.- Archbishop Hector Aguer of La Plata has criticized in vitro fertilization as a technique that plays with “the lives and deaths of thousands and thousands of people.” Therefore, he continued, “we could call this a new holocaust that is part of the holocaust of abortion.”
On Nov. 6, during his program, “Keys to a Better World,” Archbishop Aguer referred to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine to Robert Edwards, for his efforts to conceive the first child through in vitro fertilization.
“This belated recognition again raises the issue of the judgment that must be made regarding this technique that has spread notably throughout the world,” the archbishop said.
Archbishop Aguer pointed to “the fundamental ambiguity” that the procedure presents. “It would seem that through the manipulation of gametes, as if they were an industrial product, a human being can be manufactured.”
He went on to note that “despite being conceived under such circumstances, the human embryo is still a personal being.” He explained that "it is a well known fact that in order to achieve a birth, a number of embryos are destroyed, and it is very common that only the best ones are chosen and the others thrown away as unusable biological material.”
Archbishop Aguer also pointed out that today there are “thousands and thousands of frozen embryos all over the world” whose fate is unknown and that a multi-million dollar industry has developed from artificial fertilization.
For this reason, he continued, in seeing the Nobel Prize awarded to the creator of in vitro fertilization, we must reflect on “the importance of recognizing the fundamental truths that have to do with the dignity of human life and its sacred nature, from conception to natural death.”
“Bringing about the birth of a child at any cost to satisfy the understandable desire of a couple to have a child must not be done,” he stressed. “This desire must be conformed to objective ethical criteria.”
Catholic teaching is opposed to IVF because the procedure is contrary to the natural order of sexuality. The technique also involves the elimination of human embryos both inside and outside the mother’s womb, which constitutes abortion in each case.
