Posted on 08/19/2013 2:21:00 PM PDT by NYer
Only 13% of Catholics--and 12% of Americans--believe that in vitro fertilization is morally wrong, according to a new Pew Research survey. 33% of Americans judge the procedure morally acceptable, while 46% say that it is not a moral issue.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith discussed the immorality of in vitro fertilization in its instructions Donum Vitae (1987) and Dignitas Personae (2008).
The survey also found that 49% of Americans believe that abortion is morally wrong, while 15% say it is morally acceptable and 23% say it is not a moral issue. 64% of Hispanic Catholics and 53% of white Catholics surveyed said that abortion is morally wrong, though among “white Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week,” the figure rises to 74%.
22% of Americans--and 24% of Catholics--said they believe that embryonic stem cell research, which involves the destruction of human embryos, is morally wrong. In addition, 21% of Catholics said that they believe that adult stem-cell research is morally wrong, despite Church pronouncements that it is morally licit.
Additional sources for this story
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Obviously, IVF eliminates the marriage act as the means of achieving pregnancy, instead of helping it achieve this natural end. The new life is not engendered through an act of love between husband and wife, but by a laboratory procedure performed by doctors or technicians. Husband and wife are merely sources for the "raw materials" of egg and sperm, which are later manipulated by a technician to cause the sperm to fertilize the egg.
Invariably several embryos are brought into existence; only those which show the greatest promise of growing to term are implanted in the womb. The others are simply discarded or used for experiments. This is a terrible offense against human life. While a little baby may ultimately be born because of this procedure, other lives are usually snuffed out in the process.
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Let’s all send this to the Young Adult coordinators in our parishes.
Let’s all send this to the Young Adult coordinators in our parishes.
I think it is wrong yet had no significant catechesis in my entire life. But I guess those who don’t get it intuitively need to be taught.
I’d say the biggest problem with IVF is the fact that the “extras” are either thrown out, frozen for years, or experimented on.
I've been running into a lot of that since I became Catholic. Seems like a large percentage of Catholics had parents who thought they'd just absorb everything or didn't have much catechesis themselves and saw no need for it.
Or is it like Michael Voris was saying and most Catholic schools dropped the ball and went stupid after V II?
Lutherans for life agrees with this for ivf procedures entails the destruction or freezing of embryos, and even those lucky enough to be implanted have a high miscarriage and birth defect risk caused by the procedure.
From the link I posted above ...
To avoid the problems of carrying and rearing "too many" babies after several have been implanted, doctors sometimes engage in something euphemistically called "fetal reduction" or "selective reduction." Here they monitor the babies in utero to see if any have defects or are judged to be less healthy than the others. They eliminate those "less desirable" babies by filling a syringe with potassium chloride, maneuvering the needle toward the "selected" baby in the womb with the aid of ultrasound, and then thrusting the needle into the baby's heart. The potassium chloride kills the baby within minutes, and he or she is expelled as a "miscarriage." If it cannot be determined that one baby is less healthy than the others, some doctors simply eliminate the baby or babies who are easiest to reach. Again we see the unspeakable diminishing of the value of human life which can arise from this procedure.
Now, how do you feel about IVF?
The truncated version that made me ill. They fertilize several eggs and see which ones take and then place others in the uterus. They say they destroy the others. That to me is death of living beings. I could not bear it. Later of course we come to find out many of these are used in testing.
Either way I could not live with it morally. I can't judge others regarding this issue for me own personal reasons, but for me it did not sit right in my soul. I remain childless and did not chose adoption for my own reasons as well. God Bless!
Yes. And this is the other reason I did not go forward with it. I would rather live without than to kill a child. I must say though honestly, I did have an abortion when I was very young and my soul suffers to this day. I could not take another life. It would have been based on my own selfish want. I posted earlier I chose not to have IVF for spiritual/moral reasons because they also ‘get rid’ of already fertilized eggs that don’t go into the uterus.
So you take an egg from the married woman and her husband donates his sperm because for some reason the woman couldn’t conceive the normal way. So this is somehow morally wrong to some people?
...most Catholic schools dropped the ball and went stupid after V II....
&&&
I’d say that’s your answer. I attended 12 years of Catholic school in the 1950s and ‘60s. Nearly all of my teachers were dedicated teaching sisters who gave me a solid academic foundation along with strong religious training.
Today, in the average American Catholic school, sisters are pretty much extinct, and the religion department is a tangled mass of confusion and feel-goodism.
See my post #13.
IVF creates life where life would not normally exist. This amounts to nothing more than a human ‘playing God’. IVF almost always involves the creation of extra embryos. Often, one or more embryos is selectively destroyed so that the mother does not have triplet or quadruplet births.
A similar moral argument can be made against euthanasia. It is one thing to not prolong a terminally ill person’s life through extraordinary means, however, the intentional murder of a terminally ill person to expedite death is wrong. Think Terri Schiavo.
Then there is ultra-sound used to check on babies health in the womb plus checking the embryonic fluid. If the parents elect to abort, then what the difference in what you wrote? Just asking.
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