While the vast majority of Americans support the practice of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), the public is split on the morality of destroying frozen embryos created in the process.
That’s according to a Gallup Poll which found 82% of Americans believe IVF is morally acceptable. That included around two-thirds of weekly churchgoers. 10% felt it was morally wrong.
When it came to destroying frozen embryos, just under half of respondents supported the practice, but 43% said it was morally wrong. The nation’s biggest Protestant Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, recently passed a resolution, effectively opposing the procedure. It called on infertile couples among its 13 million members to adopt someone else’s frozen embryos.
The Christian Post reports the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that under IVF, “the act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that ‘entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person.’” It describes the “relationship of domination” as “in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.”
The IVF findings were part of Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, examining Americans’ views on a wide variety of contentious and cultural issues. Only birth control had a higher share of respondents characterising it as morally acceptable (90%). Other behaviours seen as moral by a majority of Americans include sex between unmarried men and women (69%), having a baby outside of wedlock (68%), gambling (66%), same-sex sexual activity (64%), embryonic stem cell research (63%) and buying and wearing clothing made from animal fur (59%).
Narrow majorities of the public believed that the death penalty (55%), abortion (54%) and euthanasia (53%) are morally acceptable, while 48% said the same about medical testing on animals. Most Americans believed that that sex between teenagers (50%), gender transitions (51%), pornography use (58%), suicide (71%), polygamy (74%) and extra-marital affairs (86%) are morally wrong.
