This bizarre article caught my eye: A father and son in Quebec have sired between themselves 613 children by donating their sperm for use in IVF. Yes, you read that rightly. All those children are related in ways that doesn’t bear pondering. You’d have to go back to Genghis Khan’s industrial-scale harem to find that level of hermetically sealed inbreeding. And in Quebec of all places, which already has a shrinking, if not vanishing, population, and needs more, not less, genetic diversity. The father-son dynamic duo have been banned from donating any more of their genetic material. Bu why at the magic number 613? Why did it take some lethargic government official so long, and after so many children, to do anything?
This Pandora’s box of evil goes back to 2004, when Canada, by the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, legalized artificial reproduction technologies – in vitro fertilization, donation of sperm and ova, artificial insemination, embryo transfer – under then Prime Minister Paul Martin, a Catholic. Many others – including clergy – supported the law, claiming that some law is better than no law.
That was not true then, and not true now. What Pope John Paul does advocate, in Evangelium Vitae, is that a Catholic, or anyone of sound conscience, may vote for a less bad law than one that is manifestly worse. Here are his words, substituting for ‘abortion’ any other crime against life:
A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage of a more restrictive law, aimed at limiting the number of authorized abortions, in place of a more permissive law already passed or ready to be voted on. Such cases are not infrequent…when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.
Such was not the case in 2004. There was no law, restrictive, liberal or otherwise. Thus, the government positively introduced into law, out of thin air, with the support of much of the Church. The bitter fruits of this are now being sown.
Part of the problem is that in Canada it’s illegal to sell one’s sperm or ova. Hence, there is little incentive to donate, at least of a monetary sort. So what happens is that a few zealous individuals are responsible for most of the children conceived by IVF. (Unlike the U.S., where these technologies are largely unregulated, and one may sell one’s genetic material, often at great profit, if one is eugenically desired – but that of course raises other problems).
What motivates such donors in Canada, who must do it for free? A twisted sense of altruism? Maximizing their Darwinian ‘fitness’ by getting as much of their DNA out there as possible? The whole ‘selfish gene’ hypothesis of Richard Dawkins? Sheer vanity? Conquest, and the creepy thought that 613 women are incubating their legions of children, for which these ‘fathers’ did almost no work, except masturbating into a cup?
It’s macabre and mephistophelean, but it’s the children who will bear the brunt, when it dawns on them how they were conceived, that their ‘patrimony’ and genealogy will always and forever be something shameful. Who wants or needs 612 siblings wandering over the Earth, to say nothing of Quebec? And they still don’t know the full health risks IVF children face.
What is more tragic is how many of their tiny unborn siblings who never knew the warmth of a womb had to be ‘sacrificed’ so they could live. That number likely runs into the thousands. For every one child born, eight or so must die.
Yet so many Catholics – along with fellow Christians and any number of other religions – see nothing wrong with IVF, I suppose because it has a sort of ‘pro-life’ veneer, as a ‘solution’ to infertility. Trump is a great supporter, signing an executive order in 2025 to lower costs and increase access. So is JD Vance, a new convert to the Faith, but who may well have needed more time in the catechumenate (oh, to bring back some of the disciplines and practices of the early Church!). The reader likely knows many others who see nothing wrong, and much that is right, with IVF. But beneath that facade, a whole world of evil lurks. Countless children are now brought into the world in a manner God never intended, and countless others are killed, or left in frozen limbo. It’s not their fault, of course, but this has led, and will continue to lead, to nowhere good, and the Magisterium has called for an end to this nefarious practice. Instead, we should seek morally sound solutions to infertility, accepting children as gifts from God to be welcomed into the world through the natural means of procreation, instead of products to be ‘created’ in a laboratory.
For more, peruse the Church’s two instructions, to which we have alluded before: Donum Vitae from 1987 and Dignitatis Personae from 2008. If only more had read and listened, we wouldn’t be where we are, but we need not continue down wide and easy path of the culture of death, but may we choose life, in the way God so intended, and so live to the full.
