
Contents
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Origin of Issue Origin of Issue
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Historical—Medical Background Historical—Medical Background
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The Initial Scholarly Debate The Initial Scholarly Debate
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Responses Responses
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Embryo Rescue Embryo Rescue
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Embryo Adoption Embryo Adoption
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Surrogacy Surrogacy
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Procreative Infidelity Procreative Infidelity
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Embryo Adoption Acceptable in Principle, but Still Morally Wrong? Embryo Adoption Acceptable in Principle, but Still Morally Wrong?
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Further Moral Considerations with Regard to Embryo Adoption Further Moral Considerations with Regard to Embryo Adoption
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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15 Adopting Embryos
Get accessJohn Berkman is professor of moral theology at Regis College, University of Toronto, at the Graduate Centre for Theological Studies in the Toronto School of Theology, and a fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion. He previously taught at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkeley, California, and was director of the Division of Moral Theology/Ethics at the Catholic University of America. He has been a visiting professor at Duke Divinity School, a visiting fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, and a visiting research scholar at the Aquinas Institute at Blackfriars, Oxford. He teaches and writes in the areas of Thomistic ethics, healthcare ethics, and animal ethics. He recently published “G.E.M. Anscombe’s ‘I am Sadly Theoretical: It Is the Effect of Being at Oxford’ (1938): A Newly Discovered Article by Anscombe Edited and with an Editor’s Introduction” in New Blackfriars in September 2021, and is editing The Oxford Handbook of Theological Bioethics. Many of his publications can be found at his academia.edu and researchgate.net webpages.
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Published:19 September 2024
Cite
Abstract
For over twenty-five years, the relatively rare but now growing practice of embryo adoption has engendered what at first glance appears to be an outsized moral debate amongst Catholic ethicists. In embryo adoption, a woman undergoes embryo transfer. A previously frozen human embryo is transferred to her uterus, and then she gestates it to delivery. A number of competing moral descriptions of the practice have been proposed and defended: rescue, adoption, surrogacy, or infidelity. One reason this question has received such extensive moral analysis (or “casuistry”) is that Catholic ethicists early on recognized that the question could not be readily resolved using existing moral categories within that tradition. In other words, a conclusive moral evaluation of the practice would entail a development of moral doctrine. The alternative moral descriptions constitute competing paradigms through which to see and evaluate the practice. This chapter provides a moral analysis of these competing paradigms, and suggests possible new directions.
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