Can our family still be catholic?

[90Domer]

I have to strongly disagree with this. There is a VERY good reason for you son to know. If for some reason, even decades from now, medical science discovers that there is some disease or genetic mutation, or some other issue with children conceived during IVF or other such procedures, and your son does not know his own personal medical history, you could very well put his life in jeopardy.

Because you chose this life for him, you at least owe it to him to tell him of his beginning so he can have this information should he ever need it in the future. It is a critical piece of HIS LIFE. The fact that it will be difficult to tell him, or that it could emotionally or spiritually impact him is really just too bad - you put him in this situation, you owe him the truth. You owe him the truth about his own life. Withholding such essential information as how a person was created has to be one of the most significant betrayals I can possibly imagine.

~Liza

We will tell him what he needs to know when he needs to know it, if ever. Until then, as I said, he does not need to know all the gory details. He knows some but not all. Please lighten up a little. My gosh, you are naive to think that I would deny my son anything that would jeopardize his physical or spiritual welfare. Give me a bit more credit. And please do not guilt trip (and yes I see this as a guilt trip) or use melodrama. I agree with your facts (and I am fully aware of the risks of the procedures and are part of a long term research study). Saying that I am betraying my kid in the most severe way is WAY over the top.

Basically, come right out and say that I am a horrible sinner for choosing IVF, because that is what I am reading into this message. In the meantime, you worry about your family and I will about mine.

 

[90Domer]

I NEVER SAID THIS.

I’m glad you are done talking about it, because frankly, so am I. You have twisted just about everything I said, put absolutes on things I’ve said, and changed meanings to things I’ve said.

No, you didn’t and I didn’t suggest you did. However, you told me to inquire to TOB Healing Institute, and I did. And it was there that the fellow who heads the institute defined these hurts as generational sins. That is what he teaches–it is the focal point of his method of healing.

Honestly, I have no idea what the heck you are talking about then.

 

[90Domer]

Here is what I am taking away from this thread. There are some people who absolutely hate the idea that I used IVF and want to make sure I am reminded of that mistake. I KNOW I made a mistake. I said that I would never do it again or encourage it again. And you want to make sure I tell my son how terrible I was to use IVF to have him…I get it. I would respect people more if they would just come out and say it. ONCE AGAIN, I GET IT. I SINNED THROUGH MY FAULTS, THROUGH MY FAULTS, THROUGH MY MOST GRIEVOUS FAULTS.

Also, you seem to be assuming that I do not know any of the risk factors of conception that way. Guess what? I am not learning anything new from you. Just because I didn’t acknowledge it doesn’t mean I don’t know what they are. We read the stacks of paperwork regarding the procedure and were counseled numerous times on possible risk factors. We are highly educated scientists with advanced degrees. We are not some naive kids going blindly into procedures. We are continually updated when a possible correlation exists between the procedure and a possible increase in risk factor. He will know what he needs to know, as I said before.

Finally, all this negativity and harping is causing far more spiritual damage now to me than any perceived wound he may have incurred because you are presuming I am going to make a dire decision that will harm my son. Pease save the worry for scenarios closer to you and not posted by a person you do not know.

 

[Kensho]

To get back to the OP’s issue.

Yes, I think you are still Catholic. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have cared enough to come here and ask.

Also, please remember that confession is a sacrament given to us by God. It isn’t just us sitting in a box reading a list of sins to a bureacrat in order to keep from getting into trouble; it has spiritual power. There have been a number of times I have gone to confession not sure if I was sorry for the sin I needed to confess, but just willing to be sorry – and as I spoke my sin, I did feel sorrow, sometimes so deeply that I began to weep.

I think just being willing to restore your relationship with God even if your feelings aren’t in line with Church teaching is enough to start with. Go to confession just out of love for God, tell the priest you aren’t sure you’re sorry and why, and see what happens in your heart. Maybe the priest will tell you just what you need to hear.

 

[90Domer]

I promise you this is absolutely NOT superstition. This is also not above God’s mercy and healing power.

It seems like everyone is so focusing on the practicalities here and forgetting that this is BASIC church teaching! The fall of adam and even created spiritual wounds-- that haunt us and manifest themselves to this day. It’s in the generational line.

Any participation in sin at all creates spiritual wounds for us, for those around us. Otherwise the most private personal sin wouldn’t be a sin because it doesn’t appear to do any damage.

Note: I don’t expect you or anyone else to answer this, but I am going to summarize my confusion.

Agape, this is the post where you mention hurts and the generational line. Bob Schuchts lectures and incorporates the concept of generational sin and/or curse. So how am I twisting your words? This is truly what I thought you were talking about here. I have no agenda here. I am simply confused.

