Extrapolation from those figures shows that about 170,000 human embryos actually died in the attempts by doctors to bring about the birth of a child through in vitro fertilization.
This calculation was made in an article by Dr. James P. Toner on progress on IVF in the journal Fertility and Sterility, and reported by LifeSite.
Voicing the Church’s condemnation of IVF, John Paul II said at the Jubilee for Families in 2000: “The tendency to use practices which are morally unacceptable in the generation [of children] betrays the absurdity of the ‘right to a child,’ which takes the place of the correct recognition of the right of a child to be born and then to grow in a fully human way.”
The Pope encouraged couples unable to conceive a child to turn to adoption, a “true exercise of charity that places children’s well-being before parental needs.”
The Centers for Disease Control statistics for 1999 may be found at www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/drh/ART99/section1.htm.
