A kind nurse practitioner delivered the news as best she could. Azoospermia. Zero sperm. Throughout the past year, my OBGYN constantly told me as we tried to "fix" what appeared to be anovulation and low progesterone on my end, "Don't worry, we can work with anything except a lack of sperm." To receive that diagnosis after months of injections, cocktails of different medications, and intensive monitoring was crushing. My husband and I were sent to a clinic shortly after to discuss our options. Very quickly, it became clear, without a certified miracle: IVF was apparently the only option for us to have biological children.
Believing the Church's teaching regarding IVF in the abstract is one thing. On a purely logical level, it had always made sense to me. I had read all the Catholic Answers articles, watched the Fr. Mike Schmitz videos and listened to podcasts on the topic. Many Catholics, I’m sure, could say the same.
It's another thing entirely to sit at a table, your dream of motherhood seemingly hanging in the balance as someone looks you in the eye and promises they can take your greatest pain away if you just agree to IVF. My husband and I understood and wholeheartedly agreed with the Church's teaching prohibiting it. But the truth of the teaching didn't make our pain disappear and certainly didn't make sense to many friends and relatives. Honestly, we seemed crazy.
Battered from a year of disappointments and the apparent loss of my most precious dream, I withdrew. I didn't want the questions, the pitying looks and, most of all, the confusion: "But why wouldn't you do IVF?" I knew this situation gave us a unique opportunity to witness the Church's teachings, but frankly, I had no interest. Deep down, I struggled.
Medical advances seemingly allowed us a chance at the life we dreamed of. And here we were, choosing to walk away, knowing that the door to biological children would be closed without a true, someone’s-getting-canonized level miracle. I will never see a positive pregnancy test. Never feel a baby kick from within. Never look into my child's eyes to see a reflection of myself and my husband gazing back at me. The grief is still enough to take my breath away at times.
And yet, to many, it seems IVF provided the exit ramp from our most profound suffering. From an outsider's perspective, everything we mourned so deeply could still be ours: the two pink lines, the flutters of tiny feet, the baby. Were we crazy not to take it?
The only way any of this makes sense is by going to the cross. When our Lord was hanging there, many reviled Him, yelling for Him to come down if He was truly the Son of God. And here's what we know that they didn't: He absolutely could have. He was, in that moment, still fully man and fully God. And as God, with a single thought, He could have taken Himself down.
"Come down from the cross!"
Just do IVF.
"If you are God's Son, save yourself!"
God wants you to have children, what if IVF is part of His plan?
"He saved others; let Him save Himself!"
I don't understand why you wouldn't at least try.
But He didn't come down.
And because He didn't, our salvation was won. Because He loved each one of us and the will of His Father more than His own life, He stayed on the cross to the end. In fact, scripture assures of His love with exactly that specific phrase: to the end.
“Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.” (John 13:1)
We are called to do the same: to love the Lord and the will of our Father to the very end. More than our dreams, and even our own lives. We could do IVF. That's something in our power. But we understand through the wisdom of the Church that this isn’t God’s will for our family. Christ could have come down from the cross. That was undoubtedly well within His power. But He didn't. He understood that wasn’t His Father’s will for Him. And because He didn't, we choose not to.
It's only through seeing our crosses through to the bitterest of ends that we can finally come to the fullness of joy in the resurrection. It is that hope that we cling to. If He had come down, we would still be lost to our sins, the gap between us and the Father unbreachable. But because He didn't, glory, redemption and eternal joy are promised to us who follow Him.
I don't know what resurrection will look like in our lives. Maybe it will be something my husband and I get to see in this lifetime, and possibly it won't come until eternity. But it is promised. Because He rose from the grave, we are assured that our grief and death (even the death of our dreams) are not the end of the story.
So, today, we will choose to stay on our cross beside Him and continue to pray for the courage to do so to the end. We look forward with great hope to the resurrection to come. And if our decision to walk away from IVF seems crazy, well, I would argue we're in good company because, if you think about it, a God who loved us enough to take on human flesh to suffer and die for our sake is probably pretty crazy, too.
Interested in other Fruitful Hollow blogs about IVF? Check out the links below: