Are contraception and IVF leading us to "radical eugenics"?

In the debate over IVF (in vitro fertilization), we hear the remark “Contraception and IVF are two sides of the same coin.”  What does this mean? It means that both contraception and IVF separate procreation from the marriage act. The marriage act has two essential qualities: the unitive (love giving, bonding), and the procreative (life giving). Contraception --- intercourse while using some physical or chemical means to prevent conception --- separates the unitive from the procreative, while IVF --- fertilizing an egg in a laboratory --- separates the procreative from the unitive. One is sex without babies; the other is babies without sex.

Early advocates of abortion (see the article Contraception, by Thierry Dejond, S.J.), saw that contraception “…did violence to the Christian ethic, which considers the body a gift from God,” and promoted it, believing it would lead to “a revision of the meaning of life in a materialistic direction.”  This meant that people would begin to believe that they “owned” their bodies, and could use them as they pleased. This would undermine the Christian belief that we are stewards of our bodies. To quote St. Paul (1Cor 6:13-20): “You are not your own. You have been purchased, and at a price! So glorify God in your body.”

Pope Paul VI, in the encyclical Humane Vitae, confirmed this, writing “…to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also… he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.”

He then warns, “…careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power (artificial birth control) passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? …they may even impose their use on everyone.” In 1987, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that “The human being must be respected—as a person—from the very first instant of his existence.” He warned that IVF “can lead to a system of radical eugenics,” and in 2002 wrote that “God will take action… against the attempt to demean mankind by the production of slave beings.”

We should not dismiss his warning about “radical eugenics”! It has been part of the artificial birth control movement from the beginning. In 1920, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote “Birth control… is… the process of weeding out the unfit.” A headline in the January 31, 1922 New York Times reads, “Mrs. Sanger Says Superman is the Aim of Birth Control.” In the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, Supreme Court Justice Holmes wrote, “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.” In 1934, Margaret Sanger proposed that parenthood should require a permit. In 1969, Planned Parenthood’s president, Alan Guttmacher (previously vice-president of the American Eugenics Society), said “Each country will have to decide its own form of coercion.”

More recently, Peter Singer, who taught bioethics at Princeton from 1999 to 2023, said that he does not think “that the fact that an embryo is a living human being is sufficient to show that it is wrong to kill it.” He supports infanticide for severely disabled newborn infants because they aren’t “persons.”

One would think that unborn human beings would be protected under the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which say that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” But no, the Supreme Court, in both their Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson rulings, avoided finding that an unborn human being is a person. No matter that when you look up “person” in the dictionary, the first definition is “human being.” This leaves the door wide open for technicians to experiment on human embryos, and free to create “spare part humans,” “supermen,” human/animal chimeras, or “slave beings.”

In the midst of this, Fr. John Hardon recommends supernatural hope, and trust in God’s providence. This means living joyful, holy lives, and praying, especially before the Eucharist, for the conversion of our nation. The Church’s teachings on conception respect human dignity and the sacred character of marriage and life. It’s imperative that we charitably impart these teachings, because they are the truth, and the Truth is a person, and the Truth will set us free.

Have a blessed New Year. Viva Christo Rey!

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