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Treat a Dead Embryo Like a Miscarriage

Question:

Should a funeral/burial be performed for an embryo that wasn’t implanted via en vitro fertilization? What about baptism?

Answer:

The sad answer is no. The instruction Dignitas Personae, issued by the Holy See on order of St. John Paul II, points out that the issue of frozen embryos is a case where immorality has gone to such a point that there is no morally acceptable solution to their existence and development. This document argued against the practice of “adopting” frozen embryos, a practice promoted by some Catholics in good faith but which is too fraught with moral difficulties to be an acceptable solution. At the least, the embryo, say, if left to thaw and so to die definitively, should be treated as would a miscarriage. And there has never been and is not now any obligation to baptize or to bury a miscarriage.

Although it is unfashionable to say it, it remains true that the Church has never and can never pronounce on the exact moment of the infusion of the rational soul of the unborn, which alone makes the unborn a person. Even St. John Paul, always a careful theologian, who personally held that the rational soul was present from fertilization, did not present this opinion as certain. The older Catholic tradition assumed for various reasons that the rational soul was infused later in the process of gestation. In all cases, however, the human embryo and fetus must be treated as a full human person.

As St. Cyprian taught, “He who intends to kill a man, kills a man,” meaning that abortion at any stage involves the willingness to murder a human person. This is perhaps more information than you asked for, but it is necessary as a context for the answer you are seeking.

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