. The remaining fertilized eggs are considered as human beings by the Church and are usually destroyed or used in medical experimentation.

Answer 2

Roman Catholic AnswerFor many reasons, IVF is man playing at God, and ignoring God, and ignoring his own moral responsibilities:

from the website IVF and Catholic teaching, By Rev. Fr Clement Mary, C.SS.R.

For the complete article, click on the link below. For the Vatican document, Instruction on respect for human life in its origin and on the dignity of procreation see the second link.

The Catholic Church, as even her enemies will tell you, condemns procured abortion, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, cloning, research on embryos, foetal harvesting, eugenic screening, prenatal selection, 'designer' babies and a whole host of other abominations with "grave consequences for humanity".

Is the Church insensible to the joy of the parents of the more than a million babies who have been born through IVF since 1978, the joy on which men like Edwards trade for their credibility?

Of course not, but then again the Church does not attribute their creation to Messrs Edwards & Co. Every soul is created and infused directly by God into the matter He has made. Louise Brown, just as much as anyone else, can ask "who made me?" and receive the answer of the Penny Catechism: "God made me". No scientist can achieve anything without the order of nature Almighty God has established, just as none will be any more successful in forcing Him to intervene directly in that order than King Herod was able to obtain a miracle from Our Lord through mockery. In His own good time God will call each soul to render an account of every thought, word, deed and omission in the inescapable light of His omniscience. And then He will have all eternity to reward them according to His Justice.

In the meantime those who discover the laws of nature only to deny the existence of their Author are doubly inexcusable: "For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. [...] Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools"; and so, according to their "hardness and impenitent heart", they treasure up to themselves "wrath, against the day of wrath and revelation of the just judgment of God [...] Who will render to every man according to his works" [Romans I, 20-22; II, 6].

God is the exclusive Author of all Being, but we remain the authors of all sin. When those responsible for IVF are called to reckoning, they will find that anything on the credit side comes from God, but that the overwhelming burden of guilt for the iniquities of IVF will be laid to their account.

IVF is intrinsically and extrinsically wrong. For our contemporaries (and even our co-religionists), for whom might makes right, and who love not truth for its own sake but for the power that knowledge can bring, there is little chance of their coming to understand that a child "has the right to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents" [Donum Vitae, 1987]. If they cannot understand that IVF, as the same Vatican document says, "is in itself illicit and in opposition to the dignity of procreation and of the conjugal union, even when everything is done to avoid the death of the human embryo",nevertheless they may be brought to their senses when they see its inevitably evil consequences: millions have perished since 1969, when the first short-lived attempt at human fertilisation in vitro was achieved.

Answer 3

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Catholic AnswerThe Church came out against IVF specifically in Donum Vitae, 1987 reiterating the constant teaching of the Church that a child is born, as God intended, from two parents in an act of conjugal love. The document In Vitro Fertilization and Catholic Teaching by Rev. Fr Clement Mary, C.SS.R. explaining all of this is also at the link below, as well as Pope Paul VI's infallible teaching on Human Life issued in the his Encyclical Letter in 1968.