Part 4: Can You Love an Embryo?

Yes. Receive them all in love.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In Part 1, I said that learning to love an embryo will teach you more about yourself and about what it means to love one another and pursue justice in society. In Part 2, I talked about a cool connection between nonlinear brain dynamics and Thomistic thought. Modern neuroscience explains how sensory perceptions accumulate to form memories and imagination in the brain that evoke emotional responses. Aquinas has a rich teaching on common sense and the other interior senses (imagination, memory, estimation), covered in Part 3, that predates and parallels modern nonlinear brain dynamics. I did all of this to make a very important point about loving embryos: We cannot sense them with our five external senses; therefore, we cannot relate to them in our emotions and imagination, at least not in the same way as to babies who are born.

The closest anyone can come to bodily sensation is the mother when she feels the effects of the living embryo inside her changing her hormones and causing all kinds of systems in her body to respond to the tiny embryo’s implantation and early growth. I suppose, the scientist in the lab watching an embryo in a petri dish would also have a visual sensation. But without the brain processing sensory input and accommodating experience and cognition to form images, the intellect has nothing experiential to draw upon when attempting to “know” the unborn, which in turn makes it harder to love.

Therefore, I contend that people who undergo IVF as well as citizens in society do not have the same emotional response to embryos as they do to born children. As Catholics, we logically say that embryos have the same fundamental rights of any other human, but on a sensory and emotional level, we simply cannot imagine an embryo in the way we can imagine larger babies and humans with whom we interact. For embryos, we must appeal to the intellect and will.

In IVF is Not the Way, I spend entire chapters reviewing Catholic teaching on what it means to be a “person” made in the image and likeness of the triune God. I’ll review a bit of it here. In the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we understand that there are two internal processions in God. The Father generates the Son, His Word, in an act of the intellect, somewhat like we conceive an idea before expressing it externally with words. From the Father and Son consubstantially, the Holy Spirit proceeds as the fruit of an act of the will. This is why we can say that Truth (the fruit of the intellect) and Love (the fruit of the will) are Persons.

In the Trinity, truth and love are not tied to imagination, emotion, or feelings. If we want to touch the deepest level of truth about what exists in God and in God’s image, we must go beyond the limits of senses and imagination and push our intellects into the spiritual realm beyond sensory experience.

I also argue that all persons have a right to parents. This requires an in-depth consideration of marriage, but I show from Church teaching that those who have a right to parents (i.e., children) have a right to be conceived and received in love. This is easy to defend for children big enough to hold in our arms. A boy in the foster care system who does not survive in adulthood may have been fed, clothed, and kept alive, but his deepest needs were violated. He had a right to be conceived in love by his parents, to be received as a gift and raised in love, to belong to his family and community. We feel this, deeply and instinctively, having perceived him (even indirectly) through the senses.

Children that are too small to see or hold in our arms, or to be perceived with our senses, have the same rights. There are millions among us today in petri dishes, in cryogenic tanks, and near death in research laboratories. Their parents should love them. We can too if we close our eyes, shut out our imaginations, and conceive (intellectually) of them in our hearts and minds and receive them in love. That is how we begin to restore all that has gone wrong, not just with IVF, but with every injustice against all children. We must decide to receive them all in love, through an act of the mind and will.

You may wonder how? It may not seem like enough to do this abstract conceptual exercise. It is not enough, but it is a necessary start to train your intellect to avoid relying on imagination (pictures in the mind) when it comes to the topic of human embryos. Train your intellect to think more abstractly and logically. As a chemist, this exercise is the same as working conceptually with atoms that I cannot see. Chemists solve a great many problems by shutting down their imaginations and forcing their minds to work abstractly.

I take up the topic of embryo storage, destruction, and adoption in the last part of the book, but first I wanted to explain how to receive an embryo in love in the context of moral decision-making. As a woman who lost five little Trasancoses in miscarriage, I had to work through this exercise myself. By doing so, I was able to open my heart to them, to allow myself to love them, and then to grieve their loss. I was not grieving the loss of a potential reality or of all that those embryos might have become. I was able to grieve the loss of my embryos as they are, because I received them, their very being, into my soul in love.

Whether you have used IVF and regret that you have embryos stored in cryogenic tanks, or you are considering IVF treatment for perceived infertility, or you are a citizen concerned about what we, as a society, do with the millions of frozen embryos, the first step is to love them. Decisions should flow from love.