Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
"Life from a Lab: a Moral Dilemma" | March 16, 2025
As the White House moves to make IVF more accessible and affordable, Catholics find themselves at a crossroads between compassion for those struggling with infertility and fidelity to Church teaching on human reproduction.
Join as Father Wolf explores why IVF—now responsible for approximately 2% of U.S. births—raises profound moral concerns despite its widespread acceptance.
Drawing a parallel to Pope Paul VI's once-ridiculed but ultimately prophetic warnings about contraception in Humanae Vitae, he challenges listeners to look beyond individual cases to consider the broader societal implications of reproductive technologies.
The episode provides a meaningful framework for understanding Catholic teaching on reproductive ethics while addressing profound questions about the commercialization of human life, the spiritual dimension of parenthood, and our responsibility to protect human dignity from conception.
• IVF involves harvesting eggs, fertilizing them in a laboratory, and implanting the embryos in a womb
• About 2% of US births now result from IVF procedures
• The White House recently announced support and affordability measures for IVF
• Pope St. John Paul II categorized IVF as part of the "culture of death" in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae
• IVF separates the unitive act of marriage from procreation, similar to how contraception separates sex from procreation
• The procedure commercializes human reproduction, treating children and reproductive elements as commodities
• Many fertilized embryos are destroyed or stored indefinitely in the process
• The technology often exploits economically vulnerable people, particularly women
• Each child represents an immortal soul with unique DNA that will never exist again
• The Church affirms the natural desire for children while questioning technological means that compromise human dignity
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Fr Don Wolfe. This is Living Catholic with Fr Don Wolfe. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in His Word. And now your host, fr Don Wolfe.
Speaker 1:While IVF has been practiced now for over a generation, it's been very expensive and limited in its application. Because of this characteristic, making it more available and providing some new arrangements to make the cost more affordable is considered by the administration to be a support to those who wish to have children but are unable. Given that it's a contestable moral option, it's a curious decision on their part. It's important for us to consider what this is and why it's of moral concern to us. First of all, ivf is a procedure by which the eggs of an adult woman are gained some say harvested from her. These eggs are then fertilized by sperm in a laboratory. In vitro refers to the dish or test tube glass in which this part of the fertilization procedure is performed. The fertilized embryo is then implanted in a womb where it grows to. Vitro refers to the dish or test tube glass in which this part of the fertilization procedure is performed. The fertilized embryo is then implanted in a womb, where it grows to full term and is born. For those who are unable to achieve pregnancy naturally, it's a means to bypass whatever dysfunction is occurring, so that pregnancy can occur For those for whom there is no natural pathway to childbearing for a single person or between two people of the same sex, for example it also provides a measure by which a child can be produced. 1978 marks the first time a child was brought to term using this method of fertilization. Millions of children have been born as a product of this procedure since then.
Speaker 1:It's been much lauded by the medical community as providing happiness for those for whom pregnancy would otherwise be impossible. Since this is no small number of people, especially among the societal arrangements of our time, this procedure is highly attractive and appealingly functional to those who wish to have children, and it must be mentioned, having children grows less and less common in the Western world, with no first-world country coming even close to a replacement birth rate. Ivf seems to fulfill both a personal desire and a societal need For those who want to have children but cannot, as well as for a society that needs children but does not have them. It seems that both benefit. Having the White House announce its support seems to be a real win for those who want to support having children. This latest statistic seems to bear this out as much as 2% of the children born in the US in our time are the product of IVF. It is generally supported by the medical community and has wide acceptance among all levels of society, including among Catholics. This is not simply some note that is abstract about numbers. In my own family I had four aunts and uncles who were unable to have children on their own. They opted to adopt children, 10 in all.
Speaker 1:Infertility is an aspect of the human condition that is neither negligible nor just contemporary. As in so much of modern technology, ivf has grown up amid a need expressed for generations that some relief ought to be available to those who cannot have children on their own. The appeal of this technological solution becomes more pressing as the pool of adoptees dries up around us. Despite the cross-currents of our culture and the odd situations in which we find ourselves in the modern world, people still want to have children, and yet the Catholic Church objects. Bishop Burbage of Arlington, virginia, has crafted a letter recently to the administration begging them to rescind their position and change their support.
Speaker 1:Ivf is contrary to Catholic teaching and has been identified as one of the manifestations of the indifference to the integrity of bodily functions that affects the modern world, and it has produced a sea of violence and sadness throughout the whole of society. Catholic teaching thinks this procedure is a truly bad idea and an immoral practice. This has been a focus of moral theologians for a long time, even before the technology had matured enough for it to become common practice. While this may seem odd, given the church's reputation for being out of date and behind the times, it's actually a tip of the cap to the far-seeing capacities of the moral theologians who think about these things and, admittedly, the novelists and thinkers who have been writing about these things for generations.
