After nearly 50 years of in vitro fertilization (IVF), there are countless embryos who have been created and frozen in storage. Many of them have effectively been abandoned by their genetic parents. This has prompted the pro-life community to ask what should be done with these embryos, especially considering the worldview understanding that life begins at conception.

This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Dr. Kent Lasnoski, author of the book Human Embryo Adoption, vol. 2, Catholic Arguments For and Against, to discuss the theological implications involved in embryo adoption.

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Family Policy Matters

How Should Christians Think About Embryo Adoption? (with Dr. Kent Lasnoski)

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. It’s been half a century since the first baby was conceived through in vitro fertilization, and today, this issue continues to be one of the most vexing of our culture. There is disagreement even among reasonable, pro-life Christians, and for good reason. There are deep moral and theological issues at play here, especially for those of us who believe that life begins at conception, as countless children are suspended in labs and freezers across the world. Well, today we’re going to jump into that debate. We’re joined by Dr Kent Lasnoski, who has written a new book, Human Embryo Adoption, Volume 2, Catholic Arguments For and Against. In his book, he gathers the best arguments on both sides of the debate to help moral theologians and Christians as they consider the practical questions surrounding IVF. Dr Kent Lasnoski, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

KENT LASNOSKI: It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, so I’m sure you always consider, as you dive into this discussion, that many of the people that are listening to you may have children, grandchildren, neighbors, they themselves, even, may have been conceived through IVF, and many may know or are related to someone who has frozen embryos. So how does this influence the way you think and talk about this topic.

KENT LASNOSKI: First of all, it makes a person sensitive to the way they approach the topic. Because really one of the things that can get in the way of thinking through this or any morally difficult question clearly and objectively is the emotional side of it, right? And the fact of the matter is, there are real people with real hearts and minds that are being impacted here every day. And so if you run roughshod over that, even if you have the best arguments in the world, no one’s going to believe it, because you haven’t been paying attention to the hurt that even the best arguments can make. So where we need to start with is a place of compassion and understanding and saying, like, look, here’s the deal. People are created in God’s image by God. So there’s never a person that shouldn’t exist, right? There’s no person who’s a mistake. There’s no person who shouldn’t be here, or for whom the world would be a better place if they never existed, right? God intentionally created the soul, the immortal soul, of every single person that has ever existed and ever will exist, and we must honor that in any conversation we’re talking about. So if we’re talking about whether IVF is wrong morally, it’s a different conversation from saying the person who is now on the earth because of that action is dis valued. They’re not. That person is not disvalued. That person has a great dignity which we need to respect. And the dignity that person has requires us to talk carefully about things like IVF, because things like IVF may not be equal to the dignity of a person who exists on account of God’s love.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You may have just answered the question that I was going to ask next, and that is, why do you think it makes sense for all of us, whether we’re Catholic or not, to listen to Catholic arguments on this debate?

KENT LASNOSKI: As those of us who are following Christ and trying to live us as disciples by the power of his Spirit active in our lives, we think, Okay, well, how would Jesus answer this question? One of the ways that we, particularly as Catholics, approach that is by looking at natural law, right? We think of it as God’s first book, his second and greatest book, right, is Scripture, divinely revealed. It’s Christ Himself the fullness of Revelation. But at the same time, God shows us his will by showing us the way the world works according to His providence. And so, we can look to that natural law to see God has built in to the way the world works that conception happens when a man and a woman give themselves as a gift to each other in the marital act, and then God gives a gift to them and to the world in the form of a child. And that a child could never be a commodity and never be a product made in a factory or made by any scientific projects, that a human only comes from the gift of spouses to each other when God sits in and makes the gift with them. So, we get that from natural law, and not just from Scripture. And that’s one of the powers, I think, of bringing in sort of the Catholic side of it.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: This specific book title references embryo adoption, which I think is a little bit different, basically, than just talking about IVF. So, why did you feel like you needed a whole volume, Volume Two, on embryo adoption?

