When President Trump signed an executive order on February 18, 2025 calling for a 90-day policy review and recommendations to lower the cost of IVF, he launched a discussion about the morality of assisted reproductive technology. The Catholic Church has declared this procedure illicit ever since 1897 when scientists first considered extending artificial insemination from livestock to humans. When the first test tube baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born in 1978 in England, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) followed up with Donum vitae (“The Gift of Life”) in 1987.
Magisterium on Rights of a Child
President Trump’s administration seeks to “make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.” But this statement begs a lot of questions, particularly those related to the rights of the child. Should anyone who wants one be able to buy and make a baby with IVF? To answer this question, I will rely on the instruction from the CDF. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) cites Donum vitae on the familiar passage about the gift of a child.
A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The “supreme gift of marriage” is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged “right to a child” would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,” and “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception. (CCC 2378; citing Donum vitae, II.8.)
Notice how after the CCC emphasizes that no adult has a “right to a child” and that children are not property, the CCC quotes Donum vitae that “only the child possesses genuine rights” in this area. The child has the right to be conceived in love that is both bodily and spiritual, the sexual union between husband and wife where two become one. The child also has the right to be respected as a person from the very beginning of his or her existence. There is no right to a child—only rights of a child. In the IVF discussion, we hear a lot about parents’ right but rarely do we hear about the child’s rights.
One might ask: if married couples have a right to establish a family, why wouldn’t they have a right to use whatever means available to bring about a new life? To understand the Church’s reasoning, we must look at the bigger picture. Rights come with responsibilities. If children of any age have the dignity of persons, then they have a right to life as persons. The full title of Donum vitae is an “Instruction on Respect for Human Life and its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation,” so the document addresses both the right for human embryos to be conceived in love and to be respected as any other person. Let’s take a look at those two rights.
Right to Be Conceived in Love
The right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents” in Donum vitae refers to natural conception or procreation, and it is a hard case to make in modern society. In the mind of the Church, children are tied to marriage, and both marriage and parenthood are tied to the understanding of the human person. There is unity. In secular society, however, these are separate concepts. If you want a baby, you can have one whether you are married or not. If you get pregnant and don’t want the baby, you can get rid of it by abortion. If you want to get married, you can, but if you want to get divorced for any reason, you can undo the marriage. It’s like we are all atoms bumbling around, meaninglessly bonding and unbonding if the conditions are right. This is a materialistic, reductionistic, atheistic view of being human.
But if children are the supreme gift of marriage, then the godless worldview collapses. Human bonds are bonds between body and soul, love given and received, two people knowing and being known, belonging in the relationship—and such a view changes everything about how we treat children.
Consider the implications. If children have the right to be brought into existence by cooperation with God and between committed and loving husband and wife in the most intimate of union, a sexual act that is both spiritually and physically united, then the would-be parents are obligated to be good parents before the child is ever conceived. They are obligated to form their union and solve their divisions so that the new human is born of love in absolute intimacy. But if children are just collections of atoms, because in a materialistic worldview we are all just atoms, then anything goes. Sure, the infertile married couple could use IVF to have a baby, but so can anyone else. All that is needed is a sperm, an egg, and someone or something to gestate the child, anyone else to raise the child, and no one to care about what becomes of the child. This is the kind of commoditization that is behind growing embryos in labs, using them for research, inventing artificial wombs, and cloning.
Right to Respect as a Person
The right “to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception” may also sound vague to the modern ear. We need a clear meaning of the word “respect.” This word’s etymology is classical Latin, respectus, and it refers to the action of looking round or back, consideration; the phrase “in respect” (respectū) means out of consideration or regard for the other. As it is used in the context of the embryonic human, it means that the rest of society should have consideration or regard for these tiny children in the same way as we would for any other child.
This is easy to test. The right to be “conceived in love” refers to before the child exists, but the right “to respect as a person” refers to after the child exists, even from the first moment. If it is wrong to kill an infant child because he or she is unwanted, then embryonic and fetal children should also not be treated with such cruelty, for they are also children. Likewise, if it is wrong to store toddlers in freezers, living but suspended from growing, then it is also wrong to store embryos in cryogenic tanks until their parents want to either raise them, donate them to science, or kill them.
There are now genetic screening tests in which parents and doctors seek to identify which embryos are at risk for diseases, meaning parents using IVF can pick which children live and which ones are frozen or killed. In other words, not only is the first right to be conceived in love violated, but the child is also further subjected to lethal discrimination based on poorly understood medical probabilities. The child is completely disrespected as a person and totally treated as property to be produced, bought and sold, or destroyed.
The instruction specifically addresses respect in the context of IVF. “In his unique and irrepeatable origin, the child must be respected and recognized as equal in personal dignity to those who give him life” because no child should be treated as “the product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques . . . evaluated according to standards of control and dominion” (Donum vitae, II.B.4c). To put it in a straightforward way, if we as a society do not support putting parents in freezers until they can be good parents, then we should also not support putting children in freezers until the parents decide to raise them. This violates the embryo’s right to respect as a person, to say the least.
Embryos are Children
When we use the word “child” in reference to embryos, it is an affirmation of their humanity. Since the early twelfth century, the word has been used to mean an unborn or newly born human being. We use such terms as “with child” to mean that a woman is pregnant or “childbirth” to mean a woman will bear a child. It is not new for our language to refer to the unborn as one among us. A child is a son or daughter of any age belonging to human parents. The CDF’s Declaration on Procured Abortion issued in 1974, when abortion was being legalized, put it like this:
From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. (12–13)
If someone denies that the single-celled human zygote or the multicellular three-to-five-day-old embryo is a child, they are in disaccord not only with the Church but with the English language and collective understanding of reality, hence the affirmation in Donum vitae, “the human being must be respected—as a person—from the very first instant of his existence (I.1).”
Although it may be difficult to love an embryo because we have no direct sensory experience of children too small to see or hold, we must find our love for them in our intellect, reasoning about them with the same skills of abstraction that we use when we learn to think of angels and of God.
The beauty of this teaching is that it challenges us to more fully respect all our brothers and sisters. Donum vitae’s teaching applies to all humans. We all were once embryos. Each of us is someone’s child, and despite all the ways these basic rights of a child may be violated, each of us had a right to be conceived in love by our parents, to be received into their love, and to be raised in their love. We all have the right to be treated like persons and not like property to be used. These are the rights of all children because we are created in the image and likeness of God and, as such, we are gifts to the world.
Editor’s Note: This author’s new book, IVF Is Not the Way: The False Promises of Artificial Procreation, is available for preorder from Sophia Institute Press.
Photo by Jonathan Sanchez on Unsplash