Speaker 1:The process of artificial fertilization and gestation was proposed by science fiction writers almost immediately after scientists discovered what actually happened when sperm fertilizes an ovum. Naturally. Remember Aldous Huxley's novel A Brave New World was published in 1932. A novel A Brave New World was published in 1932. It described children being created and gestated in artificial wombs that were in fact glass tubes. From that time until 1978, the idea was in the air. Moral theologians, faced with such thinking, have been trying to understand its ramifications and its boundaries among the prospering of human society, to understand its ramifications and its boundaries among the prospering of human society.
Speaker 1:Pope St John Paul II highlighted the issue in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Gospel of Life, in which he outlined the moral concerns of IVF and the issues involved in separating the creation of human life from the natural act of human intercourse and the context of marriage and family dynamics. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith also treated the question in its document Donum Fide as Donum Vitae. This teaching was notably criticized because the Pope included IVF in his criticism of the Western culture of death, which he was anxious to invite the Church to step beyond. Culture of death, which he was anxious to invite the church to step beyond. Since then, the church has remained adamant in its critique and stern in its opposition, even as the practice has been propelled into the mainstream. We should pause for a moment before we come to the heart of the church's anxiety and mention that this is one of the issues in which we have to make a special leap of imagination, since the Church's teaching asks us to consider an aspect of society that we're unused to thinking about. Not that this issue is different than all other issues, but that it is an issue in which the personal so outweighs any consideration of the societal. Any appeal to a broader context almost never takes place. It's the church's job to remember and to remind the human family not just any one individual, but the whole project of society that it should remind not simply a particular family, because the church is the body of Christ altogether and not just one person at a time. And we mostly don't think this way.
Speaker 1:When we look at the issue, it hits home when we're talking to a couple who has not been able to have children. They long to fulfill the natural and naturally good desire to have offspring that they can raise and sustain. By their opposition, by their decision to becoming husband and wife, they've invested their lives to one another and they naturally look beyond the boundaries of themselves to the future and to their creation of it. They give themselves to each other and as the first fruit of that gift they long for a life larger than their own lives. They long for a child and there's nothing disordered or evil in their longing. In fact, it is the most natural and moral thing anyone can long for. If they're disappointed in their longing, if they find out they can't have a child, it's only natural we join them in their frustration. So when they choose to use the technology of IVF and can produce a child together, it seems like a dream and a blessing come true. It is the satisfaction of a deep felt need and the realization of a good, especially when we can visit their houses and see the joy in their faces and the lively, precious child that they've created together.
Speaker 1:It's hard to imagine anyone could object to what they have. On a person-to-person basis, going one by one, it's hard to mention any objections or to be troubled by what's happened. Actually, it's the same leap of moral imagination required to criticize contraception, which the church has also done quite emphatically. Looking at one situation at a time, the desire to have children only when the parents are ready and responsive seems to be a pretty good intention. Controlling when a child is conceived seems like a true blessing, especially considering how many times parents have been surprised and troubled by the discovery of an unexpected pregnancy. Anyone who has any contact with the soul-wrenching discovery of a person who has created a new life, a life that she is now responsible for for a lifetime that person knows it, can create a life-altering sense of panic and a deeply pronounced fear. The first thing most people who experience this think of is if only it could have been prevented, my life would have been better. And it's hard to argue on a case-by-case basis that they are mistaken. If only if only makes for a powerful motivation to justify whatever steps could be taken to keep it from happening. Looking at someone affected by a pregnancy that he or she did not plan for and talking about the immorality of contraception seems like a losing argument. However, stepping away from the individual to the whole society, the practice looks completely different.
Speaker 1:When Pope Paul VI criticized contraception in the most famous encyclical of the 20th century, humanae Vitae Oddly not the one by Pope Pius XI criticizing anti-Semitism and racial discrimination published in 1937 under the German title Mit Brennen der Sorge, that is, with Burning Sorrow an encyclical that no one paid attention to. Five years later, the Shoah, the Holocaust, was in full swing. In Pope Paul's encyclical that no one paid attention to, called Humanae Vitae, that is, on Human Life, he was pilloried in the public square and accused of being backward, cruel, patriarchal and medieval. Among the kinder, things said about him what the entire society had embraced as an unrequited good. Contraception, paul reminded, would lead to undesired but entirely logical and anticipated results. He predicted that widespread embrace of contraception by everyone would lead to the spread of divorce and the debasing of marriage, the devaluing of the feminine in society, the widespread consummation of pornography, the demeaning of the human body, especially the female human body, and the widespread practice of abortion. A commentator on the Pope's encyclical also added in 1968 that it would lead to gay marriage.
