HUMAN EMBRYO ADOPTION, VOLUME TWO: CATHOLIC ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST

Edited by Trent Horn and Kent Lasnoski

(National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2025, paperback, 396 pp., $34.95)

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THE ZYGOTE OF CHRIST AND THE MYSTERY OF MAN

Francis Etheredge and Elizabeth Rex

(En Route, 2025, paperback, 173 pp., $14.95)

Reviewed by Jason Morgan

Human Embryo Adoption, Volume Two—a follow-up to a 2006 edited work, now edited by Catholic Answers’ Trent Horn and theologian Kent Lasnoski—is aptly subtitled “Catholic arguments for and against” the practice of embryo adoption, which is transfer of a cryopreserved (frozen) human embryo from a suspended state at a fertility clinic to the uterus of a woman who is not the biological mother but who intends to nurture and raise the child. The term “embryo adoption” is most commonly distorted by physicians to “embryo donation” (p. 4). The difference in wording underscores a profound difference in understanding. For many physicians and other medical practitioners, embryos are “tissue, like blood products or gametes, and only potential lives” (p. 4). But that embryos are not just tissue is attested by the strenuousness of the debate over what should be done with them, some 1.5 million frozen embryos in the United States alone (p. 17). As the eighteen editors of and contributors to this volume make clear, people of good will can and do come to radically different conclusions about what is to be done with the frozen embryos, little human beings in an unnatural state of cryogenic suspension.

The teachings of Pope John Paul II and others of the twentieth- and twenty-first century Catholic Church are central to these debates, but there is no magisterial consensus on how these poor souls should be cared for, including how or even whether they should be freed from their frozen limbo. Contributor and Catholic Answers apologist Jimmy Akin points out that, in the 2008 document Dignitas personae (no. 19), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (under Pope Benedict XVI) referred to statements by John Paul II and observed that “the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (cited on p. 44; emphasis in original). As Akin (I think rightly) argues, John Paul II did not mean to say that nothing could or should be done about frozen embryos. And yet, the adoption of these embryos, as other contributors point out, involves much moral hazard. For example, Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Broomall, Pennsylvania, while acknowledging that “each of these [cryogenically] ensnared human embryos is a being with full dignity and human rights,” nevertheless holds that “embryo adoption is illicit and unlikely ever to be sanctioned by the Catholic Church” (pp. 125, 126). Fr. Pacholczyk’s reasoning is that “embryo implantation as a form of pregnancy initiation constitutes an intrinsic evil because of the instrumentalization and misuse of the goods of marriage when a woman is made pregnant using an IVF-derived embryo, apart from a unifying marital act with her husband” (p. 128; emphasis in original).

What should be done with the unborn children, then? Theology professor Irene Alexander proposes “thaw[ing] the embryos and allow[ing] them to die naturally” (p. 163). This would seem to be the inevitable fate for human beings, like those conceived in ectopic pregnancies, who have been given life but denied a womb. There is much internal cohesion in these and other statements by highly trained ethicists, theologians, and other thinkers. But one gets the distinct sense that there must be more to offer the “[cryogenically] ensnared” than the cold logic that saving them from suffering and death is not morally licit.

There is another way to think about this seemingly intractable problem of human beings trapped in the bitter cold of the laboratory machine, beings whose only escape would appear to be through the commission of another sin on top of the sinful manipulation of nature that created the conditions for their conception. Two of the most eloquent contributors to the volume, Fran-cis Etheredge and Elizabeth Rex, go into the heart of the mystery of man to find their answer. For Etheredge, a freelance writer and prolific bioethicist, and Rex, a bioethicist and associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and a former adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, the way forward is illuminated by the divinity of our Savior and by the dignified nature of the humanity which He, through His Mother, took on as part of the plan of salvation. As Etheredge writes, “the first instant of human personhood is integral to the incarnational union between Christ and all who come into existence. The identity of the human embryo is no less relevant to the identity of Mary, who was miraculously conceived without original sin and [. . .] could not be conceived without original sin if she were not one in body and soul from the first instant of fertilization” (p. 241). These miracles, Etheredge writes, should shape how we think about the children trapped in

suspended animation. “The discussion on embryo adoption takes place in the context of salvation history,” he observes. “It is not enough to speak of living in a fallen world, because the fallen world is embraced, from the beginning, in Christ’s work of redemption” (p. 242). Where moral philosophy falters, the unstoppable force of God’s salvation comes through.

