US Bishop Burbidge Warns of the Dangers of IVF which "both creates life and destroys life"


Bishop Michael Burbidge, former USCCB Pro-life chairman, of Arlington, Virginia, on January 22nd, issued a pastoral letter urged Catholic families to offer a “heroic witness” to love by rejecting the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Following church teachings he called the practice “contrary to justice [and] replete with moral difficulties.”

The Christian Family, In Vitro Fertilization, and Heroic Witness to True Love
Key Excerpts from A Pastoral Letter by Most Rev. Michael F. Burbidge
January 2025
“Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.” 1 John 3:18
Introduction

God, the creator of all that we know and can know, is also the loving author of the life of every human person. At all times and in all places, with every breath which we breathe, God wills our true good and our life in abundance. As part of his “plan of sheer goodness”[1] for the human family, God calls us to strive, by his grace, to order ourselves and our lives by the standard of true love that makes authentic relationships, and in a particular way authentic family life, possible.

Saint Thomas Aquinas described love as willing the good of the other, and it is this sort of love which the Church proclaims as the love necessary for those who wish to be happy now and forever. Authentic love means making a total gift of self, for the true good of one another, and it is for this reason that love means the rejection of any action that would degrade, instrumentalize, or otherwise wrong another.
Fertility and in vitro fertilization (IVF) are incredibly sensitive topics and deserve to be treated with a spirit of accompaniment, compassion, and understanding. It is important that we proceed with care. Whether or not we are aware of it, we know or encounter others who have experienced fertility challenges or whose lives have been affected by IVF in some way. I hope to provide you with pastoral information for your reflection and strongly encourage you to consider this letter in its entirety.
The Natural Desire for Family
As priest and bishop, I have heard consistently of the heartache experienced by so many relating to the desire for family. Pope Paul VI prophetically observed in Humanae Vitae[2] that the modern world presents a host of apparent solutions to the challenges of human relationships and sexuality and the drama of family formation. In our time, I have observed with pastoral concern the growing acceptance of IVF as an apparent solution to the heartache of infertility. More darkly, I have also observed the growing demand for IVF as an instrumental means to procure a child through surrogacy outside the context of marriage and family life or even to create a child eugenically with specifically desired characteristics while eliminating other children in the process.
I recognize that what the Church teaches about IVF represents a “hard saying” (cf. Jn. 6:60) that is convenient for many to ignore, and that many Catholics and others of goodwill may have never encountered the Church’s teaching on this issue. According to a recent Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans shared their belief that the use of IVF is morally acceptable, with 49 percent stating that they believe it is morally acceptable to destroy embryonic human persons created through IVF procedures.[3] Even 65 percent of American Catholics view IVF access as a good, according to a recent Pew survey.[4]
It is a natural longing of married couples to have a child who is the living expression of their love. Sacred Scripture often confirms this common experience of humanity, just as it also witnesses to the great suffering experienced by couples who cannot have children. Today, and for a variety of reasons, it seems as if an extraordinary number of couples experience difficulties with fertility and procreation, often due to chronic conditions like endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, or oligospermia. The Church encourages and promotes all life-giving and restorative fertility treatments, approaches like NaProTechnology, that address and resolve underlying causes of infertility.[5]
God calls us as Christians to accompany one another particularly in seasons of heartache and uncertainty, and through faithfulness and patience always to remain open to God’s miraculous and often mysterious working in the lives of all his children.[6] In the Diocese of Arlington, we accompany those experiencing infertility and pray novenas that God will pour out his grace upon their hearts to make known the great depths of his love and unique plan for their marriage and to encourage us all to grow in our faith as brothers and sisters in one Christian family.
Nevertheless, even after many years of trying to conceive and availing themselves of restorative fertility treatments, some couples still find themselves unable to conceive and then choose to adopt a child. Still others make their marriage life-giving by way of spiritual motherhood and fatherhood in their communities and daily lives.
The Allure and Cost of In Vitro Fertilization
