By Judie Brown
There has been a cultural shift in America that defies every aspect of the human nature with which God created us. In fact, we could say that according to many in our midst today, it is they, not God, who choose what is and is not a human person.
We can identify this phenomenon as the cultural effort to deny and replace nature, and in so doing it becomes a poison that afflicts the soul.
This malady is everywhere, even in what was once a pro-life bastion—the state of Tennessee. In that state, lawmakers are pursuing efforts to protect the business of in vitro fertilization while at the same time clarifying abortion exceptions and acting to protect contraception.
In other words, they are drinking the poisonous Kool-Aid. And they are not alone.
President Donald Trump has expressed that even some Catholics want access to in vitro fertilization, a practice that is contrary to Catholic teaching.
Dr. John Haas, the current president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, explains, “The immorality of conceiving children through IVF can be difficult to understand and accept because the man and woman involved are usually married and trying to overcome a ‘medical’ problem (infertility) in their marriage. Yet the procedure does violence to human dignity and to the marriage act and should be avoided. But why, exactly, is IVF immoral?”
Here the poison appears in the documented fact that most Catholics have no understanding of or problem with IVF. Perhaps this is because the pulpits are silent on the topic, or perhaps it is a simple matter of immoral poison eating away at the roots of Catholic doctrine.
Since the days when contraception first became available in this nation more than 50 years ago, Catholics have had a checkered history about the morality of this practice. So it is with IVF.
We could point the finger at members of the hierarchy, at local parish priests, or at any of a number of other targets, but at this stage in the history of the poison within, what good would that do? We must acknowledge that right or wrong, average Catholic people are not aware of the teachings of the Church on sexual matters, or perhaps they simply do not see a connection between the desire to have children and their love of God.
Whatever the reason, this immoral practice results in millions of dead babies each year. As commentator Nathanael Blake explains:
IVF cannot be so easily purified, and Christians should be skeptical of a tree that has produced so much evil fruit—babies are good, but wanting a baby does not excuse any and all evils, especially the mass killing of human embryos. Furthermore, even without the intentional destruction of human life, the inherently high risks and failure rates of IVF should give pause to Christians who claim to respect human life.
But even if IVF could be separated from its deadly practices, it would still be wrong. Children, however conceived, are of inestimable value, and this is why it matters so much how we go about conceiving them. God’s design is for children to be begotten in the committed, loving relationship of marriage, with the one-flesh union of husband and wife—which Scripture repeatedly uses as an image of the union of Christ and the Church—made literal and eternal as gametes combine to form a new person. Children are not things to be ordered, they are persons who should be received as gifts from God, whom they are meant to know and enjoy forever.
In these words we find the kernel of right thinking on the subject of human fertility and man’s desire to destroy it, mechanize it, and otherwise convince us that the ability to beget children is a condition in need of treatment, not the miracle it truly is.
When couples are told that infertility is the reason they cannot procreate, they must also be told that there are moral alternatives at their disposal. IVF is not one of them. In fact, it is but one tentacle of the poisonous cult of ego that has driven America to the point of killing so many babies, rendering so many women infertile, and destroying the very essence of nature as intended by God.
The treatment for such venomous poison within is individual affirmation of the truth that life is a gift from God to be welcomed according to His timing, not ours.