If the woman’s doctors used superovulatory drugs to stimulate the woman’s ovaries, she speculated that the dosage may have been “completely off.”
“It’s very important in the superovulation process to take a moral approach to the problem.”
A doctor must monitor the woman carefully to determine how the drugs are affecting her and her ovaries.
A key question, she said, is how many eggs a woman has developing.
Sr. Mirkes explained the procedure of Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers, an obstetrician/gynecologist and founder of the Pope Paul VI Institute, in the case of a woman undergoing ovarian hyperstimulation.
He tells the woman to avoid intercourse during the fertile phase if ultrasound shows three or more follicles that all look like they are “ripening” and preparing to expel an egg, Sr. Mirkes reported.
“It is not a good thing to conceive more than one baby at a time,” she said. “Even just twins put stress and strain on the mother’s body and the babies’ own development could be compromised.”
She said that whoever gave the Tunisian mother ovary hyperstimulation treatment “wasn’t very ethical because they didn’t follow her.”
Though reports were unclear on which method was used, but Sr. Mirkes doubted IVF was the source of the twelve babies in the pregnancy. It would be a “huge, huge breach of practice” of implanting only a few embryos.
She explained the reasons IVF was unethical, noting that the children were conceived not “within a loving act” but in a lab, a “sterile setting” where the person guiding the process of fertilization doesn’t even know the parties involved.
In such techniques, the husband has engaged in the immoral act of masturbation, while the woman has had her eggs removed, turning the parents into merely “suppliers of genetic material” until the IVF-conceived embryos are transferred back into the woman.
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“Husbands are sometimes invited to attend, but it doesn’t do much for intimacy, certainly,” she told CNA, saying that this process is immoral since children have a right to be conceived in an act of love between prospective parents.
She also noted that in “high order” pregnancies, pregnancies in which there are more than one unborn child, “selective termination” is often used. In this process, a form of abortion, doctors find the fetus that looks “the least developed, the most compromised and probably least likely to make it in the end.”
They then inject sodium chloride into the heart of the developing unborn child until the baby stops moving.
This is “directly destroying an innocent human being in the womb,” she stated.
“You can’t ever kill someone out of necessity. It doesn’t make any moral difference just because you feel it is necessary.
“If the baby dies normally, that’s one thing. But you don’t go and start killing them off to make the pregnancy more manageable.