Speaker 1:Everybody thought the Pope was out of his mind. After all, people just wanted to control when they had children. These warnings were only to scare people. They said we have only to look around that these predictions were prescient. Some would say prophetic Prophets were not those who looked into a crystal ball to see a report of what would happen next. They were those who could see the truth of what was happening and then warn people of the conclusions of those actions. The Pope was the 20th century's prophet when it came to the topic of contraception. He saw it all. Century's prophet when it came to the topic of contraception, he saw it all. And we have to admit as we survey the landscape especially the 68 million abortions since 1973, that human society throughout the Western world has become grim in the ways Pope Paul never predicted.
Speaker 1:Although these individuals did not intend their results when they made their choices, these were the symbols and the results. Ivf carries with it, a very significant set of results, making it quite morally questionable. In fact, pope St John Paul II categorized it as part of the culture of death. The first is that IVF separates the unitive act of procreation. It takes the intimacy of the sexual act and its power to express and to actuate a unity of their spouses and separates that bond from the creation of a new life. New life becomes the product of an industrial process stripped of every aspect of human intimacy and expression. You might object to note that such processes are the point. The natural process has not produced a child, and perhaps this one will but remember. Having baby-making removed from sex, as in contraception, has produced a frightful destruction of humans' connections to one another. Removing sex from baby-making will destroy the connection of parents to their children. The second aspect is the commodification of children, that is, children in these arrangements are objects to be bought and provided for by companies and processes rather than being human individuals that are individuals whose value inheres in their being.
Speaker 1:In some cases I've heard that potential parents who opt for this method are presented with advertisements for how to achieve babies with desired characteristics and predilections Predilections for higher IQ, specific eye color, skin tone, hair type, etc. Rather than being considered as a gift from God, whose uniqueness is blessed in every way, a child becomes a compositive characters in a repository of particular values that have been chosen as a premium. As this happens, any lack or deficit in a child's being becomes an expression of failure and disappointment rather than an attribute of character or personality. Soon it becomes the case that perfection is the only option, and there becomes no tolerance for that one who's not perfect. According to the measure of mom and dad, once you presume to choose the child, you're going to create, perfection rules, and once that's the presumption, perfection, pretty soon it will become the only measure.
Speaker 1:While couples use this method in order to complete the purpose of their being together, the technology involved also makes an instrument of the various parts of their bodies. That might seem like a weak complaint, since the various test tubes in petri dishes and needles in fluids simply complete what the natural process does, and we're comfortable interrupting natural processes in all manners of things in order to achieve what we want. Comfortable interrupting natural processes in all manners of things in order to achieve what we want. After all, nobody has any problem with making artificial diamonds or spreading artificial fertilizer or breaking the bonds of hydrocarbons to make the different products we want. Interrupting the natural processes, enhancing some and bypassing others so as to facilitate the making of a baby, isn't all that much different. Making things happen, after all, is what technology is for.
Speaker 1:But when the process for baby-making is broken into discrete segments and then industrialized, what had been the most intimate elements of personhood become much more than placeholders in a flowchart. Not only that, they can be commercialized. Since IVF is not just for couples but is also a process open to most anyone. The different parts of bodies and the different elements for conception are made available for a price. Suddenly, what has been an inviolate element of the human person, one of the most intimate parts of his or her being, is for sale or rent. Not only is the baby commercialized, so are the parents. Again, this doesn't seem to be a great moment of distress for a couple who's striving to have a child and are appealing to this procedure because the nature and the normal just doesn't work for them. They're leaping over the obstacles in order to achieve what billions of parents have already achieved on their own.
Speaker 1:But the technology does not stop with couples. It's used by millions, millions of people who seek to have a child outside of the normal coupled interaction and thus need to come by all of the elements necessary to make a child. And since the need is there, a market has grown up to satisfy it. Eggs, sperm, wombs and all of the additional elements of fertilization and gestation will become available for those who are willing to pay. What used to be regarded as the quote blessed event unquote becomes a pile of receipts and a stack of canceled checks. Not only that, but these various elements also become separated from one another, isolated in their market value and appreciated in distinction from one another.
Speaker 1:Again, this is not unique in our commercialized culture, but it reduces the most integral aspect of human being to a collection of discrete and separate elements that are pushed apart and then separated from one another when they exist, only to be part of one whole element contributing to life and goodness for the whole world. But it's not just that these elements are taken out of their context and then separated and commercialized and then put back together again to produce babies. It's that all these elements don't really define the true experience of personhood. We can see the sperm in the egg under a microscope. We can define the nutrients in the blood supply necessary for the growth of an embryo in the womb. We can analyze a timeline of genetic development according to the key control functions expressed by the genes as the child grows in the womb. But all these things together and all the other elements and processes of a child being, to being created and growing are part of a larger, more meaningful and more important experience of being human. That is missed if we simply create, if we're simply creating a child and we imagine that creating it is just to put these things together by separating the creation of a child into discrete elements so they can be put back together again.
