Virginia bishop denounces ‘unjust and morally wrong’ in vitro fertilization

(LifeSiteNews) — In vitro fertilization (IVF) is “unjust and morally wrong” and promotes eugenics, according to Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge.

The Virginia prelate recently released a pastoral letter titled ‘The Christian Family, In Vitro Fertilization, and Heroic Witness to True Love.”

Bishop Burbidge noted that infertility is a difficult topic and urges his flock to “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,” the bishop wrote in his Jan. 22 letter.

He shares his “pastoral concern” with “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,” Bishop Burbidge wrote.

He noted that the Church “promotes all life-giving and restorative fertility treatments” as a means to address infertility. For those who cannot conceive, they may “make their marriage life-giving by way of spiritual motherhood and fatherhood in their communities and daily lives.”

The bishop affirmed that every child, no matter the circumstances of his or her birth, has human dignity. That being said, IVF attacks the dignity of the human child. “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,” the pastoral letter stated.

The Church, as the prelate wrote, officially condemned IVF in 1987 in Donum vitae by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later Pope Benedict XVI.

The bishop addressed the injustice of the number of babies destroyed through IVF while affirming it “would remain unjust and morally wrong even if no embryonic children were destroyed or discarded.”

He wrote:

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. 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. Every successful IVF procedure results in a living child with many missing siblings.

One analysis found that between one million to two million babies are killed per year through the IVF process; at least half of those two million are intentionally killed by being discarded.

The bishop also criticized attempts to create a federal right to in vitro fertilization. Both parties have tried to push for a federal right in some form or another. As a candidate in 2024, President Donald Trump pledged to make insurance companies or the federal government pay for IVF. “Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Trump said in August 2024, repeating the false idea that the procedure simply creates more babies while ignoring the harmful effects. In fact, a LifeSiteNews analysis found Trump’s plan could directly kill 2.4 million babies, more than those killed annually through abortion.

On the legislative side, normally conservative Senators Ted Cruz and Katie Britt introduced legislation that would federally mandate the procedures by cutting off Medicaid funding to states that prohibit the embryo-destroying practice, as LifeSiteNews reported in May. Democrats in the Senate also pushed a failed bill to create a nationwide “right” to IVF.

Bishop Burbidge wrote:

In a misguided attempt to respond to challenges surrounding marriage, family formation, falling birth rates, and fertility, elected officials are rushing to support an IVF industry that kills or freezes hundreds of thousands of embryonic children every year and facilitates the exploitative practice of surrogacy. Some even claim that mandating or promoting IVF is pro-life because the process may produce children, but this ignores the moral injustices at the core of the IVF process and the fatal consequences for so many of the embryonic children brought about through that process.

These proposals are a “grave moral injustice” and would be “an illegitimate handing over to Caesar the things of God.”

“Any federal IVF mandate would insert the state into the very heart of the home and gradually bring about the false sense that the state and those holding power, now effectively the sponsors of human persons even prior to conception, can and should direct the lives of those their power has brought about,” he warned. “In this way, the prospect of a federal IVF mandate represents a grave threat not only to human rights, but to the future liberty of a free people.”

The prelate instead called on public officials to stop subsidizing contraception and instead promote families, calling it “simply wrong” to promote sterility while not supporting “restorative fertility treatments” and “pregnancy and childbirth.”

“The Church, as it has in so many other arenas of political life, stands prepared to proclaim the dignity of all human persons and to act peacefully to combat any national IVF mandate while encouraging life-affirming fertility and procreative care.”