This paper is centrally concerned with a relatively narrow question: Could the practice of human embryo transfer be intrinsically immoral, malum in se, in particular because it is in some way a violation of the good of marriage? While I will answer in the negative to this narrow question, I want first to identify just a few of the wider questions with which I am not primarily concerned, but which I think the narrow question opens up as important. I will return to some of these wider issues at the end of the paper.
The narrow question is about embryo transfer, not embryo adoption. Embryo transfer might be done for a variety of ends: As part of an IVF procedure, for the sake of a surrogacy arrangement, to rescue a frozen embryo with a view to putting the child up for adoption later, or as part of adopting that embryo. But the distinction between transfer for rescue and transfer for adoption has been seen as important by some commentators. Helen Watt, for example, has argued that transfer for rescue is morally wrong, whereas transfer for adoption is not (Watt, 2001).1 But if this is true, it can only be true because embryo transfer is not itself intrinsically immoral. Since embryo transfer is part of any proposal to adopt an embryo (that does not involve some surrogacy arrangement), if embryo transfer were intrinsically wrong, so would embryo adoption be.
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Tollefsen, C.O. (2007). Could Human Embryo Transfer Be Intrinsically Immoral?. In: Brakman, SV., Weaver, D.F. (eds) The Ethics of Embryo Adoption and the Catholic Tradition. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 95. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6211-7_5
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