One of the issues most heatedly debated by Catholic bioethicists addressed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent document on bioethical issues, Dignitas personae, concerned the morality of prenatally adopting abandoned frozen embryos. Some Catholic bioethicists had argued that such prenatal adoption is intrinsically evil and can never rightly be practiced, whereas others had concluded that it is not and can rightly be practiced.

The relevant text of Dignitas Personae is the following: “It has...  been proposed, solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction, that there could be a form of ‘prenatal adoption.’ This proposal, praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above (19.4)”; and “All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (no. 19.5).

The Fall 2009 issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Vol. 9, No. 3, Autumn 2009), presents a multi-authored symposium on Dignitas Personae, edited with an excellent introduction and marvellous concluding section on the document’s strengths and weaknesses  by E. Christian Brugger, Senior Fellow in Bioethics.

Two contributions to the Symposium provide opposing interpretations of Dignitas Personae no. 19: Luke Gormally argues that Dignitas Personae in effect condemns such adoption as intrinsically immoral, and John Finnis presents the opposing view. Here I will summarize both and offer personal comments.

Gormally’s “The ‘Various Problems’ Presented by Embryo Adoption (n. 19)”
Gormally begins by emphasizing that the term “intention” used in no. 19 regarding the proposal, worthy in itself, of prenatally adopting frozen embryos, refers to “goal” [i.e., the intended end] and not to the means used to attain that end or goal. Admittedly, the passage does not offer well-defined teaching; however, he argues that its reference to “the various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above” indicates that it would be “quite inappropriate for anyone to recommend, approve, or engage in embryo adoption.” Why does he think that these “problems” support that indication? He argues as follows.

One basic argument Gormally presents is rooted in a passage from Donum Vitae to which Dignitas Personae 19.3 refers. Dignitas Personae 19.3 reads: “The proposal that these embryos could be put at the disposal of infertile couples as a treatment for infertility is not ethically acceptable for the same reasons which make artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood.38” Footnote 38 at the end of this passage refers to Donum Vitae, II.A.1-3, and Gormally uses a passage from II.A.1 that in his judgment articulates the moral principle supporting his claim that the proposal to prenatally adopt frozen and abandoned embryos is intrinsically immoral. The passage follows: “The procreation of a new person . . . must be the fruit and the sign of the mutual self-giving of the spouses, of their love and their fidelity. The fidelity of the spouses in the unity of marriage involves reciprocal respect of their right to become a father and a mother only through each other.”

Gormally acknowledges that there are opposing interpretations of this text from Donum Vitae as well as its definitions of “surrogate motherhood” in Donum Vitae II.A.3 a and b. He thinks that  the interpretation denying that the passage in II.A.1 condemning prenatal adoption is erroneous. He also thinks that the interpretation denying that prenatal adoption is a form of the “surrogate motherhood” described in II.A.3 a and b is erroneous.

He argues that a woman seeking to adopt prenatally a frozen and abandoned embryo as the goal of her behavior chooses an intrinsically immoral means of attaining that goal. Why? Because what makes her to be a mother is the insertion of the frozen embryo into her womb and not her choice to engage in the marital act with her husband. If this is the case, then, Gormally declares, the principle formulated in Donum Vitae II.A.I “provides a clear reason for Dignitas Personae’s teaching that the use of abandoned frozen embryos for fertility treatment is ethically unacceptable. [Moreover] this principle logically applies also to the woman who becomes a mother by inserting into her womb a frozen and abandoned embryo and not by conceiving after engaging in the marital act.”

With respect to Donum Vitae’s teaching about surrogate motherhood and its relevance to “prenatal adoption,” Gormally has us consider a woman who conceives a child naturally but will be unable to carry it to term. She then arranges for the “newly conceived embryo to be transferred to another woman’s womb to save the life of the child.” Gormally maintains that this fulfills Donum Vitae’s first definition of surrogacy (II.A.3 a): “the recipient gestational mother is ‘genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of “donors.’” According to Gormally, “Since this description has to cover an embryo generated from the gametes of both the commissioning genetic parents who may be married, then the only available answer to the question ‘Donors to whom?’ is ‘Donors to the surrogate mother’; what is being ‘donated’ is the embryo.” Thus, he concludes Donum Vitae’s teaching on surrogacy excludes as a form of surrogate motherhood any attempt on the part of the woman to save the life of any genetically alien embryo by nourishing it in her womb with a view to handing the child over to prospective adoptive parents.

We can summarize this fundamental argument against prenatal adoption as follows: The ethical principle formulated in Donum Vitae II.3.1 logically embraces the woman’s choice to become pregnant by having a frozen and abandoned embryo inserted into her womb because she becomes a mother by having a genetically alien embryo inserted into her womb and not by engaging in marital intercourse; moreover, Donum vitae’s definition of surrogate motherhood in II.A.3a logically applies to her.

