Medicine, Health Care, & Ethics: Catholic Voices

3. New Reproductive Technologies and Catholic Teaching - William E. May

Chapter 3 New Reproductive Technologies and Catholic Teaching William E. May This paper examines “new reproductive technologies,” i.e., ways of generating human life that dispense with the need for coital union between a man and woman, whether marital or not. In it I will defend the teaching of the Church that God, in his wise and loving plan for human existence, wills that human life be given—“begotten”—only through the marital embrace, i.e., through a procreative marital act, and that, consequently, it is always wrong to generate human life through procedures that substitute for the marital act. I will first describe the new reproductive technologies; second, summarize relevant teaching of the Church; third, provide reasoned arguments to support the truth of the Church’s teaching. As we will see, the magisterium of the Church distinguishes between artificial insemination (a technological procedure which substitutes for the marital act) and assisted insemination (a technological procedure that enables a marital act to be crowned with the gift of life), declaring the first intrinsically immoral and the second morally permissible. Thus, a final part of this paper will consider the question of “assisted insemination,” and in particular the procedure known as Much of the material in this essay is taken from “Generating Human Life: Marriage and the New Reproductive Technologies,” chapter 3 of my book Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2000), pp. 65–118. 59 GIFT, or gamete intrafallopian tube transfer, which some Catholic theologians defend as “assisting” the marital act and others reject as “substituting” for the marital act. The New Reproductive Technologies The new reproductive technologies can be divided into two broad categories : (1) artificial fertilization, which embraces (a) artificial insemination and (b) in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer; and (2) agametic reproduction or cloning. 1. Artificial Fertilization Artificial fertilization occurs when male sperm are united with the female ovum not through coition but by other means. In artificial insemination male sperm are introduced into the female reproductive tract by the use of a cannula or other instruments, and fertilization occurs when one of the sperm fuses with the woman’s ovum. Fertilization occurs within the woman’s body. In in vitro fertilization male sperm and female ova are placed in a petri dish and fusion of sperm and ovum and fertilization occur outside the woman’s body. Subsequently, the developing embryo can be implanted in the womb of a woman, who can be either the one whose ovum was fertilized or some other person. Both these forms of artificial fertilization can be either homologous, when the gametic cells used are provided by a married couple, or heterologous, which uses gametic cells of persons who are not married to one another (although one or both of the parties whose gametic cells are used may be married to another person).1 A. Artificial Insemination i. Homologous artificial insemination, or AIH Homologous artificial insemination , or artificial insemination by the husband (AIH), introduces the husband’s sperm into his wife’s body by the use of a cannula or other instruments . Ordinarily, the husband’s sperm are obtained by masturbation, although an alternative is intercourse using a perforated condom, or, in cases of obstruction of the vas deferens, which serves as the conduit for spermatozoa , the surgical removal of sperm from the epididymis, where the sperm are stored.2 60 william e. may ii. Heterologous artificial insemination, or AID Heterologous artificial insemination is usually referred to by the acronym AID, signifying “artificial insemination by a donor.” But, as Walter Wadlington correctly observes, “the term ‘sperm donor’ is a misnomer because compensation of persons supplying semen has been a long-standing practice.”3 It is thus more accurate to designate this form of artificial insemination as “artificial insemination by a vendor.” Traditionally, heterologous artificial insemination was used by married couples to allow the wife to bear a child genetically her own when her husband is infertile or in cases of “genetic incompatibility” between the couple, i.e., when the couple are bearers of a recessive genetic defect and there is thus the likelihood that any child they conceive may be actually affected by this genetic impairment. Today, however, artificial insemination is also used by single women who want to bear a child and who, as Walter Wadlington puts it, “do not have a marital or other stable heterosexual partner or by a woman...