Such embryos cannot (yet) develop into full-grown human beings. Even if transplanted into a uterus, the specimen could never attach to the uterine wall.

Yet, what we have here is still a (disabled) human embryo. Without parents.

Are you disgusted? We believe that if you have a well-formed conscience, this is a good and proper reaction to this development.

We cannot always and everywhere trust a reaction of repugnance; at times, such a reaction is simply the result of ingrained biases and stereotypes.

But there is often a certain wisdom in our repulsion. Repugnance can assert itself as a moral alarm and response to real moral distress.

This is such a time.

The creation of a human embryo without sperm and egg shares some important similarities with other artificial reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilisation and certain surrogacy practices that involve the creation of human embryos outside the human body.

Perhaps most strikingly, the procedure overlaps the process of modifying genes using novel techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9. In both cases, a manufactured human embryo is the result of direct human intervention.

Tellingly, CRISPR-Cas9 has been known to be used only once on human embryos.

The scientist who performed the procedure, He Jiankui, was roundly and firmly criticised by the medical and ethics community and served a prison sentence for his work.

Meanwhile, leading scientists — including Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the creators of the technique — have called for a moratorium on its use on human embryos.

The creation of a human embryo without sperm or egg also goes beyond what we have seen in previous artificial reproductive technology and genetic engineering techniques.

In vitro fertilisation and even CRISPR-Cas9 involve direct human intervention in the reproductive process. Yet, all of them work by modifying or intervening with existing human embryos or gametes.

The manufacture of a human embryo without sperm or egg, by contrast, aims to build a human embryo from scratch.

The process is less a tweak to human reproduction or bending it to our own will than replacing it with something different altogether.

Heretofore we have aimed to eliminate variability, inconvenience or inefficiency from human reproduction. With this new development, the aim is different: to swap human reproduction for a different process entirely.

The charge of playing God comes to mind.

The charge is over-attributed and sometimes reveals more about our biases than something morally real, but in this case it is apt.

There are at least two kinds of playing God: An overstepping by humans into spheres of action that should be reserved for the divine, and a hubristic attempt to meddle with the world in ways that our all-too-human intellects simply do not understand.

In creating human embryos from scratch, we risk playing God in both senses.

One of us is a philosopher and the other a theologian.

We are both convinced that a Catholic understanding of reproduction could be a cultural antidote to the toxic understanding of reproduction that has led to the development of an eggless, spermless embryo.

Our position is not aligned with some kind of revisionist attempt to "take us back to the 1950s" (or some such dismissive phrase), but is rather at the heart of the perspective that Pope Francis and the Vatican reaffirmed just a few months ago.

As Christianity yields to a consumerist reproductive throwaway culture, the logic of the marketplace takes over.

Instead of seeing the creation of new human beings as pro-creation with God (our ultimate creator), who offers them as an unmerited gift, we now think of it as yet another transaction between individuals.

I have resources (money, insurance) and you have skills and facilities (medical training and fertility labs)? Well, then who is anyone to come between autonomous actors pursuing their self-interests?

Our post-Christian culture is already well advanced down this pathway, as couples, individuals and even "throuples" demand control over the embryos and future children they purchase in the marketplace.

We've had decades, actually, of privileged people demanding the ability to purchase ova and sperm based on the donor's IQ, attractiveness, participation in varsity athletics, and more.

Sex selection is par for the course in many contexts.

And of course our throwaway culture simply discards the prenatal human beings who don't fit the market-based criteria.

But here again we have something that is genuinely new.

Instead of modifying or intervening (albeit dramatically!) into the process God created for procreation, this new technology has the potential to obliterate it.

Catholics, other Christians and all people of good will must make our voices heard on this and work to make creation of such embryos illegal.

It may seem, and we may be told, that we can trust the process to stay where it is — that no actual reproduction would ever take place using this new technology.

But the history outlined above shows that is a very, very bad bet.

In a culture that becomes more and more dominated by the logic of the marketplace and by a commitment to a kind of relativism that welcomes virtually any vision of the good, who are we to impose our view onto others who think differently?

They should be able to make their transaction and we should butt out.

It will do us no good to pretend that this is a retreat to a kind of moral neutrality. The marketplace has its own logic and its own goods. It rewards the privileged while exploiting the marginalised.

There is no view from nowhere on this question. No neutral place to hide.

We can and must explicitly and firmly take a stand with a particular vision of the good. And the Catholic vision stands ready to provide precisely what is necessary in this context.

Unfortunately, there are forces even within the Church itself that are apparently trying to undermine the Church's teaching in this regard — precisely where it is so obviously and importantly true and needed the most.

Those of us who agree with Francis's vision of resisting a consumerist, throwaway culture with the logic of gift and openness to life must redouble our efforts to make our voices heard on this new and repugnant biotechnological development.

• Joe Vukov is an associate professor of philosophy and associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the author, most recently, of The Perils of Perfection.
• First published in Religion News Service. Republished with permission.

Many moral theologians in the country agree with that assessment.

One of them said that re-formulating Church teaching on human sexuality is one of the most "urgent" and one of the most "difficult" challenges facing contemporary Catholicism.

