The public case against the artificial creation of human beings
Ryan T. Anderson has a commentary on First Things titled: Reproduction and Public Discourse. He writes:
. . . Benedict XVI recently asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to turn its attention to the ethical challenges that new biotechnologies pose . . .
Benedict’s principles are obviously correct—and yet they point to a problem that serious ethical thinkers, especially Catholic thinkers, have not really faced up to. They have given us good public arguments on embryo destruction and abortion, all the death topics. But they seem not to have given us persuasive public arguments on reproduction and parenthood, all the creation topics . . .
Benedict argued that non-conjugal reproduction such as in vitro fertilization had created “new problems”—the freezing of human embryos, for instance, and the selective abortion of medically implanted embryos, together with pre-implantation diagnosis, embryonic stem-cell research, and attempts at human cloning.
Worth noticing is that his public argument is about the consequences of assisted reproductive technologies, how they result in embryo killing, freezing, and other abuses. The argument never touches on any objection to IVF per se—how the creation of new human beings in this way is itself wrong.