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  • Is Artificial Impregnation Opposed to the Unity of Marriage?:A New Look at the Question of Embryo Adoption
  • Irene Alexander

The question of embryo adoption is one of the most difficult and most nuanced questions in all of bioethics. The difficulty of the question lies not only in the grave reality that the lives of more than 400,000 cryopreserved embryos are at stake but also in the fact that the technological procedures used by the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry have created an ethical situation that has never before existed in the history of the human race. No Father or Doctor of the Church in centuries prior could have anticipated the kind of medical technology available today and, thus, commented on such a unique moral situation. Both the weight of the question for these tiny orphaned persons and the novelty and absurdity of their current state make the evaluation of embryo adoption extraordinarily difficult. Even the 2008 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) document Dignitatis Personae, which treats the issue explicitly, does not give a definitive solution to the moral issue. Dignitatis Personae states that there are "problems" with embryo adoption similar to those with IVF, surrogacy, and the transfer of embryos for infertile couples as a "treatment for infertility," all of which the CDF condemns as "not ethically acceptable" because they are opposed to the unity of marriage.1 Nevertheless embryo adoption [End Page 47] itself is not formally condemned as illicit. The judgment in Dignitatis Personae leans in a negative direction but does not make a definitive pronouncement either way. While much of Donum Vitae and Dignitatis Personae is aimed at addressing the immorality of artificial fertilization, the main issue surrounding embryo adoption is whether or not artificial impregnation is morally licit.

Moral theologians themselves are currently divided on the issue. Those in favor of embryo adoption do not find artificial impregnation—that is, heterologous embryo transfer (HET)—to be morally problematic but may have concern with the proximity of the couple's cooperation with the IVF industry.2 These proponents of embryo adoption do not see any moral difficulty in what is considered a clinical act of transferring of an embryo into the womb of a married woman to impregnate her if it is the couple's intention to adopt the [End Page 48] child into their family. They consider it a life-saving act, one that perhaps even restores the order of nature by placing the child where he or she ought to be—gestating in the womb of a loving mother married to a man who also adopts the child as his own. On the surface this argument seems very fitting and reasonable. Most opponents of embryo adoption, however, argue that, while the intention is profoundly noble and praiseworthy, there is a fundamental moral problem in the very act of embryo transfer, since the woman becomes pregnant by a person who is not her husband and this action violates the unity of marriage, which Donum Vitae states involves "the right to become a mother and father only through each other."3

To complicate the matters even further, proponents of embryo adoption absolutely agree with the text of Donum Vitae II.A.1, but they do not see why its logic applies to embryo adoption, since that section of Donum Vitae deals with the dignity of procreation—namely, how procreation ought to happen in the first place. Yet, since conception has already occurred and the injustice already taken place to the embryo, proponents of embryo adoption generally do not find these passages to be essentially related to the issue.4 Nor do they [End Page 49] understand why opponents of embryo adoption continue to focus on this one aspect of the biological process required to make embryo adoption occur when there does not seem to be another morally licit solution. How exactly does artificial impregnation violate the unity of marriage, as opponents so often argue? Why do opponents make such a big deal over moving an embryo imprisoned in a freezer to the womb of a woman who will gestate and nurture the child through birth and raise the child together with...

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