You used the phrase “the body manifests the soul.” What exactly does that mean? You state this in a way that implies I should know exactly what this means and the consequences thereof. I don’t. I admit it. I just don’t.

You are asking me to believe something (or get out of some denial) in regards to my son, but you don’t understand that I don’t get it. I try to research it, and you say that I am twisting your words. You are criticizing me and berating me over something that is completely foreign to me. Granted, I don’t fully understand the Trinity either, but I take it on faith of the Magesterium. I cannot do this in this case and you are getting mad when I try to understand and wrongly summarize what I thought you said. You have put me in a no win situation.

Gotta say, I am outta here on this thread. I’m in need of spiritual healing from my failed attempts at understanding.

 

[lizaanne]

My gosh, you are naive to think that I would deny my son anything that would jeopardize his physical or spiritual welfare. Give me a bit more credit.

You said:

We are certainly not sharing that intimate detail with our son. No reason for him to know.

My kid has no idea how he was conceived **and will never know. **

How else am I to presume otherwise?

Basically, come right out and say that I am a horrible sinner for choosing IVF, because that is what I am reading into this message.

I don’t need to – you already know this.

~Liza

 

[90Domer]

You said:

How else am I to presume otherwise?

I don’t need to – you already know this.

~Liza

You are right–read thread again to see I said that. I will consult with our priest friend to see if we should or to what extent we should tell our son. But you may have missed the post where I said that we told him we had him with the help of doctors.

 

[coopnann]

“We have several more embreyos frozen and we are planning to use them all to have more children in the future.”

Sarah2 that is your writing from your original post. Sorry, I still haven’t figured out how to use quotes.

But what immediately struck me was a few words in that one sentence you wrote:

“planning”–plans change. All the time. So many ways down the road you could justify not giving them life, because life is not going as planned. Or, as what happened to my friend, her child is 2, conceived through IVF, husband unexpectedly died a few months ago. She told me there are still more frozen embreyos, babies. She also does not know if the embreyos are adoptable because of her husband’s severe health problems, which contributed to his death. What of the embreyos now?

“use them all to have more children in the future.”–USE them???

Someone from my high school class had IVF procedure (hmmm, that just struck me in a way I hadn’t thought before–a child conceived through a procedure) and 6 children were born in one pregnancy. I was told that she and her husband were upset because the doctor they went to was known to not let “high” numbers like that happen. So, in other words, when more fertilized eggs are implanted, perspective parents and doctors are hoping that some of the babies do not make it to birth? So, some people who go through IVF are hoping some children die before birth so there are not many babies at once, so ironic, because they had IVF done in the first place to have babies?

The above is something I mention as you said you do not regret it, but please research what really happens in IVF, and see the attitudes and irony of things about it.

The manner in which a child is conceived is the issue. A child, no matter how a child is conceived, is always created and loved by God. So absolutely your child and any child is a wonderful blessing to have. I just want to stress that, that in my pointing out the above things in no way diminishes my thanksgiving of your son and recognition of your son given by God.

 

[Litcrit]

I think it could be true that an extremely stressful pregnancy could cause changes in the fetus. And yes, leaving an infant to cry for hours has shown to be detrimental to attachment and development. Those are both physical, tangible problems that can be diagnosed.

Yes, but only a decade or so ago we didn’t have these certain scientific findings. We didn’t know for sure infants felt anything. We didn’t know that the prenatal period of life had any bearing at all on the person. Scientifically. But many smart folks in the Church have been advising pregnant women - for millennia - to adopt a calm prayerful attitude and take Communion frequently. Bodies matter, even tiny ones, and souls are impacted, even young ones.

I do not think there is a Church teaching that says there is some kind of unseen spiritual damage done to babies conceived via IVF. That might be your opinion or suspicion, but since it is a) not Church teaching and b) there is no evidence of it, we cannot tell parents that children who are conceived this way have damaged souls.

The thing is - the people who committed the sin have the damaged souls. The people around them may experience physical and psychological fallout. Their souls are fine. You can harm your kids by sinning. But your sin does not impart some kind of stain on their eternal souls.

Certainly not. No stain. No sin. I agree completely.

However, the soul is a tricky concept. Maybe this is where we diverge. “Psychological” comes from “psyche,” meaning, of course, the soul. The me, the core of my being, not opposed or inimical to my body. We all affect each others’ souls in life, for better or worse.

