March 29, 2024

Vatican calls for more fertility research

The scale of destruction of embryos in IVF amounts to a “massacre of the innocents”, says the Pontifical Academy for Life. In a Vatican communique issued after a conference on reproductive technologies, it condemned IVF and embryo research and declared that “no war or catastrophe has ever caused so many victims”.

The Academy also claimed that doctors were referring couples for IVF programs without attempting to look into the underlying cause of their sterility. It foresaw a growing feeling that artificial reproduction was to be preferred to natural reproduction because the outcome could be controlled. “All this contributes to considering the child obtained through artificial reproductive technologies as a ‘product’, whose value in reality depends to a large extent on its ‘good quality’, subjected to severe controls and selected with care,” it said.