CV NEWS FEED // The President of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, Bishop Michael Burbidge, recently issued a statement explaining the Catholic teaching on in vitro fertilization (IVF), stating that the Church cannot condone procedures that “result in a loss of life at a massive scale.”
“The national conversation in the news about laws related to in vitro fertilization and other technologies creates an opportunity and a necessity to speak about protecting the gift of life itself,” Burbidge, bishop of the Diocese of Arlington, said in the statement. “Each of our lives has immeasurable value from the moment of conception.”
“It is precisely because each person’s life is a unique gift that we cannot condone procedures that violate the right to life or the integrity of the family. Certain practices like IVF do both,” he continued.
Burbidge added that the industry “treats human beings like products or property,” but he emphasized that this “of course does not mean that our brothers and sisters who were conceived by IVF are somehow ‘less than’ anyone else.”
“[IVF] cannot be the answer to the very real cross of fertility challenges,” he said. “In efforts to bring about new life, we cannot turn our face from the many more lives that are cut short and extinguished in the process.”
Instead, Burbidge called for priests and bishops to comfort families suffering from infertility as well as encourage “restorative” treatments that “can help to address the root causes of infertility.”
As CatholicVote reported, debates about the practice of IVF have recently swept across the U.S. following the Alabama Supreme Court’s February 16 ruling, which stated that frozen embryos have the same rights as children under state law.