Infertile Couples Must Make Own Decision, Cardinal Says

Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin said this week that married couples seeking to have a baby “must make their own decision” about whether to use birth technologies the Vatican opposes, such as in vitro fertilization.

Bernardin, head of the American Catholic bishops’ Pro-Life Committee and of one of the nation’s most important archdioceses, endorsed the Vatican’s opposition to most scientific and laboratory interventions in reproduction--a position promulgated in March.

But in a speech to student physicians at the University of Chicago Medical Center, the cardinal said non-Catholics and Catholics alike have the right to inform themselves fully on the moral questions of such interventions and then decide.

Bernardin is the first senior U.S. Catholic clergyman to address formally the issues raised by the controversial “instruction” issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican.

The cardinal firmly embraced the Vatican’s views, but expressed sympathy and respect for couples who reject them and seek special help to have children.

“I have heard the pain of loving couples, Catholic and non-Catholic, who desperately want the gift of a child,” he told a forum sponsored by the university’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

“My heart reaches out to them. Theirs is a difficult burden and I share their pain. We must offer them love, support and understanding. And in the end, after prayerful and conscientious reflection on this teaching, they must make their own decision.”

The cardinal’s position is significantly different from that of the Vatican’s instruction, which calls “the act of conjugal love” the only approved method of procreation.

Bernardin celebrated as “a noble and worthy venture” scientific efforts to aid the infertile. But, he told the future physicians, “We are not God. . . . All that scientific method is capable of doing is not necessarily worth doing. In fact, it might be something that should not be done.”

The cardinal, a moderate in the wide-ranging debate between conservative and liberal American Catholics, said the instruction’s intent is not to oppose the scientific search for cures for genetic defects.

Rather, he said, the pronouncement is aimed at ensuring that “in pursuit of these goods, a greater good--the inviolability of life--is not lost.”

Bernardin said he agreed with the Vatican condemnation of “surrogate parenthood, artificial donor insemination,” cloning and other laboratory parenthood techniques.

The instruction opposes them “not because it is opposed to the generation of life or to scientific knowledge and application, but because it seeks to protect what it sees as an essential connection between the creation of life and faithful, committed marital intimacy,” the archbishop said.

Bernardin said science must accept moral limits in the laboratory so that weak or unsuitable embryos are not sacrificed to ensure the survival of “a ‘perfect’ child.”

“Could it be that we are tampering with something so fundamentally human that we are endangering the quality of future life?” he asked.