Modern Crosses: How Christian Women Navigate Gender, Religion, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

The increasing use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has raised moral and ethical questions, around the creation of embryos that are discarded or otherwise do not survive the IVF process, as well as around the large-scale freezing of embryos in storage facilities. While conservative Protestants and the Catholic Church have been vocal about protecting the embryo in their opposition to abortion and stem cell research, their positions regarding ARTs diverge. Protestant denominations generally support the use of IVF and have largely remained silent about ethical or moral concerns. Catholicism, on the other hand, is the most restrictive religion in its position on ARTs. This dissertation examines how devout Catholic and evangelical Protestant women struggling with infertility navigate gender, technology, and religion when they encounter ARTs that threaten what they consider to be sacred. Drawing on interviews with 75 Catholic and Protestant women, I found that these two groups of women, who are often considered to have uniform positions regarding the moral status of the embryo as life, actually have distinct views on how life should be created and the circumstances under which embryo loss is permissible or not. For evangelicals, ARTs were collaborative co-creators with God and within the bounds of nature. For devout Catholics, the technology disrupted the natural order by supplanting God's role in life's creation. Religious schemas provided devout Catholic women with different cultural resources that help them to avoid using ARTs while still reckoning with the ideal of biological parenthood. They drew on religion to find value and meaning in their suffering, move beyond biological motherhood, and achieve a moral femininity. While religion increased the burden of xi reproduction for devout women, it also provided the cultural resources to resist the financial, emotional, and physical difficulties experienced by women who use ARTs. For evangelical women, a deep opposition to abortion on the grounds that it destroys life and a belief in the personhood of the embryo coexisted with a reluctant acceptance of embryo loss under certain circumstances when using ARTs. In their moral reasoning, evangelical women enacted culturally valued forms of femininity that prepared them to envision themselves as mothers and enabled the achievement of attachments and kin relations that the women longed for, and were also invoked to explain why embryo loss was morally permissible in IVF treatments. By drawing on cultural ideals of femininity, the women constructed themselves as deserving of motherhood. These personal negotiations shed light on larger debates about when and why embryo loss becomes a moral issue. I argue that the fertility clinic and its largely white, middle-class clientele are shielded from the moral condemnation that abortion clinics face, because in the former, the loss of embryos occurs in a space where women are striving to become mothers. This study suggests that the fertility clinic and the abortion clinic occupy different spaces within the moral hierarchies of the stratified system of reproduction. This study contributes to our understanding of how religious sensibilities mediate one‘s relationship with ARTs in diverse ways.