In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Catholic Social Teaching

 In this episode, we look at several recent news items related to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a procedure for getting pregnant that is growing in popularity and usage in the United States and around the world, and why the Catholic Church teaches that IVF is not morally acceptable. 

References and notes:

1. Senate Democrats reintroduce "Right to IVF Act" - July 23, 2026
2. Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization - Executive Order - February 18, 2025
3. Trump Administration proposes rule to expand access to fertility benefits - May 10, 2026
4. Recent state legislative IVF activity in Georgia and Tennessee and in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas
5. Inside IVF clinic embryo mix-up
6. Opinion poll - Americans overwhelmingly say access to IVF is a good thing - May 13, 2024
7. For the First Time, More Than 100,000 Babies Born Through IVF in the U.S. in a Single Year - March 24, 2026
8. Begotten Not Made: A Catholic View of Reproductive Technology - 1998 USCCB document
9. What Is the Catholic Church’s Position on IVF? - Feb 28, 2024
10. Donum Vitae - February 22, 1987
11. Dignitas Personae - September 8, 2008
12. Catechism of the Catholic Church - see #2374-2379
13. More human embryos destroyed through IVF than abortion every year - Updated Sept 26, 2025
14. Description of the Church's position on IVF, suggesting that embryo adoption might be morally acceptable - December 9, 2020
15. Catholic Ethicists Discuss the Fate of the Estimated 1 Million Human Embryos on Ice - Jan 17, 2023
16. The Magisterial Liceity of Embryo Transfer - Perspective from a Catholic theologian who supports embryo adoption - 2015
17. Moral Contraindications to the Adoption of Abandoned, Frozen Human Embryos - June 11, 2023
18. Exploring the state of the Catholic debate over embryo adoption - August 5, 2025
19. Podcast website with full transcripts for this episode and all other episodes

Transcript

Welcome to “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching,” where we take a brief look at stories in the news, not from a left or right political perspective, but through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching.  I’m your host, Tom Mulhern, and I hope that this podcast will help us grow in our love of God and love of our neighbors.

In this episode, we look at several recent news items related to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a procedure for getting pregnant that is growing in popularity and usage in the United States and around the world, and why the Catholic Church teaches that IVF is not morally acceptable. 

Before we get to the news items, here's a quick definition.  IVF is a medical procedure that brings together sperm from a man and an ovum or egg from a woman in a lab environment to conceive a child outside of sexual intercourse. The live embryo is then later implanted in a woman's uterus to continue developing until birth.

So, here are some recent IVF news items.  On July 23, 2026, a group of Democratic US Senators reintroduced "The Right to IVF Act," a bill that had failed back in 2024.  It includes various provisions that would make IVF more available and more affordable.  

For his part, President Trump has expressed support for IVF in an Executive Order issued in February 2025, and more recently in a proposed rule issued in May 2026 by the U.S. departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury, aimed at providing better benefit coverage for IVF and other fertility treatments in employer health plans.

At the state level, Democrat-controlled state legislatures are overwhelmingly in support of IVF, while IVF is a point of contention in Republican-controlled state legislatures, with Tennessee and Georgia recently passing legislation to protect access to IVF, while Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas are considering laws that would make it more difficult to use IVF.

There was even a tabloid-style news story about IVF earlier this year, when a white couple in Florida gave birth to a brown-skinned child whose biological parents are from south Asia, as a result of the IVF clinic mistakenly mixing up the parents' embryos.

Opinion polls show high levels of support for IVF across the political spectrum and among practically all demographic groups, including Catholics.  And there were more than 100,000 babies born through IVF in the US last year, more than in any previous year.

Going against this tide is the Catholic Church, one of the few major institutions that is opposed to IVF.  In 1987, nine years after the first successful birth using IVF, the Vatican published a document entitled Donum Vitae, or gift of life, that provides the moral framework for Catholics with regard to IVF. 

Donum Vitae says that because conception through IVF is “brought about outside the bodies of the couple through actions of third parties,” such fertilization “entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person.”

Donum Vitae says that “the gift of human life must be actualized in marriage through the specific and exclusive acts of husband and wife . . .” and not through technology.

In providing this guidance, Donum Vitae makes a critical distinction between fertility treatments meant to assist the marital act in conceiving a child, which can be morally acceptable,  versus treatments like IVF that replace the marital act, which are not morally acceptable.

