Does your wife see the couple doing in vitro as evil? I doubt it. The Church can have a position on this but certainly doesn't need to put out a bunch of selective statistics and propaganda.
I see the absolute good that in vitro can produce every single day. Anyone that calls that evil is an a**hole.
She sees the whole situation demanding these services as very concerning. In the case of an otherwise healthy woman with tubal defects or other reproductive injury, neither of us sees an ethical problem with offering a treatment whereby the patient could have a baby. However, both of us agree that a large fraction of these fertilizations should not be performed both for medical and ethical reasons.
First of all, there are usually good reasons the patients are having trouble conceiving. A lot of them have poor egg or sperm quality with markedly higher percentages of observable defects. Poor sperm with low motility normally wouldn't survive the trip up the uterus and into the tubes to fertilize. Low counts have a lower probability of successful implantation. Poor eggs more often fail to accept a sperm. In-vitro bypasses those deficiencies, but at a price. Babies born by in-vitro fertilization have higher birth defects, more immune system problems, and lower intelligence quotients than children conceived naturally (this in a population of parents able to afford the procedure). It would seem that the process abets undesirable combinations by failing to cull poor sperm and bad eggs. Then we take these (for lack of better words) less optimal combinations and implant them under ideal or even augmented circumstances doing everything possible to make sure they survive where they might otherwise be rejected by the body through a spontaneous abortion.
More disturbing is the ICSI process (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection), wherein a sperm is injected directly into the egg. The rate of birth defects and other congenital problems subsequent to this process is very high, in part because the procedure bypasses the usual process wherein an egg selects a compatible sperm. If you ever wanted to see the hand of God in conception, it is there.
Also disturbing (to her) is the number of couples entering the clinic who seem, upon first appearance, to be totally incompatible, just plain bizarro couples. She says half her job is managing frayed emotions of unstable women jacked up with hormones and suffering in rotten relationships. This is to say nothing of the number of lesbians visiting the clinic.
It used to be that the clinic only accepted stable married couples. In recent years with fewer cash patients and lower rates paid by insurance companies, the clinic is now accepting larger numbers of just about anybody in order to remain a profit center for the hospital. If the work wasn't so interesting, I don't think she would be doing it, preferring to take care of babies instead.
How do you not see the utilitarian, Hitlarian implications of such a procedure?
The fact that good results from an act does not make the act good. The end does not necessarily justify the means. For example, a child can be conceived by rape, but that does not make rape an ethical act. Therefore, the fact that children can be produced by IVF does not show that IVF is not unethical. Of course rape and IVF are not equally unethical. But the example of rape shows that it is a fallacy to argue that good results (i.e. children)justify IVF.
Also, the fact that in the natural process many fertilized eggs fail to implant does not show that it is ethically permissible to destroy fertilized eggs. That would be equivalent to arguing that since miscarriages happen, it is ethically permissible to intentionally abort one's child. Or, since many people die of starvation, it is therefore ethically permissible to starve people to death. Clearly, that kind of reasoning is mistaken. It fails to recognize the difference between a good act that happens to have an evil consequence and an evil act.
- A8