SENIOR HOLY See and Catholic Church figures reacted negatively this week to the awarding of a Nobel Prize for medicine to Cambridge-based researcher Robert Edwards, the pioneer of the in-vitro fertilisation process.
Although church critics acknowledged that Prof Roberts had opened a “new chapter” in the whole field of human reproduction, many commentators expressed reservations about the “ambiguous ethical” implications of his work. “I find this award very perplexing,” said Msgr Ignacio Carrasco De Paula, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life. “Robert Edwards has the merit of having opened a new chapter in the field of assisted pregnancies but he remains a controversial figure . . . whose in-vitro fertilisation technique has opened up all sorts of dangerous scenarios such as the ‘marketing’ of donor eggs, the freezing of embryos and the banalisation of motherhood and fatherhood, techniques and practices that are morally unacceptable for the church.”
Msgr Carrasco de Paula said that because of the new Nobel Prize winner’s medical techniques “thousands of embryos will be abandoned to die” while the whole area of assisted pregnancies has become one of “confusion . . . with babies being born to grandmothers and surrogate mothers”.
Msgr Carrasco de Paula, who is the Vatican’s senior spokesman on bioethics, also suggested that the award raised a number of questions, in particular pointing out that his research did not treat the underlying problem of infertility.
Other Catholic voices were even more outspoken. Jacques Suaudeau, a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said that in-vitro fertilisation exceeded “every ethical limit”, while the Association for Science and Life argued that a child can never be “just a product”.
The Vatican remains opposed to IVF because it involves separating conception from the “conjugal act” (sexual intercourse between husband and wife), while the process can result in the destruction of embryos. Church teaching holds that human life begins at conception, arguing that a foetus is entitled to the respect and dignity due to a living person.