KENT LASNOSKI: The question of embryo adoption is different from the question of IVF because, as you already mentioned, there’s millions of children that are languishing in freezers, right? They’re basically slaves, because they’re sitting there making money for IVF clinics, and people are paying to keep them in this frozen state, and they have no agency, no ability to develop. They’re not living a life that’s equal to the dignity of their creation in the image of God. And so, we have a crisis. We have a crisis, right? What do we do about this injustice? And as people who are pro-life, we’ve witnessed against things like abortion. But what do we do? Are we consistent? What are we doing about the fact that these children are frozen and no one’s helping them. No one’s giving them food, shelter, and helping them develop and follow Christ themselves. So, we have a crisis in our world right now, and it’s not just the crisis of whether or not IVF is good. It’s the crisis of, well, what do we do with these millions of people that are slaves in freezers. So, we need to think about it. We need to think about it carefully. And there’s been a number of books out there. This one is actually a compilation of the best authors. We’ve taken together a number of authors on this field to give arguments for and against in a kind of dialog format. So, with respect to each of the ways you can think about it, we have one author in favor and another author against, thinking about it in the same argumentative mode. It’s a really great way of approaching the problem, and that’s what we’ve tried to do here.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, well, can you give us an example?

KENT LASNOSKI: To be clear, embryo adoption is where you would say, All right, well, let’s rescue a frozen person, and let’s insert that frozen person into the womb of a woman, and she can raise that child, or she can give that child for adoption, if she doesn’t want to raise the child herself, but either way, she’s rescuing the child. So that’s the basic premise that we’re talking about.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS; Okay, so let me stop you there. So, you’re talking about giving those embryos life and not necessarily keeping the child, but just giving them life and maybe putting them up for adoption. Now, that’s interesting.

KENT LASNOSKI: Yeah, I’m saying that people talk about that. I would never recommend that. No, I think that’s wrong.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, good.

KENT LASNOSKI: My position on it would be that you would only have a married couple who is looking to raise the child as their own. And that would be, those would be two preconditions on which you would need to even consider this being correct. But the fact of the matter is that some people talk about it in terms of a surrogacy, right? Where you gestate the child and then someone else adopts them. Now I think that’s clearly wrong, but there are folks who don’t. So, one of the arguments that you’re going to hear is like, let’s look at Matthew 25 right? Let’s talk about sheep and goats, right? And Jesus says, If you gave me to drink, if you sheltered me when I was homeless, if you called me when I was naked, if you visited me and I was in prison, right, you will be brought into My Kingdom. And so, folks say, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing with embryo adoption. We’re finding the imprisoned child who’s naked and hungry and thirsty, and we’re giving them a home, and in fact, the woman’s uterus, the woman’s womb, becomes the home and the shelter and the food for that child who’s raised them in love, right? They say that they’re the good Samaritan who’s finding this child on the side of the road, discarded in a freezer somewhere, and they’re taking him to the hospital of their own womb and their own family and raising him up. So, there’s one side of that sees this as a work of mercy, right? And a huge work of mercy, because Jesus himself said in Luke, I’ve come to set captives free. And what are these frozen embryos, if nothing, but captives, right? To the consumer mentality of our world. So that’s one side, the other side of common arguments can say, no, look, this is not a work of mercy. This is, in fact, an illegitimate, technological adultery. Okay? What’s happening here is a misuse of the procreative faculty to bring about a pregnancy in a way that is not from the gift of marriage, and no matter how much you clothe it in your work of mercy language, it will never be anything except technological adultery. And so that’s one approach to it is through the idea of works of mercy.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, do you come to any conclusions in your book?