A second argument Gormally advances is connected to his belief that the authors of Dignitas Personae, confronted by the polarized positions of moralists on the ethics of embryo adoption, “clearly felt unable to offer decisive teaching.” He thinks a major source of this polarization is the “androcentric view” of the marital act characterizing many advocates of embryo adoption. These advocates are simply not sensitive to the character of the woman’s choice in engaging in that act. She recognizes that it is an act of the “generative kind,” and is therefore “choosing inter alia to admit an intromission of impregnating kind and a kind to make her a mother.” He says that the choice to have an abandoned embryo inserted into her womb “is also a choice to admit an intromission of impregnating kind, which in a woman not already the mother of that embryo means of a kind to make her so.” She chooses to admit an intromission of “impregnating and maternity-creating kind in dissociation from the relational context to which such a choice alone belongs. It is a choice subversive of the dispositions required in any woman who chooses to allow herself to be made pregnant (emphasis added). That may be seen to be the underlying rationale for the interpretation of Donum Vitae and Dignitas Personae offered here.”

Finnis’ “Debate over the Interpretation of Dignitas personae’s Teaching on Embryo Adoption”
Finnis begins by saying: “The third of three procedures condemned in Donum Vitae I.6 is ‘constructing artificial uteruses for the human embryo.’ Reflecting on this condemnation will help us discern whether the fourth paragraph of Dignitas Personae n. 19 teaches that embryo adoption is exceptionlessly wrong.” He considers a woman who conceived a child as a result of the marital act but is then diagnosed with a uterine condition making it impossible for her to carry her child to birth. Suppose there is available an artificial womb to which her child could with minimal risk be transferred and safely carried to term or that the child could with minimal risk be transferred to the womb of her best friend and brought to birth. Finnis judges unsound the claim some might make that doing so must be immoral because it is condemned in Donum Vitae I.6 and by the unqualified assertion in II.A.3 of the right to be “carried in the womb . . . and brought up by his own parents.”

Why is this claim unsound? It is so because “The condemnations in Donum Vitae I.5, I.6, and II all have a controlling context: the concern of those parts of Donum Vitae with acts connected with the ‘techniques of human reproduction’ (as expressed in the heading of I.6)—that is, acts considered as taking their place (before or after generation) in some plan to bring a child into being in a way that violates the good of marriage and its act and, even more fundamentally, that violates the child’s equal dignity—the child’s entitlement to be conceived as gift, not product.… So Donum Vitae’s condemnation (in I.6) is of the development and use of artificial uteruses as ancillary to the project of enabling in vitro fertilization to substitute (whether in one case or many) for natural conception (the kind of conception that, when conditions avail, supervenes—as the gift of life—on a marriage act).”

Finnis argues that the mother’s action in the cases hypothetically presented are evidently not actions specified by the choice to engender human life outside the marital act, nor would her best friend be choosing to be a “surrogate” mother. In fact, condemning such actions would conflict with the duty to care for the embryo ‘as far as possible like any other human being’ and would make no sense to the mother in the example or to any reasonable person.”

Finnis acknowledges that the kind of surrogacy involved when the child is transferred to the womb of her best friend to be carried to term raises more problems, ethical and otherwise, than using an artificial uterus. However, he observes, the mother “believes that a refusal of her friend’s benevolent surrogacy—free from every taint of involvement in illicit modes of generation—would be a grave failure to fulfill her motherly duty to her baby. Only compelling reasons could persuade her otherwise.”

Finnis says that some might claim that Dignitas Personae n. 18, in teaching that “cryopreservation is incompatible with respect due to human embryos,” can be used to condemn this procedure insofar as the mother’s unborn baby might have to be cryopreserved after removal from his mother’s womb and prior to his insertion into the artificial womb or womb of her best friend. But this unqualified statement does not, he thinks, constitute an unqualified condemnation of cryopreserving human embryos as “exceptionlessly wrong. Its condemnation is of cryopreservation of embryos produced in vitro,” which is by no means why the mother’s unborn baby is cryopreserved in the situations envisioned. Dignitas Personae n. 18 does not apply to the temporary cryopreservation of an embryo on its way to an artificial uterus or the womb of a best friend.
 
Finnis says that the statement in Dignitas Personae 19 that prenatal adoption for the end of saving the lives of human beings otherwise condemned to die “presents various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above” “surely intends to recall… the ethical principles relevant to Donum Vitae II.A.2–3.” But he has shown that Donum Vitae’s condemnations, properly interpreted contextually, fall far short of condemning exceptionlessly all forms of post-conception gestation outside the womb of the genetic mother or every form of surrogate postconception gestation. “So Dignitas Personae n. 19 offers neither intrinsic reasons nor magisterial teaching sufficient to exclude the benevolent surrogacy envisaged in the second
example above (and not envisaged at all in Dignitas Personae n. 1 9 or in Donum Vitae II.A.3).”