We humans are not, in other words, as merely human as some moral theologians might presume. We love in “totality, like God, and not just in a functional sense,” Etheredge writes (pp. 255-256). Letting the light of God shine through the gauze of our human ratiocination about Him, Etheredge understands the Trinity to be at work “in the conception of every human being,” and argues that we should see the “psychological and spiritual suffering entailed in welcoming into a marriage a child who both came to exist outside the body and has no relation, beyond that of being human, to either the mother or the father who have adopted him or her as an embryonic infant child” as analogous to the “spiritual and psychological uncertainty” that “Mary suffered” when she “became pregnant from the mysterious action of the Holy Spirit before she came to live with Joseph” (pp. 246-248). The Christian thing to do, beyond but including being the right thing, is to let the babies live. “Offering the hospitality of the woman’s womb [to a frozen embryo] [cannot] be separated from her total identity as a person called to love” (p. 256). Therefore, Etheredge concludes, embryo adoption, in its holistic reality, contributes to the reciprocal gift of person-hood to which each of us is called and from which, in a dramatically real way, the frozen embryo is excluded—both the naturally dynamic engagement as integral to his or her living response to life and the mother’s recognition of her vocation as taken up into relationship with the Author of life to whom, as it were, she will introduce her child. In other words, the mother stands in a certain more direct relationship to the action of God at conception than does the man, and in view of this, she introduces him to that action, so that together they can bring the child up in the perspective of the relationship to God which his action at the child’s conception has established (pp. 256-257).

For Etheredge, motherhood is not simply a function of marriage or wholly subordinate to the theology of such, but is rather something even more mysterious, imbued by God with an expansive and even cooperatively redemptive power that overcomes the “intrinsic evil” of implanting a child conceived by another mother and father into the uterus of a mother who will bear the child whom God Himself has loved into existence. The mother, on Etheredge’s liberating reading of human conception and development, is the conduit of a grace that breaks free of human sinfulness.

Elizabeth Rex takes up a similar line of argument in her work in the ed-ited volume. Rex places the “theology of the body” teachings of Pope John Paul II in historical context while also giving full moral and theological rein to them in arguing that “the theology of the body defends the dignity of the body as inseparable from the dignity of the person” (pp. 270-271). The Magisterium (that is, the teaching authority) of the Catholic Church, Rex points out, “praises the adoption of orphans,” a teaching in keeping with “the Church’s unchangeable doctrine on the dignity of the human person” which “makes clear that the responsibility to protect frozen embryos from harm and death is not just a secondary concern but rather a moral imperative” (pp. 277-278). In this broader view of human dignity, Rex writes,

the only moral options for parents who have surplus frozen embryos is to practice what the Theology of the Body has called “responsible parenthood”. It is the duty of the parents who have frozen embryos to responsibly decide whether to (1) lovingly raise their own children or (2) lovingly place their frozen embryos for adoption by a married couple longing to start a family or increase their family by means of adoption. The Catechism—under the heading of “The gift of a child”—eloquently praises adoption and encourages married couples to “give expression to their generosity by adopting abandoned children” (pp. 279-280).

Jesus Himself, Rex reminds us, teaches that “‘What you do to one of the least of my brethren, you do unto me’ (Mt 25:40)” (p. 291).

If Etheredge and Rex make arguments in Human Embryo Adoption, Volume Two that are complementary, this is no coincidence. The two authors are collaborators in a way that goes beyond being co-contributors to an edited work. They are, in fact, the co-authors of The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man (En Route, 2025), in which they actively build on one another’s scholarship in elaborating their profoundly spiritual view of the human per-son at every moment of his or her natural life. Informative essays republished from other journals form the last fifth or so of their book, and the remaining chapters are sourced from some of their other writings. Taken as a whole, the chapters in The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man provide a beautiful portrait of the human person as “an indivisibly psychosomatic being from conception” (as Etheredge puts it), an act that both authors affirm is “an icon of the beginning,” of God’s Creation (pp. 7, 41, 73).

To answer the questions and overcome the moral quandaries surrounding embryo adoption, we must go back to the start of each one of us and rediscover our true identity as created in the image and likeness of God. We must remember that we are loved into existence and therefore are carried along by a goodness and a power that demolish the logical contradictions ham-stringing us in our wish to do what seems right from a human perspective, no matter how dedicated to the service and the truth of God. To those who might leap to the conclusion that a demolished human reason makes permissible any assault on the human person so long as that assault is couched in the language of “love,” I would caution that the love that Etheredge and Rex mean is the love of God, which is always life-giving, always the conqueror of death. Each human being is “‘one’ being,” Etheredge emphasizes, stressing the “‘immediately’ enfleshed and animating human ensoulment of the human being” (p. 43). The beginning of the human being at conception, Etheredge argues, is a “mystery” in which God is “completely” and “intimate[ly] ‘involve[d]’” (p. 46). Human persons and God work together in “a truly human-divine act of begetting a child of man, male and female, and a child of God” (p. 46).

