Thirty Percent Success Rate
Posted byRebecca TetiinNewsonMonday, July 25, 2011 2:00 PM
“The overall IVF success rate sits at around 30% today.”
I was astonished to read that statistic in a story about in vitro fertilization over the weekend.
Holly Finn’smoving firsthand accountof her visceral longing for a child and the painful path she’s been on to have one lacks a Catholic or pro-life perspective.
You won’t read a word in it about the plight of frozen embryos, selective reduction of embryos or the rights of children to know their parents and to have both a mother and father.
Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from her experience, particularly from the things she wishes she’d understood when she was younger.
For one thing, she offers a poignant reminder that even when you’re not one of the 12% of couples suffering from infertility, life is a gift not under our control:
In any given month, with a man whose parts are in order, a healthy woman’s chance of getting pregnant naturally is 20% to 25% if she’s in her 20s, 10% to 15% in her 30s, and 5% in her 40s.. Really, it’s miraculous at any age.
She’s brutally honest with us, and therefore exposes herself to our judgment about her moral choices; what was more interesting to me was not the points of conflict with Church teaching in her perspective, but her points of intersection with it, particularly her re-thinking of the wisdom of postponing family life
The first thing I’d like to tell women ages 26 to 34 is: Start having babies. I know it’s not polite or funny. But I don’t want others to go through what I’m going through now.
There’s also her innate sense that IVF is inhuman, even though she is pursuing it. Ponder the pathos in this passage, for example:
On a walk by the sea one blustery day, a friend told me he’d never hire a hooker. “It’s efficient,” he said, “but there’s something so sad about not being able to get it for free.” Picking a sperm donor feels like that, at least at first. For months before I started IVF, I sat down at my computer, logged on to a sperm bank and stood up again.
I’ve never wanted to pick a man just so I could have children. I craved something less logical. My first love was the man who drove all night in the snow to New York City. He called me from the corner of 93rd Street and Third Avenue and said nothing except, “Look out your window.” There he was, shivering at the pay phone, gorgeously spontaneous. I miss pay phones.
And I believe in soul mates. So how did I end up cruising a cryobank? Is this the punishment for romanticism: having to do the least romantic thing in the world? Like many, I trusted that marriage and children—my family—would happen. In the meantime, I lived my life. I fell in with some fascinating men, up close and unvarnished, and had conversations I can still quote. I didn’t want to settle at 25. I wanted adventures. I just didn’t imagine their cost, and how I would struggle to keep paying it.
While the Church’s judgment concerning in-vitro fertilization treatments may appear cruel and unfair, it is not. Children are a gift, not an entitlement. The Church teaches that
[M]arriage does not confer upon the spouses the right to have a child, but only the right to perform those natural acts which areper seordered to procreation. A true and proper right to a child would be contrary to the child’s dignity and nature. The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, "the supreme gift" (58) and the most gratuitous gift of marriage, and is a living testimony of the mutual giving of his parents. For this reason, the child has the right, as already mentioned, to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents; and he also has the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception. (Instruction on Respect for Human Life8)
TheCatechism of the Catholic Churchalso reminds us that
Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization). . . dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children." (CCC 2377)