Church offers morally acceptable options for infertile couples

By Nancy Frazier O’Brien
WASHINGTON (CNS) — At least 15 percent of U.S. women experience fertility-related problems sometime during their reproductive years. And Catholic women are no exception.
Although the growing field of assisted reproductive technology offers many options for those who have no moral qualms about in vitro fertilization or other methods that bring about reproduction outside the marital act, there may seem to be limited options for those who want to follow Catholic teaching.

Not so, say staff members at the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction in Omaha, Neb., and its Center for NaPro Ethics.

The institute’s founder and director, Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers, has developed the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, a natural method of family planning and monitoring gynecological health, and a comprehensive system of women’s health called natural procreative technology, or NaPro technology for short.

Through its Omaha headquarters and more than 150 satellite offices in the U.S. and abroad, physicians and other practitioners of FertilityCare offer reproductive services and obstetric and gynecological medicine that conform to Catholic teaching on marriage and responsible parenthood.

Sister Renee Mirkes, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity and director of the institute’s Center for NaPro Ethics, counsels hundreds of infertile couples each year about moral ways to conceive their own biological baby.

“Typically, infertile couples think that their only options are those that are morally suspect: high-tech reproductive technologies such as insemination, in vitro fertilization or ICSI” — intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in which sperm is injected directly into a woman’s egg, she said. “I’m so pleased to be able to tell them that this just isn’t true.”

NaPro technology, developed after almost 30 years of clinical research, is at the heart of the institute’s efforts to help infertile couples conceive their own biological child and carry the pregnancy to term. But before any diagnostic work can begin, the couple must learn NaPro tracking and keep records on two months of “their” menstrual cycle.

“We deal always with couples, and so we talk about ‘their’ cycle,” Sister Renee said. “The husband may be fertile all the time, but really the man is only fertile when the woman is fertile.”

Subsequent medical and surgical interventions build on what is revealed in these monthly menstrual and ovulatory records.

Sometimes the fertility problem is solved just by a couple becoming more aware, through NaPro tracking, of “the status of their fertility every day,” Sister Renee said. By cooperating with nature and timing their lovemaking to their fertile days, the couple might become pregnant.

For others, a particular pattern in the two months of records that they bring to the institute’s “full-service” headquarters in Omaha can help Hilgers and the other physicians pinpoint and treat the problem. It might be endometriosis (in which the tissue that lines the uterus grows outside the uterus), pelvic adhesions, obstructions of the fallopian tubes, hormonal dysfunctions, ovulation-related problems, previous chlamydia infections, polycystic ovarian disease or hypothalamic amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation due to anorexia, stress or excessive exercise)– or some combinations of those problems.

In the most serious cases, Hilgers performs reconstructive pelvic microsurgery and laser surgery, Sister Renee said.

“The critical tandem hallmark of NaPro infertility interventions is (the system’s) moral goodness and medical effectiveness,” she added. “All NaPro interventions assist rather than replace the couple’s act of intercourse so the act of union can achieve its natural end, pregnancy.”

Dr. John Bruchalski, who runs the Tepeyac Family Center in Fairfax, Va., calls in vitro fertilization and related biotechnologies such as embryo research and cloning “profoundly anti-woman.”

“Questionably safe drugs, a poorly regulated industry and lack of long-term research all place women’s and children’s lives in jeopardy,” he wrote in an article for the U.S. bishops’ 2004-05 Respect Life program.

Bruchalski, whose center provides obstetrical and gynecological services in line with Catholic teaching, was not available for an interview by Catholic News Service because of illness.

The “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” approved by the U.S. bishops to provide guidance to Catholic health facilities, notes that the church opposes any infertility treatments that are “contrary to the covenant of marriage, the unity of the spouses and the dignity proper to parents and the child.”

But the directives also urge Catholic health care institutions offering treatment for infertility to provide “not only technical assistance to infertile couples” but also to help couples “pursue other solutions,” such as counseling or adoption.

The Catholic stance on assisted reproduction aims to protect couples “from selling your soul to get pregnant,” Sister Renee said. “I explain to couples who access NaPro technology that they are assured that any baby conceived as a result will be conceived within the only context worthy of human conception: a loving act of union between them, the prospective parents.”

Bruchalski calls it “unconscionable to allow the physical, psychological and spiritual damage inflicted” on women by artificial reproductive technologies to continue “and, indeed, escalate.”

“How can we, under the guise of treating infertility, building a better human or finding cures for intractable diseases, continue to experiment on women, bombarding them with hormones to super-ovulate, and using them as egg donors and surrogate wombs?” he asked in the Respect Life article. “There must be better answers. It should be our goal, as responsible stewards of life, to find them.”