My opinion plus five bucks will get you a cup of Starbuck’s

A reader writes:

I was reading this article today:

…and it prompted a question I hope you might be able to answer. Would it be morally licit in this situation for a Catholic couple to adopt an embryo and undergo IVF to prevent them from being destroyed or used in medical research? Because as the article states, there are five options here for these embryos:

1. The couple to whom they belong can implant all of them over time and attempt to bring them to birth.
2. The couple can donate the embryos to another couple so that they can undergo IVF and attempt to bring the child to birth.
3. The embryos can be kept frozen indefinitely.
4. The embryos can be destroyed.
5. The embryos can be donated for research.

I realize that none of these situations are good ones from a Catholic perspective. IVF is not permitted and would be considered to be a mortal sin (or at least a grave matter). But at this point, that ship has sailed. The question now is, what do you do in the aftermath? It would seem to me that #’s 4 and 5 are reprehensible and couldn’t be justified in any sense by a faithful Catholic. So my question is really addressing the first three options. Which of these would be the “least wrong” (if such a thing could be determined)? Would undergoing IVF and bringing the child to birth be acceptable under these circumstances (whether by the original couple or an adoptive couple) or would it be considered less wrong to just leave the embryos frozen so as not to compound one sin with another one?

I really have no idea. My kneejerk, uninformed and absolutely unreliable response–which nobody should pay attention to, because I’m not a moral theologian, have never given it any thought until right this second, and know nothing of the relevant technologies and magisterial instruction (if any)–is, I suppose that it could be morally licit, in order to save the life of the embryo. But then what do I know?

The problem here, it seems to me, is that new technologies are actually making possible new forms of sin that have never ever existed before and therefore creating new moral dilemmas the Church has never had to face. If so (and I think this is an archetypal case of that) then the Church’s theology (which is typically slow to develop) may have to play catchup here. I assume that there are theologians out there who are noodling this problem and that work will eventually percolate its way into magisterial documents and pastoral recommendations. But I’m a total ignoramus about the state of the question in Catholic teaching, so don’t, I’m implore you, run off saying “Mark Shea says IVF implantation is morally licit to save lives!” I’m making a shoot-from-the-hip guess about what might be possible as the tradition develops in response to the technology. I have no doubt there are people who will say I’m dead wrong. I have no doubt there are people who will say I’m mostly wrong, or partly right, or completely right. As far as I know, we’re operating in a big grey area here.

Take this whole blog entry in the spirit of a couple of guys sitting around a bar chewing over a science fiction story idea with a couple of beers under out belts.