Speaker 1:The unitive experience of the parents is discounted or is treated as nothing, as we have seen with contraception. By interfering with the natural aspect of sex in children, every part of the experience of men being men and women being women is interrupted. We've still not figured out how society is to function in a contraceptive world. As of now, the societies most committed to contraception cannot think of themselves of a reason to reproduce themselves, and every one of the societies they're from is dying. Interruption is not a good thing.
Speaker 1:There's also the spiritual element involved in the creation of a new life. This is mostly ignored, since the IVF is a technology and answers to questions about its efficacy and inefficacy rather than to concerns about what's holy or godly intent. But Pope John Paul II warned everyone that if we let go of the spirituality of creating new life, we could very easily continue to devalue life so thoroughly that we treat it as no more than a product in a world of other products, to be thrown away when inconvenient, or treated as if nothing, when much more than a marketable commodity. And while no one wants to contemplate the gift of children, the beginning treated with the same concerns as livestock, the pathway to this reality is wide, straight and flat. God is the author of all life. When a child is conceived, the being created is an immortal soul that will live forever, never to be ended. The DNA of that child has never existed before and will never exist again, which is another way to describe that. The attributes of a child are unique to it and will never be duplicated. Each child is an expression of God's desire for the world and an expression of God's gift to the world, and deserves to be treated as such. We should remember it has been a long journey of moral progress to live in a world in which slavery, the possession of human beings as property, has been overcome and the invaluable personhood of each individual is recognized.
Speaker 1:Slipping back into treating persons as marketable items is giving up hard-won ground. There are two types that come to the top. There are two more issues that come to the top of this as well. The first is that the procedure itself produces a lot of unwanted and unattended fertilized eggs that are not destroyed or simply stored with uncertain futures. Often, a number of eggs are placed in a dish, the sperm is utilized and they are fertilized, all with about the same efficacy. As, say, a frog fertilizes the eggs affixed to a puddle's edge, with the most viable chosen to be implanted. Some practitioners allow more than one to be implanted so that the one growing fastest is chosen to come to full term while the other is removed. It is mechanical and cold. All the other fertilized eggs are either destroyed or put down in cold storage where they remain. Each is what we all once were. They have all that is required for human personhood and will become a human person in full stature if they have but enough time and the appropriate space, and yet they are left in physical and moral abeyance, and that's a problem. And the second issue is that almost all of the functions of IVF displaces the problems and the function of their technology out of sight of those who avail themselves to it.
Speaker 1:As we have more carefully analyzed, in our modern world, we find that what we have celebrated so fully and depended upon so heartily comes with a price. And the price is often hidden, like so many things, when adding up the cost of pollution, erosion and chemical deployment, the chemical despoilment. What is like so many things, when adding up the cost of pollution and erosion and chemical despoilment, the death of bees, the destruction of frogs, et cetera, et cetera. In modern agriculture and modern fishing, the real price is never quite counted up. In the economics of buying and selling, as has been noted in many places, rented wombs, eggs for sale, the destruction of embryos not used, the inevitable mix-ups and mistakes and the unwanted products of the process are all moral horrors that are not mentioned or taken into account. And not surprisingly, those who provide for what is needed for this technology are often the poorest and the most disempowered in the face of the power of the practice. They're often women whose poverty coerces their participation and separates them from the gift of life they can uniquely offer.
Speaker 1:The author Wendell Berry has noted that we have a poor track record of limiting technology. When a process or procedure becomes available, we avail ourselves of it, even when it has serious drawbacks or parts about it we don't like. It's common to feel like we end up being controlled by the power of these technological decisions that we are unable to break that control. Once the technology has become common, this danger infects the heart of the human project with the concerns that surround IVF. It is the heart of the church's opposition to it.
Speaker 1:Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse. We have a poem today called Our Common Prayer. God, rescue us in need. We are lost, lost in the night. What fragile, broken reads. Afraid of the dark and its fright, we can do nothing of our own, can hardly mount the day. Fear all others, fear being alone. Confusion is the mean and the way. Come to us, find us. We pray. Without you, we are in the dark, we struggle, we curse, we flay. Without you dies our meager spark. Embrace us in your arms, hold us more closely still. Exempt us from the many harms and keep our hearts at you. That's our common prayer. I hope you can come back and join us in the weeks to come. To see you then. Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.