From this it follows that there are two kinds of arguments for embryonic adoption, a natural argument and a supernatural one. On the natural plane, “a child conceived outside of the womb is without the immediate possibility of benefitting from the mother’s nurturing contribution to the completion of embryological development”; such a child is therefore “dependent on being given hospitality in the womb of [another] woman” (pp. 60-61). Supernaturally, “God’s saving acts are always in the context of man’s prior sin. Thus man’s prior sin is not an obstacle to God’s saving acts but, rather, the ‘occasion’ of God showing a love greater than the death of sin” (p. 63). It is God, and not man, who is in control of reproduction. We need only try to love as He loves, and all will work out in the end. In the light of the Incarnation, the acts that humans do out of love for the innocent who suffer injustice are redeemed, in Etheredge’s view, by the greater love of God.

Just as God’s gift of life is completely gratuitous, so an act of redemptive love is completely gratuitous; and, just as God gives human life according to the covenant of the flesh He founded, so His saving acts are according to the needs of the human life conceived. Nevertheless, even the gratuitous nature of redeeming love acts in accordance with the natural law that expresses our human participation in the divine law; and, therefore, what is done to rescue an illicitly conceived child is completely different to the action which caused the child’s embryological, developmental and relational ‘homelessness’: the injustice expressed in the conception of a ‘maternally homeless’ child is addressed by the justice of an indispensably generously gratuitous adopting love. In a word, just as redemption goes beyond original sin without endorsing it, so an adopting love goes beyond the injustice of a child conceived ‘maternally homeless’ without endorsing the method through which the injustice was perpetrated (pp. 64-65).

Rex echoes these sentiments in her own chapters of The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man. For example, in Rex’s “Icon of the Beginning” es-say, she writes of a series of photographs published in Scientific Reports in August 2016, which show “the ‘transformative’ moment of human conception as billions of zinc ions, referred to as ‘zinc sparks,’ suddenly burst through the cellular wall of the newly fertilized human egg that has become a human

embryo” (p. 109). For Rex, writing in an Etheredgean vein, this moment is not simply biologically significant, but is also defined by its theological con-text. “What can these absolutely stunning photographs reveal to us,” Rex asks, “about Mary’s Conception and Jesus’ Incarnation, and about every human being who has ever been conceived?” (p. 111). Rex answers that “beautifully im-plicit [. . .] in the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the necessary truth that God must also immediately create and directly infuse our spiritual and rational souls into our one-cell human bodies at the very first instant of human conception” (p. 112). The photographs of the illu-minated moments when sperm and egg unite to produce a new human being have been “hailed” by “many commentators,” Rex writes, “as a tiny glimpse, as a miniature ‘icon,’ of the very beginning of Creation itself, when God the Creator summoned the entire universe into existence from nothing, ex nihilo, with His almighty command, ‘Let there be light!’” (p. 112).

Both Human Embryo Adoption, Volume Two: Catholic Arguments For and Against and The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man are important volumes for understanding many of the thorny bioethical questions of fertility treatments. (Many, but not all. Stem cell research is not covered extensively in either volume, so readers will have to seek out moral and theological reasoning on this issue separately.) To my mind, however, The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man is the volume that succeeds in answering such questions, beyond simply understanding them. We are born from a pure act of self-gift by God, a sacrifice that, as many other thinkers (including John Paul II) have taught, can be imitated by husband and wife in our limited, human way. I believe that Etheredge and Rex get to the very heart of the matter when they say that the human person is not simply clothed in dignity but is part of the divine sacrifice of love that God chose to perform at the Im-maculate Conception, at the Incarnation, and, in a deeply related way, at the conception of us all. I closed The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man in agreement with Etheredge and Rex. Our brothers and sisters in the indignity of cold storage are suffering. Let us go to them and save their lives, confident that the God Who created them and us will overcome the world.

I hope everyone reading this review will read The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man and relearn, as I did from Francis Etheredge and Elizabeth Rex, that we are pro-life because we are loved and therefore commanded to love others in turn. No humanly induced condition—not imprisonment, not even in a cryogenic bottle—can stop the love of God. No logic is sufficient to prevent God, who works through us, from breaking through, as the light did at the creation, and as it still does at the creation of each of us.

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Original Bio:

Jason Morgan is an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan