First Thoughts on IVF

I probably have not made this entirely clear in my postings so far, but in order to be sure: the biggest question in my life right now is whether or not to use in-vitro fertilization to get pregnant. My wife and I are at odds over this, as, while we both desperately want to have children, she is willing to use IVF and I am not. Most of the substantive communication we have done on this so far has been through writing, and little of it has happened recently, for two reasons: one, we are incredibly busy with school. Two, I am an avoider by nature. I avoid that which will be troublesome. It is probably my greatest flaw and my greatest sin, for I do not make use of my given talents nearly as often as I should.

I am in the midst at the moment of writing my third missive on this issue, this one in response to part of a book by Fr. Genovesi, S.J. For now, I will contribute to this blog with part of my first letter, one that reached to fifteen pages, and is in many ways flawed. It is a response to my father's first letter, and so you as readers will have to deal with the ambiguities of listening to a monologue when a dialogue would be so much clearer. You will also have to deal with a slightly more impersonal tone than that in which it actually was written, for I will not be disclosing the names of my family members, and so instead of something like "Joe," you'll get, "my brother."

What follows is the first section of my letter, in which I try to mitigate the harm of anything painful I might say in the spirit of honesty, in which I try to show my father that I am trying to act out of love, and in which I address his first point that the consequences of an act should have an effect on how we think of the morality of the act.

Dad,

These are some thoughts regarding your letter. They are not necessarily my final thoughts on the subject. Some of them, responding as they do to illustrations you have made from your own life, will be critical of choices you have made. These views will probably not be entirely a surprise to you, but I don’t know that I have ever stated them outright. Please do not think that I am trying to set myself up in judgment over you, or that what I say means I love or respect you any less than I do. In many ways you were and are a model for me and the way I live my life. I love and respect you immensely, and only write what I do to think through this conundrum and your points as honestly and fully as I can.

Regarding your first point, that I may be endangering my marriage, I agree that is a possibility. My wife has already said somewhat vaguely that she does not know what sort of reaction will come about from her or her parents as a result of this. She has also said that she doesn’t want to emotionally blackmail me, and she realizes that she also fears what reactions may come from me if I decide to do something that I believe to be wrong for the sake of pleasing her and others. I don’t want to downplay the consequences of my decision, because my whole course of thought and feeling on this issue has been full of foreboding about what people will think, how they’ll be hurt, and how they’ll react, people such as my wife, first of all, her parents, who have only one child to give them grandchildren, my parents, who would love to see me have children, my grandparents, who feel the same, my friends, who may be critical of my choice, even if it doesn’t concern them, and any number of relatives who may have any number of things to say about it. That said, I don’t think anyone would bring up this issue if they believed the action to be truly wrong. Perhaps you could have appeased Mother’s angst about not living a more posh lifestyle by becoming a dishonest businessman. But no one, even one who was under the impression that that was the sole cause of the downfall of your marriage, would ever dare accuse you of doing wrong by being honest, because they admire you for your honesty and there is no true dispute about whether you should or should not be honest.

A few paragraphs later you say, “Here's my gut advice to you. A successful, loving marriage for you is much more important than any Catholic teaching on this particular matter.” Again, I don’t think you would say that if you agreed with the Catholic teaching. It’s like a sermon I heard from the head pastor at my wife’s Presbyterian church. He spoke about how Jesus was tolerant, and therefore we should be tolerant in the same way, and erect no barrier to letting active homosexuals become ordained ministers in the Presbyterian Church. I felt that argument was seriously flawed because it totally ignored the morality of the teaching in question – had we been discussing the advisability of putting known, current, and unrepentant wife-beaters in the ministry, tolerance never would have come up as an issue. On a side-note, and addressing a comment you make somewhere else in the letter, wife-beating and use of IVF within marriage are obviously not analogous in their levels of iniquity – I’m not making that argument. But even if the use of IVF within marriage is a venial sin, I think “sin” is the operative word here. I don’t buy the argument that the label “venial” makes something ok.

Finally, the success of my marriage does not rest on my shoulders alone. My wife has vows that she has to respect, vows that require her to avoid as much as possible the paths of thought and ways of acting that cultivate resentment. And my decisions are not made without thought or without love. There is a poem by Richard Lovelace, a British Cavalier during the English Civil War, called, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,” that basically encapsulates my thoughts on this issue:

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

He essentially tells Lucasta, his wife or lover, that he loves something else more than her: war, or more specifically, the reasons for going to war: honor. Now I don’t know whether he means the earthly honor of reputation, or the more spiritual honor of doing right no matter what others think of him, but the point remains: true love consists in doing what is right, even if one’s beloved does not agree with that action. Hence young adults marrying despite the unjust prejudices of parents; hence young men going off to just wars despite the sorrow of their mothers and wives. I don’t think my stance so far is selfishness (I sure don’t feel like I’ve done myself a favor with it, in part because I have looked forward to raising children since I was in college). I think it’s the proper action of putting what is all-important – God and his will – before what is immensely, but not quite, as important – my own and others’ preferences, desires, or possibly even needs. I do love my wife, far more than I can explain, and she loves me too. When we’ve discussed the issue of resentments lingering after these decisions are made, she has said that she has no intention of leaving me and reiterated how much she loves me. And when I asked her whether she was sorry she married “a crazy Catholic,” she said, “No, because that is what makes you the good person you are.”

I don’t think you disagree in essence with what I’m saying. The real disagreement obviously lies in two things: the authority of the Church and the morality of IVF.

The next section of my letter is a series of piecemeal responses to claims my dad makes.