While Catholics stand vigil to support life, other childbirth questions spur deep soul-searching

Many Catholics have joined the 40 Days for Life Lenten movement by keeping vigil outside abortion clinics, including in Eugene. As a Catholic, I applaud living out Catholic teaching on the value and inviolability of human life. However, having faced this question personally, I know abortion is rarely an abstraction.

Years ago, a woman I loved thought she might be pregnant. My first response was fear. I told her I would probably want her to have an abortion.

She was not pregnant, but I have not forgotten the shame of instantly viewing a possible child as a crisis to solve rather than a life to receive. That moment stays with me. Sometimes I envision a little girl growing older — the child I once, out of fear, deemed undeserving of life. This drives me to take public witness for unborn life seriously.

This personal experience shapes not only my views on abortion, but also leads me to consider related questions — most recently, those surrounding in virto fertilization, or IVF, which accounts for about 2.6% of births in the U.S.

I know the pain of infertility is real. The longing for a child can reshape a marriage, a home and the sense of what the future holds. Many parents turn to IVF out of hope, grief and, yes, faith.

And yet, I cannot weigh abortion seriously and then disregard IVF because it is framed as medicine or compassion. Abortion is debated publicly, often as a crisis. IVF is quieter, conducted in clinics through consent forms. Yet both raise the same question: what happens when early human life is shaped by human choice and control?

That is the part I find difficult to ignore.

IVF turns reproduction into a series of decisions: how many embryos to create; whether to test them; and which to transfer, freeze or leave unused. Many see these choices as necessary or compassionate. Yet evaluating and selecting embryos adds moral weight, because it asks us to judge which possible lives to welcome before pregnancy even begins.

The deeper concern is not only what we do, but how our language changes when selection becomes routine. Once enough experts, forms, prices and clinical routines are involved, judgment begins to sound like common sense. Care starts to mean risk reduction. Responsibility starts to mean selection. And it becomes harder to say plainly what is being chosen.

In an earlier draft of this column, I used the phrase ‘soft eugenics.’ And although it is unsettling, I still think the term describes something real. This is not about state coercion, but a quieter shift: a culture where selecting embryos to minimize defects or disorders starts to feel not only permissible, but expected.

That logic is already easy to hear. A recent New York Times interview with Noor Siddiqui, founder of a company offering genetic testing for embryos before pregnancy, put it in almost perfect contemporary language: parents are given the “power to protect their children.” I understand the appeal of that promise. Of course parents want to protect their children. Of course medicine wants to reduce suffering.

But as this optimization for health becomes the main lens, care and selection blur. Ranking and screening get mistaken for love or responsibility. What is optional starts to feel required when doctors endorse it, and parents hear that responsibility means using every tool to reduce risk. A formal choice becomes a moral expectation.

This is not just a theological issue. Even for those who do not share my faith, the cultural pressure is clear: When embryos are assessed by risk, traits or statistics, a society’s moral vocabulary begins to change. We speak less about welcome and more about management, less about dignity and more about outcomes, less about receiving life and more about optimizing it.

As a Catholic, I believe every human life has dignity not because it is healthy, wanted or optimized, but because it is human. I know many readers will not share that religious view. But I hope they see a shared human concern: whether we are learning to welcome life only after we have had the chance to rank it.

I do not write to shame parents who choose IVF. I would not trust a pro-life argument that ignores sorrow, longing or complexity. I write to resist letting my moral imagination narrow to the most visible battlegrounds. If I care about unborn life outside clinics, I must care about unborn life in freezer inventories and reproductive menus.

That challenge is not someone else’s. It is mine. It reaches into my past, my shame and my capacity to treat a life as manageable when it arrives at the wrong moment or under the wrong conditions. That is why I cannot treat IVF as exempt from moral scrutiny. Not because it is identical to abortion. It is not. But because a society that grows used to selecting among possible lives may also lose the words it once used to welcome them: dignity, gift, dependence, obligation, mercy.