KENT LASNOSKI: We really wrote this book to be of service of the authoritative, magisterial teaching of the Church, so that all of the bishops of the Catholic Church teaching together in their apostolic authority, and especially under the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, will eventually come to discern the truth about this issue and definitively teach on it, we hope. But there has been no such definitive, magisterial teaching in the tradition of the church yet. And so that’s why books like this are so helpful, is because we lay it all out there and best arguments on both sides, and hopefully the church, in her wisdom, will lay down something with great clarity

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: When you’re looking at this, though, you as a person who studied this a lot, do you see some pretty clear guiding principles that should help us to come to some kind of a policy on this?

KENT LASNOSKI: Yeah, it seems to me that the guiding principles would be, first and foremost, the dignity of the person right. The dignity of the person here being, am I treating this person in any way like a commodity, or am I always treating the person, the frozen person, for example, as a gift? Okay? And another way of thinking about that is just to mention something called the personalistic norm. And the personalist norm is something that Christ really lays out for us with his own life and teaches. And it’s this, that a person can never be reduced to a means, but is always an end in themselves. So, I could never use a person as a tool to get to some other means. Even if that’s like my own satisfaction of having a child, right? I couldn’t think of the child as somehow being for me in that way, because that would be to reduce them to an instrument. And people are always ends in themselves that God has created to be his images in the world. So, dignity of the person number one, and I think tied with that is just the basic question, are we following Christ and glorifying God by this action, or are we trying to play God in a way that we’re not supposed to imitate him, right? Are we taking, are we dominating nature versus having the proper dominion over nature? So imitating, are we properly glorifying God and following Christ? Are we following the dignity of the person? And then finally, I would say the centrality of the Marriage Act. So, if there’s anything in a couple’s life that stands in for the marriage act on the way to procreation, the Christian tradition should say that that’s wrong, right? Because, again, God indicates that procreation comes from the gift of a man and woman to themselves, and God then gives a gift of a child. But not that we could put things in there that stand in the place of the appropriative act. So those would be important principles I would go with: dignity of the person, following Christ, centrality of the Marriage Act.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Of course, the North Carolina Family Policy Council is a public policy, statewide in North Carolina, entity. Do we need to wait for people, you know, these moral leaders, religious leaders, to come up with their solutions to this, or their opinions on this before we move on the public policy front? Are there some ways that we can regulate this that might be good to do in the meantime?

KENT LASNOSKI: Yes, there’s so much we can do on this, right, because if frozen embryo adoption is a good thing, we need to change the laws that are out there right now. If it’s a bad thing, we need to change the laws that are out there right now. So, either way, however a person decides on this issue, however the church ends up teaching, the Catholic Church ends up teaching on this issue, we need changes now at the policy level. And so, one of those policy level changes, I would say, is we should really recognize all persons pre born, or even those not in the womb, but who still are persons, right, those in freezers, as requiring equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, right? Everybody has equal protection under the law. It doesn’t matter how far along you are in development or not. So, I think states that are moving in that direction, policy wise, are doing a good thing. We even, and again, here’s another policy change, even if, regardless of what we think about whether embryo adoption is ultimately good or bad, we need to write laws that prevent further freezing of human persons. Right? We need to convince our legislators that it is an injustice to a human person to be frozen in status indefinitely, and that there’s nothing therapeutic about that. We need to stop that injustice immediately.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Well, we are about out of time. Before we go, I think people can certainly Google and find the book Human Embryo Adoption, Volume Two, Catholic Arguments For and Against. But how can we follow your work and learn more about the kinds of things that you’re doing?

KENT LASNOSKI: What I’m currently doing, you can look up San Damiano college for the trades. We are starting a new school in the Midwest that is trying to recover the dignity of work and integrate it with the whole of life after a kingdom following Christ. So that’s my current project right now, on the non-academic side. But on the academic side, you could check out some of my other work in marriage. My wife and I just put together a book on married saints and following Christ as a couple. 30 Days With the Married Saints. You might find that enjoyable as well.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Well, thank you so much. Dr. Kent Lasnoski, thanks for joining us today on Family Policy Matters.

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