Nate13 and Leegal: I lumped together some quotes to focus my responses.
“Describe this “possibility” in more detail. If a married couple were able to complete the act and a doctor was able to then go in and entice a sperm to meet an egg, I don’t think the Church would have a problem with that at all. The coupled completed the act as they should, and all the doctor would be doing is helping a woman’s body to act as it should.”
“It is morally significant because the conception must take place INSIDE the woman’s body in the course of normal marital realtions…You don’t have to believe me; look it up. The process of conception that takes place OUTSIDE of the female’s body is condemned by the Church.”
In my example, the doctors would not be helping the woman’s body to act as it should, rather, they would be conducting the action of the conception, after a martial act let us say, inside her body just as they would have should they have taken the genetic material from the same marital act and done so outside her body. They are not helping the body to actively conceive, but rather conducting the action of conception in her body. Would the fact that this process is occurring inside her body rather than outside of it (even if it was done with genetica material from a marital act) mean that her body was any more acting as it should? When the Church writes, “They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. 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”, this leads me to think that they might still have an issue with such a procedure. This would mean that even if occurring inside the woman’s body was a necessary condition of the act being morally licit, it would not be sufficient such that not all conceptions that occurred inside the woman’s body would be morally licit even if the conception, in a sense, resulted from a martial act. If this were true, the Church would not be rejecting IVF solely because it was a procreative act without a sexual one. Given the example, it seems that the act might be wrong for the Church because it embodies a procreative act that conducted by doctors instead of one that resulted from the sexual act by itself. An interesting question might be whether or not it would make a difference if the spouses themselves were the doctors.
“IVF also requires some other things to happen that are morally suspect. For example you have to get sperm somehow to fertilize the eggs which will require some sort of masturbation on the man’s part. There is also the fact that many times with IVF you are destroying some fertilized eggs in your attempt to get pregnant because not all of them are needed. IVF does not work with our bodies. It is an attempt to distort our bodies to work how we would like them too, and give us what we want when we want it.”
“At present there is no other possible way, unless you want a ruling on Surrogacy, which still requires the man to masturbate… This is what we have now. You either get pregnant through natural means or a doctor extracts multiple eggs, the husband masturbates (another sin) and then some eggs (multiples because of the high cost and risks of successful implantation) and then takes the fertilized egg and reimplants it.”
Consider the following example: a couple has sex and doctors proceed the sperm and an egg from this martial act. The doctors would then proceed to use in vitro to conduct fertilization and then place the embryo into the woman. Would this be licit? If it wasn’t, it does not seem that it could be faulted due to masturbation. Further, in this example, IVF would not entail the destruction of the other eggs and thus it does not seem as though it could be faulted on this ground either. To continue, as an intentional act, it might be argued that IVF is procreative such that if we are ordered toward procreation, why would it be the case that IVF was a distortion of anything?
Layman F:
To discuss artificial insemination, if the sperm or egg came from a person who was not one of the spouses, this, it seems to me, could be said to me to be morally wrong in that the procreation, as a matter of the substance of the child, is not constituted by the two married persons. In IVF, the third party work is procedural—the genetic material is of the two spouses—and might be said to be morally different in this respect.
… but thanks to all who answered. I guess I didn’t understand in vitro correctly. Artificial insemination is what I was thinking, but I’ve got plenty to ruminate over!