Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge on Wednesday urged Catholic families to offer a “heroic witness” to love by rejecting the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which the prelate called “contrary to justice [and] replete with moral difficulties.”
In a pastoral letter released on Wednesday, Burbidge acknowledged the “natural desire for family” as well as the challenges faced by couples who are struggling with infertility.
Yet the Virginia bishop said he has observed with concern the growing popularity of IVF both as a means of conceiving children and as a means to facilitate surrogacy.
In the present day it “seems as if an extraordinary number of couples” have difficulty conceiving children, the bishop said. He acknowledged that the Catholic Church is supportive of numerous licit means of addressing infertility, including NaPro technology.
IVF — which represented a “revolution of medicine” when it debuted in 1978 — nevertheless presents serious moral problems, Burbidge argued.
Chief among them, the bishop noted, is how the procedure “both creates life and destroys life,” insofar as it often kills many human embryos even as it may produce one that goes on to grow through a full pregnancy.
“For every one of the more than 12 million children born by means of IVF since 1978, there are many tens of millions more missing brothers and sisters who have been either deliberately destroyed, experimented upon, or frozen in liquid nitrogen and denied their natural right to the fullness of their development,” the bishop said.
The bishop stressed that children brought about from IVF possess “inalienable human dignity,” noting that that very dignity is what leads to the Church’s opposition to the practice.
IVF, he said, “subverts human dignity by reducing human persons — man, woman, and child alike — into objects of a technical process.”
IVF technology, meanwhile, is further morally fraught in its “ability to bring about new life for individuals who desire children outside the context of the bond of marriage” through the practice of surrogacy.
Surrogacy has increasingly come under fire in recent years from pro-life activists and critics who argue that it disrespects children and is exploitative of women. Italy has banned surrogacy since 2004 and last year banned its citizens from seeking it abroad. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has referred to the practice as “uterus renting.” In Europe, the practice is illegal in Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, and Spain as well.
The Holy See, meanwhile, last year hosted a panel at the United Nations at which advocates stressed the need to regulate and eventually abolish surrogacy around the world.
Burbidge in his letter argued that it constitutes “a grave injustice to produce children who, from the start, are forcibly separated from their natural parents.”
Though the bishop warned against the possibility of a “federal IVF entitlement or mandate,” he also argued that the government could pursue “concrete ways to encourage earlier marriage and family formation” as well as support pregnancy and childbirth as a way to help families.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, can take cues from Europe, he argued, where surrogacy is “recognized as exploitative and unjust and is almost universally impermissible.”
Burbidge further called on “all people of faith and goodwill to pray for those married couples experiencing infertility, for the efficacy of life-affirming fertility care, for an openness to God’s love and an ever-deeper experience of the virtues, and for the grace to accept whatever God’s will may be.”
The bishop released the letter on Jan. 22, the day the U.S. Catholic Church observes the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children. It was also the day in 1973 in which the Supreme Court ruled in the case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the United States.
Roe was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022. In the nearly three years since, numerous U.S. states have enacted sweeping pro-life protections that had been illegal under Roe. However, many states have enacted broad pro-abortion statutes and passed pro-abortion ballot initiatives.
