My wife and I looked into Ebryo adoption about three years ago. At that time, the church had not announced an official policy. I’m not sure if that has changed, but here is my understanding from three years ago:
The act of embryo adoption is not morally wrong. It is no different from any other adoption. These are babies who’s parents did not want or could not raise. By adopting them, you are giving them a chance at life.
My understanding of the church’s hesitance to declare this as morally good is the fear that this will create a market for more parents to create children they have no intention of raising in attempts to have their own biological children.
In the end, we chose not to adopt an embryo; not because of anything the church said, but because the government does not consider this an acctual adoption. We would not qualify for the adoption tax credit, and insurance would not pay for the process unless you go through IVF. Ironic, since this would be a less costly procedure for insurance to pay for.
We chose to proceed with a standard adoption. While getting our profile together, an amazing thing happend. We got pregnant naturally, and are the parents of an amazing little girl, but that’s another story.
That’s great that you and your wife were blessed with a natural pregnancy and now a little girl - I don’t know how you managed it, but it suggests to me that one must exhaust all avenues which are approved by the Church. One which many people are turning to, which the fertility expert mentioned in the video link I provided earlier, is NaPro technology. It is becoming a popular choice with couples experiencing fertility problems, and it has a growing success rate.
Unfortunately, the first immoral act was not the fault of those who are considering “embryo adoption” - it was the party involved in IVF who created extra embryos “to be on the safe side”.
Dignitas Personae addresses the question of how the remaining frozen embryos are to be dealt with. It clearly dismisses embryo adoption as being immoral:
'19. With regard to the large number of frozen embryos already in existence the question becomes: what to do with them? Some of those who pose this question do not grasp its ethical nature, motivated as they are by laws in some countries that require cryopreservation centers to empty their storage tanks periodically. Others, however, are aware that a grave injustice has been perpetrated and wonder how best to respond to the duty of resolving it.
Proposals to use these embryos for research or for the treatment of disease are obviously unacceptable because they treat the embryos as mere “biological material” and result in their destruction. The proposal to thaw such embryos without reactivating them and use them for research, as if they were normal cadavers, is also unacceptable.37
The proposal that these embryos could be put at the disposal of infertile couples as a treatment for infertility is not
ethically acceptable for the same reasons which make artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood;38 this practice would also lead to other problems of a medical, psychological and legal nature.
It has also been proposed, solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction, that there could be a form of “prenatal adoption”. This proposal, praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above.
All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved. Therefore John Paul II made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”.’
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Dignitas Personae, section 19)
