In past months, you have run several articles in the Register and Faith & Family magazine in support of embryo adoption. The choice to run these articles springs from your steadfast commitment to safeguard the sanctity of human life. For this you should be highly commended.

I would, however, like to offer for your consideration another view concerning embryo adoption. Because this issue is so abstruse and because it deals with frozen embryos, which never should have been conceived in vitro in the first place, ordinary moral intuition is not a sure guide. We must resort, then, to the magisterium for guidance.

Regarding the unity of marriage, Donum Vitae makes this statement, which bears on the licitness of embryo adoption: “The fidelity of the spouses in the unity of marriage involves reciprocal respect of their right to become father and mother only through each other.” This right of each spouse to become a parent only through the other cannot be violated. Yet the implantation of one couple's child in the womb of another married woman does just that.

Donum Vitae states, “in consequence of the fact that they have been produced in vitro, those embryos that are not transferred into the body of the mother and are called ‘spare’ are exposed to an absurd fate, with no possibility of their being offered safe means of survival that can be licitly pursued.” This means there is no morally licit means of saving an embryo that is not implanted in the mother. If embryo adoption were justifiable, there would be a possibility of offering them a safe means of survival that can be licitly pursued. But Donum Vitae does not allow for this.

So, what advice should be given a woman who is contemplating the adoption of one of these little human beings? Because the most authoritative statement we have precludes the licitness of this practice, she should decide against it. “But,” one might say, “a child's life is at stake.” This is true, and there could be no more noble motive for adopting an embryo than saving a human life. But the end, no matter how exalted, never justifies all means. This, sadly, is why the fate of the child is absurd.

I appreciate your consideration of this issue, on both sides of which there are Catholics of good faith who are committed to protecting all human life.

LORI MURPHY

Cheshire, Connecticut