The temporal effects of our sins can include impact on the souls of those around us - not in the sense of staining them with sin, but in the sense of a woundedness that can be transferred on and on. We may call it psychological damage to avoid confusion, but psychology as a science can’t yet quite explain how, for instance, some people whose mothers were going to abort them in the earliest stage of pregnancy on a particular date have great anxiety and suicidal thoughts around this date every year without having been told anything - perhaps some day it will. This phenomenon has been repeatedly documented. These people, I repeat, are not in any way sinful, but they *are *hurt.

All I’m saying is that it would be wrong to deny these people, and people like them, the right to trace back their problems to a possible cause, not in order to blame their “sinful” parents, but in order to understand.

Lack of love and abuse and neglect gets passed on through generations in a family, not as some sort of curse, just a natural cause-and-effect chain. The child is not loved. The child grows up. The child doesn’t know how to love her own child. God’s grace helps here, but knowing where and why we’re wounded is a great piece of information to acquire.

We as Christians don’t believe in the ideally apathetic, immovable, unchangeable soul of the Platonists and Neoplatonists. For Christians, the soul is, actually, *not *eternal. This is a Platonic attribute for the soul, implying it has always existed and will always exist, independent from the body and this lowly material world, indestructible. We don’t believe this. The soul could well be immortal, though, created with the body, fragile, changeable, and existing only through God’s grace.

And fixed and healed and made whole through God’s grace.

 

[Dorothy]

You are right–read thread again to see I said that. I will consult with our priest friend to see if we should or to what extent we should tell our son. But you may have missed the post where I said that we told him we had him with the help of doctors.

I respect the patience the Lord gives you and you accept to deal with all of these questions and refutes, some of them quite harsh.

It appears to me that you are sincerely trying to learn more about things others have shared.

Thank you for sharing about your experience, we can all learn many things from it.

May our Lord Jesus Christ grant you and your loved ones a blessed and Holy Easter Season filled with the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ!

 

[tcay584]

Thanks to all for giving your advice.
Some clarification regarding the embryo’s: I consider them to be our chidren. They are from my ova and my husband’s sperm, so we are their parents in all possible definitions. We never had any embryo’s wilfully distroyed or given up for experimentation. All have been safely frozen.

I’m not a specialist on the church’s teachings in this subject, but I do believe that the most ethical thing to do at this point is to give the embryo’s the best chances of being born into their own family.
I’m not sure what the first poster means when he says we have to ‘give them up’. Having them destroyed on purpose would be an even graver sin than the one we already committed. Giving them to other couples would deprive them of their biological family for no reason.

We’ll definitely speak with our parish priest. I’m not sure what he’ll say. How can we be absolved for committing a sin we don’t regret? It’s a huge relief that our child will be able to recieve baptism.

Regarding the sin, you have to try and separate the act (the IVF procedure) from the outcome (your beautiful little boy) with regards to feeling remorse. I can’t imagine any decent parent could ever “regret” having a child they love. Nor should you ever look at your child with anything other than true love regardless of how he came into the world. Separate the two components and try to see the how and the why regarding the sinfulness of IVF (not respecting God’s plan or timing, etc) and you may find a path to remorselfulness for the procedure itself. Many children can be born of sinful acts (rape, IVF, incest) but not be anything but a blessing. What you did was wrong, and you’ll have to come to understand that, but don’t ever think you should regret the birth of your child.

 

[tcay584]

Oh, and P.S. Of course your family can still be Catholic! If anyone here can honestly say they have never sinned, Jesus and Mary must be posting! It’s not a “one strike and you’re out” kinda church, it’s a “seventy times seven” kind of Church. Good luck on the path!

 

[90Domer]

I respect the patience the Lord gives you and you accept to deal with all of these questions and refutes, some of them quite harsh.

It appears to me that you are sincerely trying to learn more about things others have shared.

Thank you for sharing about your experience, we can all learn many things from it.

May our Lord Jesus Christ grant you and your loved ones a blessed and Holy Easter Season filled with the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ!

Thank you so much for the kind words. I wanted to tell you that, in reading your posts, I had a “eureka” moment. Your explaining the scenario of the kid who was almost aborted experiencing psychological damage (spiritual wounding, even though not told) made perfect sense. And there may be some of that in my case, but I tend to think it would my guilt he is sensing versus the actual procedure. As in your example, I wonder if the child sensed something different about his mom’s behavior.

In my case, my kid has autism. Telling him full details may cause a whole lot more harm than good because of his poor ability to process information like a neurotypical person. Certainly if my kid was struggling with something and the information would help, I would never withhold the information. I am in favor of transparency.

Thanks again for your kindness.