Is sperm donation a sin?

Hello,

I am a Catholic man who, with his wife, is in the middle of the journey to pregnancy… But we’ve waited for too long and now our chances to have a baby naturally are quite low… God knows we’ve been trying so hard and for too long to have offspring, but the Lord did not want to provide us with that gift… We don’t know why, because we’ve followed Christian patters through our whole lives and above all during marriage, and I think we deserve to have offspring 🙁 That’s why we’ve done some research in the field of science, and we are considering starting a fertility treatment using donor sperm, because it is me who suffers from infertility 🙁 The thing is, we don’t know if sperm donation is a huge sin, because my wife will be fertilized by an unknown man and our child will be half hers, but the other half won’t be mine. Of course, the insemination must be anonymoys, for God’s sake! Can anybody give me an answer, please?

Hello George,

Although the answer to your question is rather difficult to summarize, I’ll try to be as clear as I can. As you know, this question is related to the Catholic religion.

Thus, the fact that half the genetic material of your child is not from one of the parents (in this case, the man, but this also applies in cases of egg donation), is considered to “bypass” God’s will by the followers of the Catholic Church. According to them, if God wanted someone to have children, he would allow him or her to have so, without needing to use the sperm from anybody else.

To sum up, the creation of a new life lies in the hands of God, and despite reproductive technologies may aid some couples in the journey to pregnancy, they are not the source of life, and it continues to be in God’s hands the fact that the embryo finally implants or not, so he is the one, according to the Catholic religion, responsible for allowing embryo implantation to occur or not.

As for a married woman introducing the sperm from another man inside her body, the Catholic Church is not too supportive with it, since it is considered to contravene the basic foundation of this religion, that is, marriage above all.

There is also another aspect disapproved by the Catholic Church in relation to gamete donation: embryo freezing. From their point of view, embryo freezing is another way of abortion, since some embryos are later destroyed and others, despite being frozen, are never implanted. Therefore, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, embryo freezing is also wrong.

All in all, the central point of the Catholic Church is that a good believer should pray and wait for an answer from God.

The following topics may be of interest, too:

– Is the Catholic Church against surrogacy?
– Religious views on artificial insemination by donor

Hope this helps