Stacy A. Trasancos’ life changed after she read the Catholic Church’s teaching on children.
“I was a chemist and really had bought into this scientism,” she remembered her life before converting to Catholicism. “I was completely of the mindset that the human person is a collection of atoms.”
Then she came across a passage in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that recognizes children as the “supreme gift of marriage” (No. 2378).
“It made me start rethinking, ‘What is the human person? What does it mean to have a child? What does it mean for me to be human? What is the meaning and purpose in my life?'” she told Our Sunday Visitor. “(It) also got me thinking, ‘What does it mean to be married?'”
Trasancos addresses these questions and more in her new book, “IVF is Not the Way: The False Promises of Artificial Procreation,” available from Sophia Institute Press beginning May 20. The book promises to respond to today’s ongoing sociopolitical discussions about in vitro fertilization (IVF) — a procedure in which embryos are created in a laboratory and then transferred to a woman’s womb — by drawing from the Church’s teaching on marriage and human dignity.
With her latest work, Trasancos presents the Church’s position against IVF while acknowledging the struggles of couples with infertility — couples who are often told to see IVF as a solution — as well as the struggles of couples who have already used IVF to have children. She divides her book into three sections: “history and terminology,” where she delves into the history of artificial procreation and Church teaching; “the argument” against IVF; and “case studies” that address, among other things, the dilemma of more than one million frozen embryonic children, a result of IVF.
Trasancos, an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University, Holy Apostles College and Seminary and Belmont Abbey College, serves as a fellow for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Institute. The publication of her book comes after a recent Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of U.S. Catholics (88%), including a majority of U.S. Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly (71%), say the Church should allow couples to use IVF to get pregnant.
“Unless you really understand what it means to be human, you can’t understand why we think embryos and zygotes have human dignity,” Trasancos said of Church teaching. “Unless you can get into all of that, you can’t really make the case against abortion, IVF, contraception, divorce.”
She saw her book, she said, as an opportunity to delve into all of this.
A summary of Church teaching
Trasancos shared how Catholics can summarize Church teaching if they are approached about IVF. She pointed to what she called the “Principle of Inseparability,” a term that appears in her book.
“We cannot separate life-giving from love-making,” she said, citing scholar Joseph Boyle, who wrote about “Vatican instruction on reproductive technologies” in 1988 for The Linacre Quarterly. “It’s illicit to separate the unitive and the procreative aspects of the conjugal act.”
She recognized that non-Catholics and even many Catholics might think this terminology sounds like theological jargon.
“We’re talking about marital sex, and you can’t take life-giving and separate it from love-making,” she added. “Contraception removes the life-giving aspect and IVF removes the love-making aspect.”
The Church’s teaching here delves into the dignity of the human person, she said.
“When it comes to cooperating with God to bring into existence a new human being, it’s that important — a new baby, a new human — that it has to be within this complete and total intimacy of the unitive and procreative aspect of the conjugal act.”
Trasancos also said that Church teaching focuses on what is best for the child, adding that a child “has a right to be conceived in that kind of love.”
A private encounter with truth
Trasancos’ book has already received endorsements from Catholic leaders and scholars including Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington in Virginia, who also wrote the forward of the book, and Charles C. Camosy, professor of medical humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine.
“My prayer with the book is that it allows someone to hold it in their hands and have that private encounter with the truth and the teachings of the Church that might be hard to hear,” Trasancos said. “That it really starts a process where the person reading it finds the courage to talk to other people about it.”
For readers who disagree with the Church, she hoped that the book would help them see the beauty in its teaching.
If readers take away one message from her book, Trasancos wants that to be hope. That includes hope for couples who have already used IVF (Trasancos writes about women who have used, and are now haunted by, IVF and the consequences of it) and hope for couples struggling with infertility.
A hold on hope
Trasancos dedicates the book to her Aunt Danna and Uncle Kenneth Cash, who struggled with infertility.
She shared their story: Her aunt and uncle lost their first baby during pregnancy, and, when medical professionals removed the baby’s body, they ruptured her aunt’s uterus. They could no longer have children. But the couple went on to welcome more than 100 children into their home through fostering and two children through adoption.
“Talk about (an) abundance of life,” Trasancos said. “It did turn into a blessing for them.”
Trasancos, a mother and grandmother, also hopes to share what she has learned: that children are a gift.
“When you do understand what it means to be human and what it means to be married and then you say children are a gift, you also realize they’re not yours,” she said. “They’re not commodities, they’re not products.”
“They’re something entrusted to you by God,” she concluded, “and they belong to God.”
