Because of their Catholic Faith

Carolyn Savage and her husband Sean recently gave birth to a little baby that wasn’t theirs. Apparently there had been a mix up at the fertility clinic they went to and Carolyn was implanted with another couple’s embryos. What many news stories have relayed is that because of the Savage’s Catholic Faith, they carried the baby to term and then gave him over to his biological parents.

What the media has left out however, is that the Catholic Church does not support artificial conception and fertilization. And while I heard an interview by the Savages where they have talked to mental health professionals and lawyers, I never once heard them mention talking to a Catholic bioethics professional or even their parish priest.

Patrica Kasten did a very good article on this situation.

Does technology have the answers?: “Now, besides the pain of giving up a child they had nurtured for months, that had heard their voices in the womb, that had lived under Carolyn’s heartbeat, let’s add to the Savages’ story all the future pain of forever wondering what happened to their own child, that little embryo conceived in a fertility clinic and lost there.

It is just one more reason why Catholic Church teaching against fertility clinics and in vitro fertilization makes sense. Heart sense, as well as head sense.

The church teaches that every child deserves to be conceived in the loving embrace of its mother and father, not in a test tube or in the body of a surrogate. Every child is a gift from God, not a right of humans.

Besides the health risks to the mother in the super-ovulation process used to get eggs for in vitro fertilization, besides the morally questionable or downright wrong actions undertaken by both parents and the clinic staff that results in the embryos, besides the fact that most of the embryos conceived in this way are culled for viability (meaning who lives and who dies is decided by a technician), and besides the fact that many of the implanted embryos will die before coming to term, there is this basic fact:

The parents – like the Savages – will never know what happened to their babies. This is true even for those parents who do conceive a child in this fashion. They will never know what happened to all the other embryos, all the other human persons – flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone – that came into existence in a clinic.”

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