Infertility - Proposals in Congress Threatening
Human Life, the Family, and Religious Freedom
Couples struggling with infertility carry a heavy cross, especially when they so deeply desire to live out their vocation to welcome the gift of children from God. It may seem that all is hopeless.
God made male and female bodies to procreate together. When couples are faced with infertility, the Church supports diagnosing and addressing the problems so their bodies can function as they should.
There are solutions that offer real hope for restoring a couple's natural, healthy ability to have children. For example, Natural Family Planning (NFP) teaches how to pinpoint the fertile window to maximize the chance of conception and is very effective in some cases. Medical procedures or treatments such as hormonal medications, surgery to repair damaged or blocked Fallopian tubes, and other restorative treatments that do not substitute for the married couple's act of loving union can help husband and wife to conceive a baby. There is no moral objection to these treatments, any more than there is in other medical treatments to restore health.
However, couples facing infertility often find that general medical approaches and procedures toward infertility "pose serious moral problems by failing to respect the dignity of the couple's marital relationship, of their sexuality, or of the child" (see USCCB’s Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology).
To make matters worse, now there are proposals in Congress that promote morally objectionable infertility technologies. These proposals seek to create a national “right” to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other technologies that destroy preborn human lives and treat people like property, such as surrogacy, gene editing, and cloning. Some of the current proposals would also threaten Catholic hospitals, charities, schools, and other organizations and people that do not enable or cover these medical procedures. They could even allow minors to receive the procedures despite parents’ objections.
The United States Conference of Bishops (USCCB) has asked us to contact our members of Congress and tell them to oppose bills that promote so-called “rights” to IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) that cause the death of countless human embryos and violate human dignity.
The USCCB has resources to help us understand the legislative proposals on IVF https://www.usccb.org/prolife/reproductive-technology#Testimony and Catholic teachings on infertility, https://www.usccb.org/topics/natural-family-planning/infertility.
Sign up for action alerts at the USCCB Action Center: https://www.votervoice.net/USCCB/home. The USCCB makes it very easy to communicate with your elected officials and send them your comments.
The need to accompany and support the increasing number of families struggling with infertility is real. But members of Congress – including many who consider themselves pro-life – are in a rush to promote access to a new national “right” that is contrary to church teaching. The Church, with sincere compassion and empathy for couples struggling with infertility, offers guidance and hope through her teachings on how to understand and approach infertility in a way that reverences and protects the dignity of the human person and respects God's divine plan for married love. There is always hope!
Though the fig tree does not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food . . .
yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.
(Habakkuk 3: 17-18)
~St. Luke Life, Justice and Peace Ministry
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