How does the Church regard medical help for childless couples, and technologies such as in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy?

Children are a desired fruit of holy Matrimony, but not its only purpose: the marriage service asks not only for ‘the fruit of the womb,’ but for enduring love, chastity, and the harmony of souls and bodies. The Church therefore blesses the medical treatment of infertility by therapeutic and surgical means; and among admissible forms of assistance may be counted artificial insemination with the husband’s own cells, since this does not violate the integrity of the marital union and does not differ essentially from natural conception within it (Basis of the Social Concept, XII.4). Where no remedy avails, spouses are called to accept childlessness humbly as a special calling in life, and pastoral counsel should set before them the adoption of a child by their mutual consent, a work of love the Church has always honored.

Inadmissible, however, are those paths to childbirth that contradict the design of the Creator of life (BSC XII.4): the use of donor cells, which intrudes a third party into the one-flesh union and severs parenthood from responsibility; ‘surrogate motherhood,’ which is unnatural and morally inadmissible even when non-commercial, trampling the profound bond formed between mother and child in the womb; and every form of extracorporeal (in-vitro) fertilization that involves the production, conservation, and deliberate destruction of ‘spare’ embryos, for the embryo bears human dignity from conception, the very truth on which the Church’s judgment of abortion rests. Likewise, the pursuit of ‘reproductive rights’ outside marriage deprives the future child, by design, of a father and a mother. A human life is a gift to be received, never a product to be manufactured, selected, or disposed of (cf. Psa 127:3: “children are a heritage from the LORD”; see Q568).