Since 1978, medical science has offered the possibility of conceiving a child by way of IVF.[7] Since that time, IVF has led to the birth of more than 12 million children.[8] The emergence of IVF represented a revolution in medicine that shifted the focus of many physicians from addressing the causes underlying infertility to instead embracing artificial and costly technological approaches that have the effect of displacing the central role of marital love in the procreative process. Unfortunately, and despite the good intentions and aspirations of many married couples, IVF is contrary to justice and remains replete with moral difficulties. The Catholic Church first articulated its teaching against IVF in 1987 with the document Donum vitae.[9] The Church affirms the truth that every child is a gift from God, regardless of the circumstances of their conception, even while the Church’s teachings against IVF have remained constant and have been confirmed by the experience of the intervening years.
The allure of IVF lies in its ability to bring about new life and to do so in a way that addresses the desire of those who wish to have children. Simply put, IVF involves the sex cells of a man and woman being brought together in a clinical setting with the hope of engendering embryonic children, some of whom are then transferred to the uterus of the woman. A great moral injustice of IVF is that many of the embryonic children brought about by the process will either be discarded, having been deemed undesirable, or frozen, having been deemed desirable but unnecessary.[10] As practiced, IVF both creates life and destroys life. The most obvious moral difficulty of IVF, that despite giving rise to new life it also destroys many others, is a reality knowable by human reason. For every one of the more than 12 million children born by means of IVF since 1978, there are many tens of millions more missing brothers and sisters who have been either deliberately destroyed, experimented upon, or frozen in liquid nitrogen and denied their natural right to the fullness of their development.[11] Every successful IVF procedure results in a living child with many missing siblings.
God, by his gift of freedom to the human family, allows human action even of the kind that harms. God is constantly bringing forth good from evil and morally difficult circumstances. God authors and blesses the life of every child born of IVF even as he wills the true good and thriving of all persons. In Donum vitae, the Church observes: “Human embryos obtained in vitro are human beings and subjects with rights: their dignity and right to life must be respected from the first moment of their existence.”[12] All children conceived and born through IVF possess inalienable human dignity. Indeed, their innate dignity is the reason for the Church’s opposition to their being instrumentalized and made into objects by means of IVF, which eugenically selects some to live and others to die.
All the while, the Church reminds the faithful and all people of goodwill that IVF would remain unjust and morally wrong even if no embryonic children were destroyed or discarded. Although IVF and similar procedures are commonly described as “assisted reproductive technologies,” the Church observes that such procedures in fact replace rather than assist the loving self-gift of spouses manifest in procreative and unitive marital love. In this way, the natural and loving embrace of man and woman expressed in marital love is effectively replaced by a laboratory procedure made possible by the subjugation of man and woman to a technological process. Pope Francis has frequently emphasized the risks to humanity of such a “technocratic paradigm,”[13] warning for instance that “technology represents a form of order in social relations and an arrangement of power.”[14] IVF subverts human dignity by reducing human persons—man, woman, and child alike—into objects of a technical process that threatens what the Holy Father has described as “the human being in his or her irreducible specificity.”[15]
I ask all people of faith and goodwill to pray for those married couples experiencing infertility, for the efficacy of life-affirming fertility care, for an openness to God’s love and an ever-deeper experience of the virtues, and for the grace to accept whatever God’s will may be. The threats posed by IVF to human dignity and human rights are sometimes very obvious and at other times quite subtle, but nevertheless knowable to all and of particular concern for those of faith. I ask all people of goodwill to engage in greater thoughtful and rational reflection on the costs associated with the IVF industry, which are evident by human reason. Finally, I ask elected officials to come together to work toward the highest good possible to ensure that law is ordered to the good of all human persons and, particularly, the good of the family.
PRAYER: Good and gracious God,
You are the creator of all life and the source of all goodness. Grant that we may cherish the gift of human life, the fruit of the intimate and precious marital love of man and woman.
May we, who seek union with you through the creative act of parenthood, open our hearts to your perfect will. May we surrender our lives to your merciful heart, which loves us with an unfathomable love. Wherever you lead us, may we continue to proclaim your love at daybreak and your faithfulness at night. We ask all these things through the intercession of Mary and Joseph and Christ our Lord.

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