Legionary of Christ Father Thomas Berg has posted an insightful commentary on the “Octomom” case.

The case, for anyone who hasn’t heard about it despite the exhaustive coverage it has received in news media, involves the California single mother who recently gave birth to eight children conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The commentary by Father Berg, who is executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, is especially helpful in light of the moral quandaries raised by the “Octomom” controversy.

“Some of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary western culture all seem to have converged in the recent birth of octuplets to Nadya Suleman, a single mother in California: voluntary single parenthood via sperm donors, manufacturing of babies in Petri dishes, freezing live human embryos indefinitely, a renegade scientific and medical community,” Father Berg notes at the start of his commentary. “It’s hard to get one’s head around the situation and address it directly because nothing about it is normal or natural, from beginning to end.”

Father Berg can’t delve into a comprehensive analysis of all of these complexities in his commentary, but he does touch on several key points.

And he says that while some moral aspects of the “Octomom” case may seem quite murky, one thing is crystal clear in light of what occurred: Something needs to be done to regulate America’s billion-dollar artificial reproductive technology (ART) industry.

“Taking a step back, it’s hard to deny that the ART industry is almost solely responsible for the current social climate where a living human embryo is now regarded more as a product or resource than as the individual human being that it is,” Father Berg writes. “Through ART, the scientific and medical community has been able to create, manipulate, study, and destroy hundreds of thousands of human embryos. And currently, about 400,000 are frozen indefinitely in the United States alone, according to the most recent, reliable data. Additionally, these frozen individual human embryos have been targeted for years now by researchers who want to cull new lines of human embryonic stem cells from them.

“To say that ART has opened a Pandora’s Box of cultural ills is among the grossest of understatements. But perhaps the octomom episode will constitute a watershed moment ushering in the long overdue era of regulation for an industry that feeds on innocent human life in the name of fostering it, thinly concealing unbridled greed with a veneer of putative compassion.”