WASHINGTON —Two days after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into law to protect in vitro fertilization, the head of a U.S. bishops’ committee reiterated the Catholic Church’s stance against the fertility treatment.
“It is precisely because each person’s life is a unique gift that we cannot condone procedures that violate the right to life or the integrity of the family. Certain practices like IVF do both, and they are often not effective even for their own purposes,” said Bishop Michael Burbidge, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities.
The bishop, in a March 8 statement stressed that “in the IVF industry, many embryos are never transferred to a mother’s womb, but are destroyed or indefinitely frozen, and, of those who are transferred, only a fraction survive to be eventually born. All told, there are millions of human beings who have been killed or potentially permanently frozen by this industry.”
Ivey, a Republican, signed a bill March 6 protecting in vitro fertilization providers and patients in the state from criminal or civil liability if embryos are damaged or destroyed. Lawmakers had quickly passed the legislation in response to immediate backlash following a state Supreme Court ruling that said embryos are considered children and that individuals could be held liable for destroying them.
In a statement, Ivey said IVF is “a complex issue, no doubt, and I anticipate there will be more work to come, but right now, I am confident that this legislation will provide the assurances our IVF clinics need and will lead them to resume services immediately.”
The fast action by both the House and Senate to pass this bill was in response to three IVF clinics in the state pausing operations in the wake of the state Supreme Court’s decision Feb. 16.
The state’s highest court ruled that an 1872 statute in Alabama, the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which allows parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child, also applies to unborn children, with no exception for “extrauterine children.”
In its majority opinion, the justices also pointed out that the state’s residents in 2018 voted to amend the Constitution to include protections for unborn life.
The state Supreme Court’s ruling stemmed from an appeals case from three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed in 2020 when a hospital patient removed them from where they were stored in the clinic and dropped them on the floor.
The parents had sued for wrongful death, but a trial court dismissed their claims, saying the embryos did not fit in the definition of a person or child.
Attorneys for the defendants — the Alabama fertility clinic, the hospital, and its owner — argued before the court that a wrongful-death liability for frozen embryos would significantly increase the costs of the infertility treatment and could also make it a burden to preserve embryos for the future. In an amicus brief, the state’s medical association said this liability could also mean that parents cannot opt to discard embryos and they would remain frozen.
While the decision was cheered by anti-abortion groups, it raised questions for many about its potential impact.
The Catholic Church has spoken out against IVF, particularly for the treatment of embryos.
“Donum Vitae,” a 1987 document by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, says IVF is never acceptable because it removes conception from the marital act and it treats a baby as a product, “violating the child’s integrity as a human being with an immortal soul from the moment of conception.”
The document also stresses that human embryos are human beings with rights and that “their dignity and right to life must be respected from the first moment of their existence. It is immoral to produce human embryos destined to be exploited as disposable ‘biological material.’”
Bishop Burbidge, in his statement, said that the national conversation about in vitro fertilization laws “creates an opportunity and a necessity to speak about protecting the gift of life itself. Each of our lives has immeasurable value from the moment of conception.”
“Children have a right to be born to their married mother and father, through a personal act of self-giving love. IVF, however well-intended, breaches this bond and these rights and, instead, treats human beings like products or property,” he added.
The bishop also said IVF “cannot be the answer to the very real cross of fertility challenges. In efforts to bring about new life, we cannot turn our face from the many more lives that are cut short and extinguished in the process.”
