Moral reflections on the new technologies: a Catholic analysis

New technologies of conception bring into being beautiful babies. The wonder of these children, and of the technologies themselves, can tempt us to abbreviate ethical reflection on the moral appropriateness of initiating human life in this way. However, the moralists of the Catholic Church, along with many others, judge that human life should originate in acts of love between parents, not in productive acts of technologists. Scientific help for people desiring to generate a child out of their own being should be distinguished from scientific substitution for human acts of love in originating life. The child must be recognized as an equal, not as a product, subject to quality control. To radically alter our ways of generating human life without sufficient moral reflection is to generate human pain and moral dilemmas that we have not begun to fathom.