Many people, including Catholics, can’t see the problems with in vitro fertilization (IVF). They contend it’s “pro-life” and “gives people what they want, a baby.” So why does the Catholic Church oppose IVF? Because life and love can’t be separated, which is why Karol Wojtyla — the future John Paul II — objected to translating the “mutual support” of the marital act as merely “love.” Love and life belong together or you have neither.

One cannot deny the heartache of childlessness. Infertility is on the rise today. There are many potential factors for that phenomenon, some connected with our physical environment, where hormones and other artificial substances enter the food chain. Others, though, may be connected with our lifestyles. When women ingest massive monthly doses of hormones — in many cases, for years after the onset of puberty — to repress the natural functioning of their reproductive systems and eliminate their fertility as if it is a disease, should they be surprised that, unlike a faucet, their capacity to give life does not turn back on at will? And, when they attempt this after their biological clocks are coursing towards mid-to-late afternoon, as Americans first marry at the oldest average ages ever, should they be surprised their fertility is that of a 30- or 40-something-year-old, rather than a 20-something-year-old?

Faced with wanting something, have we cultivated senses of finitude and/or sacrifice that perhaps sometimes we can’t or shouldn’t? Have we not rather, as Americans, promoted a “there’s nothing we can’t do!” ethos that faces the inability to become a parent as just a technological obstacle to overcome? If that is the case, then we have lost the sense that parenthood is a divine gift that comes from “the Lord and Giver of Life,” turning it instead into what former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit called the “parental project.” Sociologist Brad Wilcox has already asked whether Americans’ delay in getting married represents a shift from marriage as “cornerstone” of adult life to marriage as “capstone,” crowning one’s having “made it” in adulthood. Similarly, does the “parental project” — intent to have a child because we want one, reducing the ethical questions to the technical — represent a similar mindset that having a baby is a “top-line” achievement on the resume of “adulthood”? When the giving of life is reduced to a technical problem, does not the “parental project” unavoidably and necessarily then turn the child into a “product,” a commodity whose design should meet certain specs?

Some might push back, saying, “All we want is a baby, and we will be grateful for that.” But once you refract the question of having a baby through the lens of your “want,” isn’t the question really just how demanding a customer you are? Some folks go to the car dealer because they need transportation: the silver Camry is in their price range and the floor model is immediately available, so they take it. Others are pickier: only alloy wheels with dual exhaust, premium heated seats, and antique silver will do. And, especially when other people’s gametes enter the picture, isn’t pickier more likely, especially if we’re paying for them? And should we be paying for the cells that transmit human life? Isn’t that the ultimate expression of knowing the price of something and the value of nothing?

The French theologian Laetitia Calmeyn once noted a very subtle but pertinent difference in the Book of Genesis. When Eve gives birth to Cain, the first baby, she says, “I have brought forth a man with the help of the Lord” (4:1). Note where the emphasis lies: “I had a baby, and God helped.” We know how the story of Cain turned out. Later, God gifts Eve with another child — Seth — after Abel is slain. Eve’s analysis is now different: “God has granted me another child” (4:25b). Note the subject of the sentence has shifted from “I” (with God as best supporting actor) to “God.”

The February 2024 Alabama Supreme Court ruling on IVF has been grossly misrepresented for pro-abortion political purposes. That seems paradoxical, because many people imagine IVF is somehow “pro-life.” It is neither “pro-life” nor, ultimately, “loving.” Why not? From the perspective of love — to borrow Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s line — “let me count the ways.”

IVF is not so much a “treatment” as a “work-around.” IVF does not “cure” infertility or obstruction in the reproductive system. The underlying problem remains. While the world may not know the truth of a child’s origins, his parents always will. An infertile couple remains infertile and, while “having a baby” might assuage the consequences of that infertility, the child’s existence will — paradoxically — also be a visible daily reminder of infertility not solved but detoured. That’s true even if the ovum was hers and the sperm her husband’s. Sex should always be an act of unity and love.  It is not a “technique” to make a child for which another “technique” can be substituted. That fact of the child’s origin, that division, will always remain, at least between the couple.

As bioethicist William May used to point out, IVF severs the relationship between social, genetic, and gestational parenthood. They can be connected, but they don’t have to be. If the child of whom we just spoke is the “product” of another woman’s ovum, the reminder of the woman’s infertility will be further compounded. Doubt it? Ask Sara about Hagar (Genesis 16; 21:8-21). And let’s not even talk about throwing a surrogate into the picture — another “option.” The above is also true if infertility is the husband’s problem. With the donor gamete, another’s gametes (another’s body) is introduced into the marital union. In a simpler age, when “persons” and their bodies were less separable, having a baby by the sperm or egg of somebody other than my spouse would have been called “adultery.” Why isn’t it now? Because I didn’t sleep with the other? Because we just let a lab tech do the “copulating?”

Sexual intercourse is a physical, human act involving genitalia. Rene Descartes deformed Western thinking with his “cogito; ergo sum” (“I think; therefore, I am”). Being is not established in the brain and then moves outward; it is. We hear the expression “sex on the brain,” but it’s not an inapt description for contemporary sexual morality that would define the morality of what we do sexually primarily by intentions. That’s precisely backwards. And if “sex on the brain” is not where sex (and its fruits) should happen, even less is its proper locus a Petri dish.

Let’s ask: Is what makes “adultery” not the act or its consequence but the up-close-and-personal pleasure normal sexual intercourse might bring the adulterers? Once upon a time, one spouse telling the other that somebody else was having his or her baby would have no doubt been called infidelity. Does consent to mixing gametes somehow make it faithful? Or does it grant a fidelity waiver? Why, then, would that not apply to every couple, fertile or not, if, in principle, gametes can be “impersonally” exchanged on consent, why on the same principle should not every marriage be theoretically an “open” one?

Our dualistic, gnostic culture wants to “liberate” us from our bodies, so that “having a baby” is equated with “having my baby,” regardless of how it happens. But I suggest the human experience of the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act — meanings Humanae vitae teaches (no. 12, link here) God has joined and man may not on his own initiative put asunder — contradicts that experience when we stop and think deeply enough about it.

What should that tell us about IVF?