The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), which recently published a shocking report on abuse cases in France over the past 70 years, agrees.

One of the recommendations it made in that report is to carefully examine "how the paradoxical excess of Catholic morality's fixation on sexual matters may have a counter-productive value in the fight against sexual abuse".

The CIASE report notes that the Church's persistent strictness on sexual issues has led to a paradoxical situation by which some Catholics, especially priests, have committed serious transgressions according to the idea that "if you don't respect all the law, then you don't respect anything at all".

Not all sins are equally serious

Added to this is confusion about the various "sins against the flesh", which Catholic tradition has grouped together under the umbrella of the sixth commandment: "Thou shall not commit adultery."

"The enumeration of acts without gradation of their seriousness is highly problematic because, for example, one cannot put masturbation and rape on the same level," deplored Marie-Jo Thiel, an award-winning Catholic ethicist who teaches theology at the University of Strasbourg.

Like others, she considers rape to be "a crime that kills another", which is actually a violation of the fifth commandment, rather than the fifth.

"Even today, anything that goes outside the framework promoted by the Church would be 'wrong'," says Dominican Sister Véronique Margron, president of the Conference of Men and Women Religious of France (Corref).

"We thus maintain confusion between wrong and failure, which all human beings encounter at one time or another in their emotional and sexual life. As a result, we don't know how to recognize what is really wrong, such as sexual violence, or perceiving the other person as an object," she said.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative"

Catholicism's focus on sexuality and procreation has intensified since the 19th Century in proportion to its loss of socio-political influence. But that focus actually goes back to the beginnings of Christianity.

The contribution of Saint Augustine of Hippo is particularly "weighty" in this matter, according to Alain Thomasset SJ, professor at the Centre Sèvres, the Jesuit school of theology in Paris.

"For Saint Augustine, sexual desire remained an effect of original sin. It is only saved by the act of procreation within marriage," he said.

The Second Vatican Council certainly opened up sexuality to purposes other than procreation, such as communion between spouses.

But Thomasset believes there is still much work to be done to transcend the culture of merely "what's allowed and what's forbidden" and to broaden our view.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative," the Jesuit pointed out.

"It is much more normative than the Church's social doctrine, which takes into account relationships, circumstances, intentions, the complexity of reality, etc. Relational anthropology, already present in social doctrine, would be welcome in sexual ethics," he argued.

A Church people are no longer listening to?

The 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, with its prohibition of artificial contraception, did much to discredit the Church's discourse on sexuality.

Then the 2019 book, In the Closet of the Vatican, which alleged the widespread existence of homosexuality (and pedocriminality) among priests and bishops in Rome, seemed to further weaken the Church's voice on this issue.

Some Catholics regret this. They believe the Church is right to insist that our bodies are a gift of God that should not to abused or that sexual intimacy should not be trivialised at a time when pornography has never been so easily accessible.

So, is it conceivable that there can be an evolution Church teaching on human sexuality?

"First of all, we must keep in mind that a good part of the French episcopate remains marked by the heritage of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who defended a sexual morality with clear norms, in the name of human nature," emphasized Francine Charoy, a moral theologian who taught for twenty years at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

Moving beyond a "confrontation between two blocks"

Pope Francis has taken a different approach by encouraging more discernment in complex situations. But he has not changed Church doctrine on the substance of the matter.

This has left some theologians "disappointed".

They believe that the pope could make changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which, among other things, calls homosexual acts "intrinsically disordered"), as he did in 2018 concerning the death penalty.

Charoy, meanwhile, wants to see the Church move beyond a "confrontation between two blocs", progressive and conservative.

"We need to work in synodality among different theologians, to analyze together the denial regarding pedocriminality in which the institution has remained for so long," she argued.

The theologian said it would be a way to start dismantling the "culture of silence" highlighted by the CIASE report.

• Mélinée le Priol is a journalist for LA CROIX France. She has a particular interest in topics related to the Middle-East but also more widely religious news.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Users of the app have a lower unintended pregnancy rate than the pill (6.5 percent as against 9 percent), without the side effects of hormonal contraception.

The app - which also works for pregnancy planning - was developed by Swedish nuclear physicist Elina Berglund and her husband Raoul Scherwizl.

Berglund says the app uses scientific research to empower women with knowledge about their body and to replace medication with technology.

"Consumers are increasingly using digital health technologies to inform their everyday health decisions, and this new app can provide an effective method of contraception if it's used carefully and correctly," the FDA says.

Users download the app to a mobile device and use it to keep a record of their temperature (which they take each morning with an "extra-sensitive" thermometer). Temperature records are important, as a woman's body temperature rises slightly when she is fertile.

The temperature data is combined with information about the woman's menstrual cycle into a 'smart' algorithm, which helps determine when a woman is ovulating.

This in turn lets users know when they should avoid having unprotected sex if they don't want to get pregnant - or have unprotected sex if they do want to get pregnant.

The Church teaches using contraception is immoral, because it intentionally separates procreation from the sexual act. However, it does approve of fertility mapping methods like natural family planning.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Shots
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