The Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life issued a new pastoral framework on March 24 that encourages the development of a program of “pastoral care of human life.” The document comes to us as we celebrate one of the richest gifts of the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II: his 1995 encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae on the gift of human life. There could have been no better day to release that document thirty years ago than on the feast of the Annunciation—the day when we recall our mother Mary’s yes to the invitation of the angel Gabriel to bear God’s Son into the world. Her fiat fulfilled ancient prophecy and transformed the world in an instant. Her generous response launched into the unknown, which she accepted in total confidence.
It’s hard for us to imagine, but in that instant Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity and God’s own Son, became an embryo growing and developing in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. For Christians, understanding that remarkable event in the context of how casually we treat the human embryo today should be at the least sobering. The trajectory of our salvation was initiated in the womb of the Blessed Virgin where Jesus, as an embryo and then fetus, was protected and nourished by her body and blood until his birth into poverty in a manger. The tiny child came into the world, grew, laughed, cried, formed disciples, and fulfilled his purpose as the icon of the Father’s love. He was eventually tortured and killed on the cross in the ultimate sacrifice given for our salvation. This was his life’s trajectory from conception to death. He was Jesus at every moment.
Fast forward roughly twenty centuries to our own country and others that claim to be “developed,” and we can’t even agree that an embryo is a human person. As I write this article, fourteen states have introduced twenty-seven bills that aim to grant human embryos and fetuses the same rights as persons—i.e., these bills are attempting to redefine “personhood” to include all stages of human development from conception on. Strange, isn’t it? What is an embryo if it has no rights as a person? We live in a time when ideologies and our insistence on controlling nature has made us nonsensical.
The dicastery’s new pastoral framework suggests how we can develop strategies to help people understand what should be basic knowledge of human life and the many threats against it: threats like abortion, in vitro fertilization, and other eugenic practices; threats to human life and dignity that we bring upon ourselves; threats like suicide, euthanasia, human trafficking, discrimination against persons with disabilities, and so many more. What the dicastery is suggesting is essentially that dioceses and parishes consult to develop an action plan to address threats to life across the lifespan, similar to what I suggested here.
Humanity has a long history of making a mess of things when it tries to one-up Mother Nature, which is, of course, God.
It’s timely that the anniversary of Evangelium Vitae came almost at the same time the embryo wars are heating up again. There was a kerfuffle around a February 2024 decision of the Alabama Supreme Court that ruled embryos created through IVF are children under the law. In response to the controversy, Donald Trump signaled his support for IVF during the presidential campaign, saying in October he was the “father of IVF” and that the procedure should be made free for women in need. He followed through on that promise this February with an executive order aimed at expanding access to IVF by seeking to lower costs and protect access.
A new legal battle over what an embryo is has now been reported too. In this case, a woman named Honeyhline Heidemann wanted rights to the embryos she and her ex-husband, Jason Heidemann, had engendered through IVF. The judge, Richard Gardiner, stirred some controversy in his ruling by referencing a nineteenth-century law that governed the treatment of enslaved people as property or chattel. He wrote, “As there is no prohibition on the sale of human embryos, they may be valued and sold, and thus may be considered ‘goods or chattels.’” How offensive to Christian ears is that? After initially ruling in favor of Honeyhline Heidemann, he reversed his opinion in favor of Jason Heidemann based on this “goods or chattel” argument from long ago in a very dark time in our country’s history. He didn’t go far enough back: back to a time when humans could simply use reason to understand that the embryo is a person because, well, it is.
What a mess fooling around with nature and manufacturing embryos in a lab creates—but this isn’t an unprecedented case. Venerable Jerome Lejeune was called to the US to testify during a 1989 trial in Maryville, Tennessee; that was the first legal test of the personhood of the human embryo. He wrote a book about his experience titled The Concentration Can. His testimony convinced the judge that embryos were indeed human and could not be destroyed. The case also involved a divorce and dispute over possession of the embryos a couple had engendered through IVF. Just like the recent case, the mother wanted to save the embryos and donate them to a childless couple and the father didn’t want his paternity passed on to strangers. Judge Dale Young ruled in favor of preserving the cryopreserved embryos, calling them “children in vitro”—literally, “children in glass.” Some cringing would be an appropriate response to that designation of human persons. Many today have lost their capacity to cringe.
Pope St. John Paul II warned against in vitro fertilization. He often referenced IVF in the same context as abortion because, in addition to its other grave faults, IVF always involves the killing of human life (Evangelium Vitae 63). Yes, as Catholics we don’t have to wait for a legislature to tell us a human embryo is a human life. A pope shouldn’t have to tell us that, and in doing so, he merely affirms what nature presents as obvious. The personhood of an embryo supersedes the rights of state or federal governments to rule on that fact, other than the obligation—just like a pope—to affirm it.
Humanity has a long history of making a mess of things when it tries to one-up Mother Nature, which is, of course, God. In 1958, Mao Zedong initiated something he called the “Four Pests Campaign” to get rid of rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows, which he thought were consuming too much of the grain raised by farmers. His initiative did a pretty good job of eliminating sparrows, but without these predators, insects ravaged the crops, causing the Great Chinese Famine and the deaths of millions of people. Tinkering with viruses in labs can lead to devastating consequences too, as we know. Damming rivers can destroy agriculture downstream, and introducing foreign species of fish can obliterate ecosystems. Humans function in a natural environment that God established to protect us. That environment includes our families and what the Church calls the “ends” of marriage.
Whether in agriculture, medical/scientific experimentation, or the engendering of human life, there are always consequences to our trying to outdo what God has provided and the means he has set in place to care for his creation. Artificial reproductive technologies like IVF are just another example of interventions with consequences. Custody battles are only one repercussion; I, and others (here, here, and here), have written about various consequences before. Word on Fire just published a new book by Stephanie Gray Connors on the topic as well. I suggest you get a copy and read it.
Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, about what he calls “integral ecology” that represents the interconnectedness of environmental, economic, social, cultural, and ethical issues and how ignoring these issues can undermine the dignity of human persons. Pope St. John Paul II laid the groundwork for this understanding in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, where he called upon us to “safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic ‘human ecology’” of which the “first and fundamental structure” is the family (38, 39).
The embryo wars are just one manifestation of our culture’s violation of human dignity. Thirty years after the publication of Evangelium Vitae, we would do well to read or reread Pope St. John Paul II’s prophetic warnings about the “culture of death” pervading modern society. That “modern society” he was writing to is now thirty years older and certainly no wiser.
Venerable Jerome Lejeune was a man well known for crafting phrases pregnant with truths. He said once that “technology is cumulative, wisdom is not.” I admit to reading the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life’s new document with some skepticism. It all just seemed too obvious and simplistic to me, but I think I may be wrong about that. I grew up in a much different generation than this one. Perhaps we are so far removed now from what to me seems obvious.
Our technological prowess has removed younger generations from a rootedness in eternal truths so evident in nature (see Rom. 1:20). For several years now, we have been manipulating nature to our peril. Manipulating the natural environment is one thing—manipulating human life is on quite another level of horror. If we don’t find our way back to sanity rooted in the truths of nature and our place within it, then we must remember that ultimately Mother Nature will have the last word. I’m afraid it won’t be a pleasant one.