Should Catholic Schools Be Able to Fire Teachers Over Fertility Treatments?
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/should-catholic-schools-be-able-to-fire-teachers-over-fertility-treatments/256427/
Do we now have a new life -- not just the parts that could become a life, but a new, ensouled person?
... What's the Church's basic opposition to in vitro fertilization? Is it mainly the issue of creating extra embryos?
That's a big part of it. When you're dealing with extra embryos in a laboratory, then it does bump up against the abortion question. You've combined sperm and ova in a lab; now you have a zygote or an embryo. Is it fully human? Do we now have a new life -- not just the parts that could become a life, but a new, ensouled person?
Can you explain what you mean by "a life"? Does the Church grant a three-day-old embryo the same status as a baby living outside the womb?
The Church has skirted that question very carefully. You don't find the Church absolutely declaring that from the moment of conception we have a person. They do say, in a sense, that from the moment of conception we should err on the side of having a human. We should act as if we have a human.
Where does that idea come from? The Bible doesn't say that life begins at conception.
A lot of this comes from our natural law tradition. From Thomas Aquinas forward, the Catholic Church has argued that our positions are reasonable, or at least defensible by reasoned argument, especially on moral issues.
So we ask, when do we have a unique individual? Is it when you have brainwaves? That would be 40 days out. Is it with the first movement, or quickening? That's several months out. Is it when it can live outside the womb? That's in the last trimester. The Catholic position is that from the moment of conception -- the moment his DNA combines with her DNA -- you can argue that you have a unique individual.
Now, there are some Catholic theologians who argue that the embryo doesn't become a unique individual until it's actually implanted in the uterus. That would allow for a lab to create all those embryos and zygotes -- they're not individuals until they implant, 10 to 12 days from conception. And a more liberal theologian like Charles Curran would say that an abortion right after a rape might be acceptable.
So many pregnancies end in miscarriages, especially very early ones. Does the Church view miscarriages as actual deaths?
We have not traditionally had funerals and coffins for spontaneous miscarriages. Does that mean we didn't say they were persons? No. But we kind of let that one fall between the cracks. If parents wish to remember them, they're welcome to remember them. If they want to give them a name, that's all right. Rick Santorum did that. But in the case of Emily Herx, what you see is the conservative side of the Church trying to tighten boundaries that were sometimes left a little bit vague.
Emily Herx told her school that she wasn't going to destroy any embryos during her IVF treatment. So why was there a problem?
There's still an issue. In terms of procreation, the closer one is to sexual intercourse, the less the Church is going to have a problem with it. So if you're doing fertility treatments that help you conceive while actually having sex, that's mostly all right. The further you move from that -- and toward the laboratory actually playing a role in conception -- the less the Church approves.
And then there's the issue of using borrowed sperm or ova, which adds another layer of distance. The further things move away from sexual intercourse, the more it raises the question: Are you manufacturing a baby? Is this an extension of lovemaking? Or is the laboratory doing something to replace lovemaking?
The whole idea of conceiving a baby outside the womb is so modern. It's hard to imagine these issues coming up in any form in the early Church.
Yes. But when it comes to sexual things, the Catholic Church has always held that the sperm belongs with the ovum, the male genital part belongs in the vagina. From that, you can deduce almost anything. ...
