Provincial Funding and the Powers We Ought Not Assume

This past week Ontario announced that it will fund rounds of in vitro fertilization under health care. Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews stated: “Supporting the safe use of modern IVF treatment will result in fewer high risk pregnancies – while at the same time helping thousands of Ontarians realize their dream of having their own family.”

Quebec currently funds 8,000 IVF treatments per year, to a tune of about $60 million. In Ontario I would expect that we will soon be exceeding that.

What’s the problem with this? After all, Ontario funds many other types of health care, right?

The problem is that IVF treatment is actually not "health care" at all. In vitro fertilization doesn’t heal or cure someone of anything. It doesn’t directly enhance or prolong life. What it does is create life through artificial means.

IVF takes the creation of human life out of its natural sphere (the conjugal act between spouses) and puts it in the latex-gloved hands of doctors. It takes the human life of the embryo out of its natural environment (the mother’s womb) and puts it in a lab dish, and then a freezer. 

Despite the natural parental inclinations of the couple, this is not a morally acceptable course. It was once only a topic for science fiction novels. Now we call it health care.

The Catechism speaks with great clarity on the dignity of every human life, “willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God”, from conception until death (cf. CCC 2319).

Because it should be treated as a person from conception, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed like every other human being. (2323)

It speaks of the child as not something owed to one, but as a gift.

The "supreme gift of marriage" is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged "right to a child" would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents," and "the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception.” (2378)

The Ontario government’s decision to fund IVF is a grave offence against the rights of even the children that are successfully implanted. What of those that fail? What of those that fail to “take” on the first round of IVF and are lost forever? What of the thousands upon thousands of humans at embryonic stage that are artificially conceived and then kept in a cryogenic prison indefinitely because the parents already got what they wanted?

Do we simply imagine away these frozen sons and daughters, brothers and sisters united in their forcibly paused existence, trapped in an unjust and inhuman mad-science experiment?

What of those whose lives are deliberately sacrificed to the cause of “medical” research?

Ontario’s health care system moved away from its inherent mission when it begun funding the destruction of human beings through abortion. This is the twisted flip side; on the other side of Quebec’s 8,000 annual IVFs are 30,000 abortions. To create and destroy lives at the whim of the parent. "To be, or not to be, that is the question-“; but it is one that adults assume the power to answer- on behalf of their sadly unfortunate children.

Artificially-created parents and artificially-created un-parents. What on earth does this have to do with healthcare? 

Have you had IVF or an abortion, or helped someone procure one? Do not despair. Do not think yourself beyond the mercy of God, who died to take away ALL of our sins. There is support available here, and here.