First Thoughts on IVF, Part V

This next section, a short one, is on something I get into a bit more in my next letter, this notion that sex and all aspects of it are not supposed to be shared with more than one person.

Near the end of your letter, you quote Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, who says that IVF "undermines the meaning of sex. It violates the exclusivity of the couple's marriage covenant.” You call this ridiculous. There are people out there who make the argument that various forms of infidelity, such as occasional sexual threesomes or open marriages, enhance the love the married people feel for each other. They argue that these situations are the result of consensual decisions, that they are done openly and honestly, that they increase the pleasure and therefore the unifying factor of the sexual act, and that they ensure the unending quality of the marriage by doing away with dissatisfaction based on the undeniable human need, or at least intense desire, for variety. But the Church, and I have no doubt, you, would reject such reasoning because it brings a third person, even one who conceivably could have purely altruistic purposes, into the innermost sanctum of the marriage, that innermost sanctum being the sexual act with its twin purposes of unifying the couple and creating children. To say that bringing another into the 2nd purpose, that of creating children, constitutes a violation isn’t ridiculous, but instead seems to me eminently logical, at least if we accept the first premise.

Where this runs into difficulties I admit, and am not at the moment entirely sure how to resolve, is in matters of degree. Is it permissible for me to tell my buddy, or a therapist, that I don’t know how to satisfy my wife in bed, and to ask for advice on what I should do to increase her happiness in that aspect of our lives? I don’t think that you, I, or the Church would have a problem with that. Is it permissible for my wife to take a drug that helps the ovary expel eggs more readily? It seems clear that no one has a problem with that. Perhaps the difference is this (this is just a guess): in the threesome, and in IVF, the action, either the giving of pleasure, or the joining of the egg and sperm, is actually accomplished by the third party. But when one talks to one’s therapist, or takes a drug that increases egg production, one is not substituting for the sexual act.

I think my notion of substitution takes care of the potential problem of going to see a gynecologist or urologist - one may allow another to touch oneself or one's spouse in an intimate manner, but one would not allow even a medical doctor to engage in the giving of pleasure or the act of procreation in such a situation.