According to Romney biographer Ronald B. Scott, three of Mitt Romney’s sons have resorted to IVF to create their families. The Republican presidential candidate is opposed to abortion, Plan B contraception and embryonic stem cell research, but has never clarified his views on IVF. ~ NY Times, May 4.
The moral perspective seems to look good here. But all three of the items mentioned above are focused on the life of the individual child. This is good. And the use of IVF seems to be pro-life. However, the life engendered by the technology of IVF by-passes the mutual self giving of the spouses that is the act of imaging the relationality of the divine Persons. The technology of the petri dish has replaced the actual union of husband and wife and now separates the life of the child from the act of love. The child is not the direct result of an act of self-giving love. And, even if we are dealing with rape, the act of rape which is not an act of love but of lust - although formally not an act of love - nevertheless, has as its intrinsic meaning and purpose, willed by the Creator, the act of spousal love.
Consider Donum Vitae A 1 (DSP p. 22): "From the moral point of view a truly responsible procreation vis-a vis the unborn child must be the fruit of marriage.
"For human procreation has specific characteristics by virtue of the personal dignity of the parents and of the children: the procreation of a new person, whereby the man and the woman collaborate with the power of the Creator, must be the fruit and the sign of the mutual self-giving of the spouses of their love and of their fidelity... (T)he procreation of a person must be the fruit and the result of married love. The origin of the human being thus follows from a procreation that is linked to the union, not only biological but also spiritual, of the parents made one by the bond of marriage. Fertilization achieved outside the bodies of the couple remains by this very fact deprived of the meanings and the values which are expressed inthe language of the body and in the uinon of human persons."
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