Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life

By Rev. Thomas V. Berg and Edward J. Furton, editors, 349 pages.

The various authors take on the difficult task of analyzing the moral implications of women adopting frozen embryos that are not their own and carrying them to term as a way to rescue these embryos from “an absurd fate.”

Since the Vatican has not yet given official guidance, we only have previous writings dealing with related issues such as 1987's Donum Vitae from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a document that deals with procreation, but before this current technology was developed.

This is a tough subject, and even a well-read theologian can get discouraged from the following complications:

“Part of the confusion is the effect of separating the procreative from the unitive dimensions of marriage. The whole context of frozen embryos is so divorced from the ordinary, from the understandable, that ordinary moral intuitions are no real guide. Clearly the problem should not have been created in the first place....The context of reproductive technology lacks the sacredness that is a feature of marital love.”