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In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer (IVF-ET or more commonly IVF), first successfully accomplished in humans in 1978 (Steptoe & Edwards, 1978), has become the treatment of choice for infertile couples in the developed world. IVF, along with other forms of assisted reproductive technology (ART) are considered morally impermissible according to official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1987). In IVF procedures, highly skilled technicians facilitate the creation of embryos in a Petri dish after obtaining ovum and sperm.1 Prior to fertilization, the ova are assessed and those deemed of highest quality are mixed with the highest quality of sperm. Two to five days after fertilization, a number of embryos are implanted via a catheter into the woman’s uterus, which has been prepared through hormonal therapy so that uterine conditions are suitable for embryo implantation (De los Santos et al., 2003). Success rates for live births using fresh eggs obtained from the woman undergoing embryo transfer hover between 20% and 30%, with even the most successful clinics reporting rates less than 51% according to reports by the Center for Disease Control (2006) and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (2005).

Discussion of the ethics of Heterologous Embryo Transfer (HET) has been framed in terms of several images: “rescue” and “adoption” of embryos, and “surrogacy.” Moral arguments using such language often attempt, in the manner of traditional casuistry, to liken the implantation of embryos to other “paradigm cases” of rescue and adoption of children or surrogate motherhood contracts. Even though the arguments that have been presented are much more complex, and not just simplistic comparisons of cases, such imagery has importantly influenced the way the question has been analyzed.

Here, I will attempt to “unload” the sometimes loaded ethical question of HET by analyzing the images of rescue, adoption, and surrogacy. This is important because framing the question of the morality of embryo transfer as a rescue or adoption or surrogacy can end up begging the question. Certainly, rescue and adoption are generally good things. Surrogate motherhood, at least in the Catholic tradition, is not seen as a good thing. When such images are used in the case of HET, they can shape moral analysis one way or the other even before the analysis is begun. Furthermore, framing the question by using such terms can limit moral analysis by focusing attention away from other important moral issues. Paul Lauritzen makes a similar point in this volume, arguing that the Catholic debate about HET has been “idiosyncratic and (religiously) intramural in a way that obscures important insights that the tradition could offer to the debate, if it were framed differently.” (p. 162) Although I want to remain solidly within the Catholic realm, I agree that it is necessary to go beyond the images of rescue, adoption, and surrogacy to assess adequately the ethics of the practice of HET. In particular, some of the medical and technical challenges of HET raise important moral issues about justice and the mission of Catholic health care facilities.

Establishing the morality of frozen embryo transfer is a delicate task. Debate amongst Catholic philosophers and theologians has developed over time. As I see it, at the centre of the argument lie differences in opinion concerning the specification of:

One group argues in favour of embryo transfer and suggests the moral object of the act to be: to transfer an unborn baby from the freezer to a woman’s womb, for her to be impregnated and to gestate and nurture the baby there until birth.

In this volume, this group is represented through the work of Christopher Tollefsen, Darlene Fozard Weaver and Sarah-Vaughan Brakman. The other group, amongst which I place myself (and which Reverend Tadeusz Pacholczyk also represents in this volume), suggest the moral object of the act is: to seek pregnancy outside the conjugal act (or put another way to impregnate a woman outside the conjugal act and/or more widely to offend against marital fidelity because pregnancy is viewed to be a continuum from the conjugal act that causes an ontological change in the woman that cannot morally be isolated from the conjugal act).

The disposition of abandoned frozen embryos remains a topic of intense discussion as pressure to sanction human embryonic destruction for stem cell research continues to build. Debates about “embryo adoption” have intensified as part of this discussion. A number of children have been born this way, and their presence serves to vividly remind us that each frozen embryo is not an anonymous grouping of cells, but a child with his or her own specific traits. These children also remind us how “unwanted” or “abandoned” embryos can be given other possible trajectories besides being discarded or destroyed for research. My aim in this paper, nonetheless, is to offer several interconnected reasons I believe embryo adoption is illicit and unlikely ever to be sanctioned by the Catholic Church. I also intend to briefly consider the related question of the fate of the many cryopreserved embryos currently in storage.

The core question under consideration revolves around the final step typically undertaken during the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, and whether that step of transferring an embryo into a woman’s uterus is morally licit. Some such as Tollefsen and Brown and Eberl in this volume, would argue that embryo transfer as part of the in vitro fertilization process is wrong, but not when it is carried out as a form of “rescue” or “adoption.” I believe such a view is internally inconsistent and will attempt to argue in this paper that embryo transfer of any kind involves the participants in a fundamentally disordered kind of action. The process of deriving moral conclusions can be complicated by the fact that grave and systematic violations of the moral law may have already preceded and conditioned the situation. We find ourselves today in the strikingly unnatural situation of routinely handling human embryos in a sterile laboratory setting, far removed from a woman’s womb. As a consequence, we have seen tremendous depersonalizing and objectifying forces skew the discussion about early embryonic life. It has become nearly routine to see scanning electron micrographs of early human embryos sitting on the point of a sewing pin, or being poked with micromanipulators.

This paper is centrally concerned with a relatively narrow question: Could the practice of human embryo transfer be intrinsically immoral, , in particular because it is in some way a violation of the good of marriage? While I will answer in the negative to this narrow question, I want first to identify just a few of the wider questions with which I am not primarily concerned, but which I think the narrow question opens up as important. I will return to some of these wider issues at the end of the paper.