Donum Vitae even compares IVF to abortion, saying that “through these procedures, with apparently contrary purposes, life and death are subjected to the decision of man, who thus sets himself up as the giver of life and death by decree.”  In other words, in both abortion and IVF, humans are trying to play God.

Then, in 2008, 21 years after Donum Vitae, the Vatican provided additional instruction in Dignitas Personae, or the dignity of a person.  This document reaffirmed the teaching in Donum Vitae with respect to IVF and addressed newer issues related to research on human embryos and the use of stem cells for therapeutic purposes, as well as in other areas of experimental medicine.

The teachings expressed in both Donum Vitae and Dignitas Personae are reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which includes some of the quotes I just shared.  There are links in the notes to all of these documents.

Another reason that the Catholic Church opposes IVF on moral grounds is that the procedure involves the creation of multiple embryos in order to increase the odds that the woman will get pregnant and bear a healthy child.  The unused embryos are either discarded or frozen for possible later use.

Given the Catholic Church teaching that life begins at conception, the creation and disposition of human embryos outside of the marital act violates the core Catholic belief in the dignity of the human person.  And while miscarriages happen all the time in natural conception and pregnancy, such miscarriages are typically not intended by the parents and they're not controlled by clinicians or technicians.

The Church's position against IVF is sometimes cast as being insensitive to the pain experienced by couples struggling with infertility.  And I can assure you that there is indeed pain associated with infertility.  My wife and I were unable to conceive biological children, despite years of trying and seeking what medical help was available to us in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Thanks be to God, we were able to adopt children and have a family.

Some couples in some places were starting to use IVF in the period when we were trying to conceive children, but it wasn't available to us in central Kansas where we lived at that time, and we wouldn't have been able to afford it if it had been available.  

Would we have used IVF if it had been available and affordable?  I don't know.  We certainly would have been tempted to use it, because we were trying everything we could.  However, if Church teaching didn't stop us from using IVF, I think that the moral problem of what to do with the excess embryos might have stopped us.

As I mentioned earlier, unused embryos resulting from IVF are either discarded or frozen for possible later use.  There are no precise numbers, but it is estimated that there may be 1.5 million embryos discarded each year in the United States.  I'm using the word "discarded," but some people use the word "killed."  It's also estimated that there may be more than one million frozen embryos in the US at this time.

And those frozen embryos have led to an interesting discussion among Catholic moral theologians.  The discussion centers around the question of embryo adoption or embryo donation.  In other words, a couple with excess embryos makes them available to infertile couples, who use the embryos to try to get pregnant.  

Some Catholic moral theologians have argued that, because these embryos already exist and are tiny human lives, giving them the opportunity to be born is morally acceptable, even though the way they were created was not morally acceptable.  They argue that embryo adoption has not been definitively ruled out by Church teaching, and that it is still open to discussion.

 Other moral theologians and Catholic leaders, while sympathetic with the desire to have a solution that would give at least some of the frozen embryos a chance at life, are of the opinion that embryo adoption is not morally acceptable and contrary to the Church teachings referenced earlier.

There's a lot more to this discussion than I can summarize here.  I've included links to both perspectives in the notes.  I also hope my collaborator Stan Werne will take up this question of embryo adoption in a follow up episode.

OK, I want to close with a comment about infertility and parish life.  As we've seen, IVF is a solution to infertility that the Catholic Church has determined to be morally unacceptable.  I accept this teaching, I think it reflects the truth, and I encourage others to accept this teaching.  At the same time, as one who has personal experience with both infertility and parish life, my wish is for parishes to do a little better job of acknowledging that infertility is a cross that some parish members are bearing, and remember them in prayer and outreach. 

I don't think that ignoring the reality of infertility at the parish level is intentional, but it does happen, and my prayer is that our parishes become more intentional about acknowledging the impact of infertility on family life.

Well, that's all for this episode of “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching.”  If you found it worthwhile, I invite you to share it with others.  If you’d like to make a comment or send me a message or pose a question, there’s a link in the notes to do so.

And I hope and pray that, in some small way, this episode might help us live our lives guided by the Holy Spirit through the teachings of the Church.  

Thank you for listening.