I-14: Assisted Reproduction and Religion What Consideration Should Be and Should Not Be Relevant,

Several important issues are pertinent to an ethical discussion of the new technology today grouped under the name Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART). This is a moral imperative because each of us must decide what is to be considered ethically acceptable in assisted reproduction. Reflecting on the ethical dimension of ‘creating’ a new human life can play a major role in ensuring that in each country and community ART is applied in a way respectful of the rights of everyone concerned, including society at large. This approach, rather than create obstacles, will contribute to the spread of ART all over the world. In the final analysis ethical discussions will help shape guidelines and laws regulating these practices. The first fundamental ethical point goes to the core of the new technology and deals with the permissibility of separating the creation of new human life from the conjugal act. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches believe that absolute respect must be granted to human life from fertilization and that a new human life must begin only through natural means. This negative position is not shared by Islamic and Jewish theologians and, even within the Christian world, two counter arguments have been proposed: one stresses that humans have, throughout history, engaged in modifying evolution and, in the field of medicine, in changing the natural course of biological events. If all these actions are not only to be permitted but encouraged, then there should be no reason why the Creator would place one and only one limit to human ingenuity: help in conceiving a new human being. The second contends that a couple should have a right to achieve the legitimate goal of having a child even if this means resorting to a partly external act. Seeking the help of professionals should therefore be perfectly ethical and – even if conception occurs outside the woman’s body – this happens because the spouses ask for help in fulfilling the scope of their conjugal act. One major consequence stems from the position of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches: Any new human being must be treated as a human person from the moment of conception and therefore no embryo should be ‘wilfully’ lost, because a fertilised ovum – if undisturbed – has the potential of becoming a human person and, as such, must be fully protected. Calls for granting the embryo a special status because of its potentiality have been made also in a non-religious context, such as by the minority position in the Warnock Committee in the UK, or by the Australian Senate. Today, many national legislations recognise that human embryos should be given some protection under the law, although countries were voluntary abortion is legal, subordinate such rights to a decision by the mother. Western secular philosophers, not only do not accept the position calling for absolute respect of early human embryos; they actively oppose it providing a number of objections to the concept that the fertilised ovum is to be considered a person. Early human embryos lack individuality and can develop into more than one person; if a fertilised ovum is already a human person, then even in Abstracts of the 12th Royan International Congress on Reproductive Biomedicine 1 1 International Journal of Fertility & Sterility (IJFS), Vol 5, Suppl 1, Summer 2011 the presence of major abnormalities – when no embryo at all is formed – we have a human person; ‘personifying’ early human embryos means accepting that countless human beings never had even the slightest chance to express their potential, which is hardly plausible and looks like an absurdity. In other words, the demise of the un-implanted embryo would be analogous to the loss of numerous embryos wasted in the normal in vivo attempts to generate a child.