The article's author, Dr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, says, in this first paragraph: "In December, with great fanfare, the Vatican released Dignitas Personae, its latest report on bioethics. Sad to say, the document demonstrates once more that a morality rooted in outdated, pre-scientific understanding is not appropriate to modern realities."

Dignitas Personae in full: http://www.usccb.org/comm/Dignitaspersonae/Dignitas_Personae...

How does Dr. Krauss argue the Church demonstrates its "outdated, pre-scientific understanding"?

"I refer not to the hot-button issues of abortion or stem cell research but to the Catholic church's continued opposition to a decidedly pro-life medical intervention: in vitro fertilisation."

Interesting that Dr. Krauss chose to say IVF is "decidedly pro-life." Is a medical intervention pro-life if it results in the birth of one child but the death of four to engineer that birth?

He goes on to say that the Church opposed IVF because "as I understand it, that a baby conceived by this method would not have a soul." Dr. Krauss understands incorrectly, as the Church did not advocate this position (it contradicts the Church's own teaching on the nature of body and soul).

Dr. Krauss wonders "whose dignity is enhanced by withholding medically viable methods that have allowed infertile couples, now numbering in the millions, to conceive and give birth to children they will love."

Dignitas Personae gives him his answer on page 6: "The Church, by expressing an ethical judgment on some developments of recent medical research concerning man and his beginnings, does not intervene in the area proper to medical science itself, but rather calls everyone to ethical and social responsibility for their actions. She reminds them that the ethical value of biomedical science is gauged in reference to both the unconditional respect owed to every human being at every moment of his or her existence."

In other words, the Church concerns itself with the dignity every human being deserves, no matter how small or how young, or how weak or how old. Performing a medically viable procedure that kills four children to implant one ... doesn't respect the dignity of those four now-dead children.

Page 8 of DP gets right to this point: "It should be recognized, however, that given the proportion between the total number of embryos produced and those eventually born, the number of embryos sacrificed is extremely high. [Footnote 27: Currently the number of embryos sacrificed, even in the most technically advanced centers of artificial fertilization, hovers above 80%.] These losses are accepted by the practitioners of in vitro fertilization as the price to be paid for positive results. In reality, it is deeply disturbing that research in this area aims principally at obtaining better results in terms of the percentage of babies born to women who begin the process, but does not manifest a concrete interest in the right to life of each individual embryo."

Dignitae Personae goes on to discuss IVF on the next page: " Embryos produced in vitro which have defects are directly discarded. Cases are becoming ever more prevalent in which couples who have no fertility problems are using artificial means of procreation in order to engage in genetic election of their offspring. In many countries, it is now common to stimulate ovulation so as to obtain a large number of oocytes which are then fertilized. Of these, some are transferred into the woman’s uterus, while the others are frozen for future use. The reason for multiple transfer is to increase the probability that at least one embryo will implant in the uterus. In this technique, therefore, the number of embryos transferred is greater than the single child desired, in the expectation that some embryos will be lost and multiple pregnancy may not occur. In this way, the practice of multiple embryo transfer implies a purely utilitarian treatment of embryos. One is struck by the fact that, in any other area of medicine, ordinary professional ethics and the healthcare authorities themselves would never allow a medical procedure which involved such a high number of failures and fatalities. In fact, techniques of in vitro fertilization are accepted based on the presupposition that the individual embryo is not deserving of full respect in the presence of the competing desire for offspring which must be satisfied."

And in the next paragraph, Dignitas Personae directly responds to Dr. Krauss' view that IVF is a "decidedly pro-life": "This sad reality, which often goes unmentioned, is truly deplorable: the "various techniques of artificial reproduction, which would seem to be at the service of life and which are frequently used with this intention, actually open the door to new threats against life"."

There's much more.

The Church certainly understands the "biomedical understanding of human conception." But yes, the Church is guilty of "allow[ing] the foundations of its morality to be fixed in the past" -- moral foundations don't seem like something that ought to change -- Thou shalt not kill seems as if it should be true today and tomorrow, just as it was yesterday. But Dr. Krauss is incorrect to claim that the Church is "ignoring advances based on changing knowledge." She isn't. She's engaging with scientific advances and understanding them, and analyzing them from a moral and ethical perspective. Then, on the basis of her moral authority, she says what she sees -- that morality doesn't change just because science does, if it was wrong to kill a man with a sword it's still wrong to kill him with a gun.