Where's the soul?

I worry much more than I should about whether embryos have souls. That’s to say, I worry about how those folks who believe that at some stage humans are granted a soul by the grace of God make sense of this question.

But as I discovered while reviewing Henry Greely’s book The End of Sex, Father Tadeusz Pacholcyzk – who has a doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and writes for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia – has at least cleared up one thing for me. Whether or not embryos have a soul should, he says, have no bearing on our judgement about the rights and wrongs of using human embryo tissue for research into stem cells, or presumably for research into anything else. He clarifies that Catholic tradition has no unanimous verdict or tradition on the precise moment of ensoulment. However, Saint Augustine, rarely consulted for his knowledge of embryology, “seemed to shift his opinion back and forth during his lifetime between immediate and delayed ensoulment”. No wonder; it’s a tough question. Much, much tougher, indeed, than Augustine could ever have imagined, because of course we can’t expect him to have known that only about 12% of fertilized eggs in vivo will develop beyond three months of pregnancy. We had best assume, then, that ensoulment is delayed until some time after that, for otherwise heaven will be overwhelmingly filled with souls of embryos less than three months old. I don’t think any of the Christian Fathers ever imagined that heaven should be as odd a place as that.

The point, Pacholcyzk says, is irrelevant in any case, because a human embryo at any stage is destined for a soul “and should not be cannibalized for stem cell extraction”. (The use of “cannibalize” to denote dismemberment for spare parts applies, by the way, only to machines. For living organisms, it refers to the eating of one’s own species. But heck, it sounds bad, doesn’t it?) We must assume that the creation of embryos for any other purpose than procreation is also prohibited by Catholic teaching. In fact, Pacholcyzk says, it is even more immoral to destroy an embryo that had not received an immortal soul (although we don’t, remember, know if anyone actually does this, because we don’t know when ensoulment happens) than to destroy an ensouled embryo – worse than murder! – “because the immortal soul is the principle by which that person could come to an eternal destiny with God in heaven”. That person? Yes, an embryo is always a person – or rather, “the privileged sanctuary of one meant to develop as a human person.”

But evidently, the majority of human embryos are not, as Pacholcyzk insists, “meant [by God, one assumes] to develop as a human person” – they don’t get beyond three months. Or has God really made such a hash of human procreation, so that all these embryos destined for personhood keep failing to attain it?

The corollary to all this must be that the Catholic Church disapproves of IVF too, since that generally involves the creation of embryos that are not given the opportunity to grow to personhood. And as the Catholic World Report reminded us in 2012, it does indeed:

“Catholic teaching prohibits in vitro fertilization, maintaining that a child has the right to be conceived in the marital embrace of his parents. Human sexuality has two components, the unitive and procreative; IVF separates these components and makes the procreative its only goal. Pope Paul VI said that there is an “inseparable connection, willed by God, and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning.”

“There are other issues involved. IVF makes the child a commodity produced in a laboratory, and makes doctors, technicians, and even business people part of the conception process. The sperm used is usually obtained by masturbation, which the Church teaches is immoral. The sperm or eggs used may not come from the couple desiring the child; because one of the spouses may be infertile, it may be necessary to use the sperm or eggs from an outsider.”

That phrase, making a child conceived through IVF “a commodity produced in a laboratory”, is one of the most obscene I have ever heard from the church in modern times. God’s love is infinite – but you, Louise Brown (and four million others), are just a commodity produced in a laboratory.

Of course, Catholic countries don’t tend to feel they can be quite this hardline with their citizens, and so they cook up some crude compromise, such as Italy insisting that all embryos created in IVF (a maximum of three) must be implanted. This flouts Catholic teaching, and also flouts the right of people using IVF to the best chance of making it work. Everyone loses.

Actually, there is a form of IVF that the Catholic church will sanction. It is called gamete intra-Fallopian transfer, or (cutely) GIFT. Here’s how I described it in my book Unnatural. The woman’s eggs are collected as in IVF and mixed with sperm in vitro. This mixture is then immediately transferred back to the woman’s Fallopian tubes, so that fertilization can occur inside the body. One claimed benefit of GIFT is that the embryo can begin its earliest development in ‘natural surroundings’ rather than in an ‘artificial environment’. It’s not clear that a developing embryo cares in the slightest about this distinction, and indeed GIFT both is more invasive than standard IVF and makes it impossible to select the embryo of best apparent quality from several prepared in vitro. But it’s OK with the church, provided that the sperm is collected using a condom (a perforated, leaky one, mind) in sexual intercourse and not by masturbation – because everything then seems to be happening in its ‘natural’ place, with just a momentary sleight-of-hand involving a Petri dish. This obsession with the ‘proper’ mechanics, notwithstanding the lengths that are necessary here to achieve it, speaks of a deeply strange attitude towards the relation between sex and procreation, not to mention the bizarre and, I should have thought, highly disrespectful notion of a God who watches as if with clipboard in hand (but ready to avert his eyes at the crucial point) to tick off each step when it happens as it ‘ought’.

Generally I want to find ways to respect what people believe. But the Catholic position on IVF is on a par, in its inhumanity, with its position on condom use. If I sound sarcastic about it, please don’t read that as flippancy. It is fury. If these folks could content themselves with expressing their prejudices as blind faith and dogma, I would find it more palatable than if they tried to justify them with idiotic attempts at rational argument. I’m told that “Father Tad... studied in Rome, where he did advanced studies in theology and in bioethics.” I don’t find a shred of ethical reasoning in his comments on embryo research. It is unreason of the most retrograde kind.