The narrow question is about embryo transfer, not embryo adoption. Embryo transfer might be done for a variety of ends: As part of an IVF procedure, for the sake of a surrogacy arrangement, to rescue a frozen embryo with a view to putting the child up for adoption later, or as part of adopting that embryo. But the distinction between transfer for rescue and transfer for adoption has been seen as important by some commentators. Helen Watt, for example, has argued that transfer for rescue is morally wrong, whereas transfer for adoption is not (Watt, 2001).1 But if this is true, it can only be true because embryo transfer is not itself intrinsically immoral. Since embryo transfer is part of any proposal to adopt an embryo (that does not involve some surrogacy arrangement), if embryo transfer were intrinsically wrong, so would embryo adoption be.

The Roman Catholic Church clearly regards in vitro fertilization (IVF) and related techniques of artificial procreation as immoral because these practices are contrary to the unity of marriage and the dignity of spouses (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF]), 1987, ). The Church’s teaching, however, does not rule out as intrinsically wrong the possibility of heterologous embryo transfer for the purpose of adoption (Pontifical Academy for Life [PAL], 2004). We address the question of the appropriate Roman Catholic moral position on this subject through textual analysis of relevant Church documents. We also respond to certain critiques of embryo adoption, particularly with respect to questions of whether this practice violates the exclusivity of a woman’s marital bond, involves illicit cooperation with the “evil” of IVF, or is a source of scandal.

The recent debates within Roman Catholicism on heterologous embryo transfer (HET) – the practice of transferring a previously cryopreserved human embryo to the uterus of a woman who is not the genetic mother – have been surprising to both Catholics and non-Catholics. Given the Church’s position that human life has moral status from fertilization onward and her vigorous defense of human embryos against destruction in human embryonic stem cell research, support for the practice might seem assured. Yet, Catholic philosophers and moral theologians have shown that HET raises crucial concerns regarding the continued cultural commodification of human life, the meaning of human sexuality and marriage, and the nature of human personhood.

Three specific areas of concern have arisen: First, whether HET is impermissible because it involves cooperation with (or the appearance of cooperation with) practices that the Church has deemed illicit (i.e., frozen embryos and the dilemma they present only exist because of the practice of in vitro fertilization – IVF). As demonstrated by the work of Brown and Eberl in this volume, however, these are not in principled arguments against the practice and do not to tell against HET in all circumstances.

When a genuinely contested question arises in moral theology, initial analyses inevitably settle around particular lines of argument and counter-argument that rely on relevant moral claims which are presumed stable and settled. Mutual criticism, discussion, and further reflection bring more nuance and texture to these lines of argument as they also illumine those claims and teachings taken to be reliable moral markers or building blocks. What takes shape is a “debate” with more or less clearly demarcated “sides,” and subsequent scholarly entries into the contested question must traverse the debate’s terrain. Eventually, however, new routes into the question are called for and charted, as newcomers to and veterans of the debate alike begin to challenge the terms on which the conversation has settled.

In the case of embryo adoption, analyses have settled around the question whether it is morally permissible to transfer a genetically unrelated embryo into the uterus of a married woman, and answers to this question are crafted by appealing to relatively stable and settled Catholic teaching on marriage, or more specifically to the marriage “act” (i.e., heterosexual intercourse) or to the marital/nuptial significance of the human body. This essay argues that many of the heretofore available Catholic arguments about embryo adoption are methodologically flawed, problematically gendered, and theologically deficient. After developing these charges, the essay explores embryo adoption in light of theological reflection on Christ’s body and ours, adoption, and the common good. While I judge that embryo adoption is at least sometimes morally permissible, my aim here is not so much to argue for the moral permissibility of the practice, but (like Eric Gregory does admirably in his contribution to this volume) to call for and inaugurate more robustly moral consideration of the practice. More specifically, I consider embryo adoption in light of the affirmation that we are made God’s adopted children by being incorporated into Christ’s body.

In 1985, Gary Trudeau and the Universal Press Syndicate agreed not to run six installments of the comic strip “Doonesbury” which parodied “The Silent Scream,” an anti-abortion film that showed ultrasound images of an abortion of a 12-weekold fetus taking place. The ultrasound images of the abortion depicted in “The Silent Scream” were accompanied by commentary from a physician–narrator, Bernard Nathanson, who had once performed abortions but had become a staunch opponent of abortion. In fact, the film takes its name from a series of images which Nathanson describes as follows:

Ethical questions about embryos generally center on determination of what if any moral status or right to life1 is attributed to them; analysis of embryo adoption hinges not only on that determination but also on the decisions of and impact on those affected. In this essay I only minimally consider the moral status of the human embryo because different positions on this issue are apparently irresolvable on the level of social policy. Because these positions are applicable to all human embryos, policies about adopting them should be consistent with other policies and decisions about embryos, regardless of how and why the embryos are obtained. I do not, therefore, distinguish between embryos that remain after infertility treatment and those that may be created for adoption. Personally, my views about the topic are consistent with but more restrictive than policies about embryos. With regard to policy as well as personal decision-making, the perspective I bring to my account may be described as egalitarian.

Using the term in the title of this book tends to prejudge the question of the embryo’s moral status by suggesting that embryos are already children. As such, regardless of whether an embryo is gestating within a woman, it has the same right to life as a newborn. Nonetheless, many people, including Catholics who have had children through in vitro fertilization (IVF), do not agree with this position. From the standpoint of some Catholics, therefore, it is possible to view obligations to children as different from those owed to in vitro embryos.