When Laura Elm started a job at a national insurance company, she managed benefits for in vitro fertilization and performance evaluations for IVF centers based on the number of babies born singly and healthy. “I had this gut feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, that maybe this was a line of work that really wasn’t something I should enter into,” she said.
Elm addressed her role in the insurance industry on a recent episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show, and what it moved her to do instead.
“It didn’t take me very long to realize that I had stepped into something pretty tragic, and quickly got out of the work,” she said. In vitro fertilization, an option used by some couples facing infertility, involves creating embryos by mixing eggs and sperm in a lab dish.
Laura Elm
The Catholic Church teaches that children born through in vitro fertilization are to be loved and cherished, but the act of such fertilization is immoral because it eliminates the marriage act as the means of achieving pregnancy. In vitro fertilization also frequently leads to discarding unused embryos or using them in experiments.
Elm didn’t know at that time what the Church teaches about IVF as a technology, and she believed she couldn’t be the only person who did not know. Learning more inspired Elm to send postcards to IVF infertility centers and call their lab personnel to ask if they would send the remains of deceased embryos to the organization she founded, Sacred Heart Guardians and Shelter, for proper burial. Because of its generous donors, Elm’s organization in Minnesota covers all shipping and burial costs.
Elm typically gets hang-ups and “strongly worded responses” when she explains her request, but some lab personnel agree to send deceased embryos for burial.
“Every now and then I get somebody who says, ‘I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way,’” she said. “I feel like that in itself is a success —having somebody pause, kind of shocking them into a different way of thinking. This isn’t just an agent to a pregnancy.”
She also is starting to make the same request to academic institutes that engage in what she called “embryo-destructive research.”
“One of the sad things that gets shared back,” she said, “is that, even if they were to engage with us, which they say they won’t, … they would say there’s nothing left of that human being by the time they’re done. These embryos are so, so tiny. But they were here. … And we do our very best with what we can to treat them with dignity.”
Elm called infertility a “devastating condition” and believes, by and large, fertility centers are trying to do good. She said the problem is IVF clinics give patients a lot of information about the procedure, but not about the elephant in the room. “These are human beings,” Elm said. “And you really can’t be a human being without being a human person and having both a physical body and a spiritual, eternal soul. And none of that is what’s presented at the fertility clinic.”
For more information on Elm’s organization, visit SacredHeartGuardians.org or search for Sacred Heart Guardians and Shelter on Facebook.
Elm has had some success. To learn the number of remains her organization has received for burial from IVF labs so far, and to hear the full interview, listen to this episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show. It airs at 9 p.m. June 18, 1 p.m. June 19 and 2 p.m. June 20 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Bishop Andrew Cozzens, who discusses physical and spiritual fatherhood in imitation of St. Joseph, and Tim Cahill and Nestor Arguello from Catholic Beer Club, who address ways to cultivate friendships as adults.
Listen to all of the interviews after they have aired at:
soundcloud.com/PracticingCatholic
tinyurl.com/PracticingCatholic (Spotify)
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