Finnis concludes his essay with an analysis and critique of the arguments advanced by Mary Geach (note that she is Gormally’s wife) to support her claim that adopting frozen and abandoned embryos violates marital chastity. I will not summarize this analysis and critique insofar as I think I have offered a summary of Finnis’ thoughtful and provocative critique of Gormally’s argument that such prenatal adoption is intrinsically evil. Geach’s position has been criticized by many. [1]

Concluding personal observations
We must, first of all, emphasize that all Catholic bioethicists involved in this debate over the prenatal adoption of frozen and abandoned embryos firmly believe in, support, and defend the  principle articulated in Donum Vitae II.A.1 and cited by Gomally as the basis for his argument against prenatal adoption: “The procreation of a new person, whereby the man and the woman collaborate with the power of the Creator, must be the fruit and the sign of the mutual self-giving of the spouses, of their love and their fidelity. The fidelity of the spouses in the unity of marriage involves reciprocal respect of their right to become a father and a mother only through each other.” Gormally and those who agree with him must acknowledge this.

The position of Geach (and after her Gormally) has been, as noted above, challenged.  I think the best critique given of her view is that provided by Christopher Tollefsen. He first summarizes her view as follows: “Geach maintains that both the act of admitting an embryo into one’s womb and the conjugal act can be described as “an act of admission whereby she (the wife) allows a carnal intromission of an impregnating kind.” [2] According to Geach the husband in choosing the conjugal act engages in an act of an impregnating kind and the wife an act of an intromission of an impregnating kind. [3] Tollefson says that the “making and becoming pregnant is itself not part of the biological function of acts apt for generation; for men and women perform those acts, but neither performs an act of making pregnant or becoming pregnant.” [4]  Thus, “the claim that the male makes the female pregnant is, strictly speaking, false. Making her pregnant is not any part of what the male does in the conjugal act, even in one that results in generation. And it is thus not an imitation of the marriage act for a woman to be made pregnant by embryo transfer.” [5] He asks “Who makes the woman pregnant?” Not the man.  But “why should we not say that the embryo itself—him or herself in fact—has made the woman pregnant?….At the very point when the woman….becomes pregnant the activity of the man and the woman has been superceded by the self-directed activity of the new entity, the embryonic human being. The generative causality of the man and woman—the causality effected by the man’s sperm and the woman’s ovum—is at an end precisely because generation is over, and a new being with its biological causality now exists. But it is this existing that ‘makes’ the woman pregnant…If so, then, it would seem that when the woman accepts an embryo into her womb via embryo transfer, she does not imitate her part in the marriage act…It is true that she admits flesh not of her flesh that makes her pregnant, but this is not what she does in the marriage act even when, in consequence of that act, she becomes pregnant.” [6]

The Gormally-Finnis debate over prenatal adoption of frozen and abandoned embryos offers strong arguments taking contradictory positions and offering illuminating comments on Dignitas Personae 19. In my opinion Finnis presents the better, more cogent interpretation both  of Dignitas Personae and of Donum Vitae.


 

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[1] See the following: Peter Ryan, “Our Moral Obligation to the Abandoned Embryo,” in Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life, eds. Thomas Berg, LC, and Edward Furton: (Philadelphia and Thornwood: National Catholic Bioethics Center and the Westchester Institute for Bioethics and the Human Person, 2006), pp. 297-325; E. Christian Brugger, “A Defense by Analogy of Heterologous Embryo Transfer,” in ibid., pp.197-228; William E. May, “The Object of the Acting Woman in Embryo Rescue,” in ibid., pp. 135-164.

[2] See Mary Geach “The female act of allowing an intromission of an impregnating kind,” Human Embryo Adoption: Bioetchnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life, eds. Thomas Berg, L.C., and Edward Furton, Philadelphia and Thornton, NY: National Catholic Bioethics Center and The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person, 2006, p. 261.

[3] Christopher Tollefsen, “Could Human Embryo Transfer Be Intrinsically Immoral?” in The Ethics of Embryo Adoption and the Catholic Tradition: Moral Arguments, Economic Reality and Social Analysis, eds, Sarah-Vaughan Brakman and Darlene Fozard Weaver, Springer, Philosophy & Medicine, Catholic Studies in Bioethics, Vol. 6, 2007, p.88.

[4] Ibid, p. 90.

[5] Ibid, p. 94.

[6] Ibid, p.97.

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