Catholic pro-life activists are confident a bill aimed at regulating assisted reproduction – and containing several provisions that go against Church teaching – may be shelved by a majority of lawmakers in Ecuador.
The bill, which was about to be put to a vote but had its consideration suspended at the end of July, is part of what pro-life movements describe as an offensive by various sectors of society to promote legislation contrary to the defense of life in the Andean nation.
Three legislative proposals were combined and introduced as a single bill on assisted reproduction in the Ecuadorian Congress earlier this year.
Lawmakers advocating its approval argue that assisted reproduction has been practiced in Ecuador for several years without regulation or state oversight, and that it is therefore time to establish legislation governing such practices.
But the bill contains a number of provisions that pro-lifers in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, cannot accept. That is why the Ecuadorian bishops issued a letter in August criticizing the bill and pointing out several elements that, in their view, should not move forward.
The main issue is in vitro fertilization and the creation of embryos in laboratories. In an attempt to regulate assisted reproduction in general, the bill recognizes such practices as legal, something that contradicts the Church’s position.
The free donation of gametes for in vitro conception – along with the donor’s right to remain anonymous – violates, according to the bishops, children’s right to know who their biological parents are.
They also argued that legalizing the sale of gametes would amount to the commodification of genetic material.
The creation of embryos in a medical setting not only can undermine the traditional understanding of the family according to Catholic teaching, but also leads to the freezing of embryos that are not implanted in the mother’s womb. Those embryos already possess the dignity of human life, the bishops emphasized.
“These forms of assisted, artificial human reproduction have been practiced for many years in other countries and, more recently, in Ecuador,” Archbishop Eduardo Castillo of Portoviejo told Crux Now.
Pro-life activists describe Castillo as one of the bishops most engaged in campaigns for life in Ecuador.
“Negative psychological, health-related and social consequences have already been observed over the decades, so it is irresponsible to continue down the same path,” Castillo said, adding that many physicians had founded small, private assisted reproduction clinics in many cases motivated by “pure economic interest.”
“Couples are driven by a legitimate desire to become parents and end up giving doctors ownership of their embryos. Serious problems of conscience emerge later,” he said.
a prominent pro-life activist in Ecuador, Amparo Medina, told Crux Now the bioethical dilemmas generated by the bill would lead to long-term social problems if the proposal should pass.
“The most critical point of violence and dehumanization occurs in the laboratory: in order to achieve a single birth, more than 10 embryos are routinely artificially fertilized,” Medina said.
“Those that fail to meet the selection criteria are tragically discarded, extinguishing defenseless human lives,” she said.
The remaining embryos are frozen, suspended in time through a process of cryopreservation in which they age, lose biological viability and “suffer damage that can drastically reduce their chances of successful implantation in the uterus later on,” she also said.
“Countless embryos die while in this frozen state,” Medina said.
Destroying and freezing human lives before implantation constitutes an act of “absolute bioethical violence,” she said, reducing human beings to objects.
The process also places a financial burden on families and attacks the most fundamental right of all: the right to life from the very beginning.
Medina also claims that assisted reproduction techniques have not seen widespread development over the past few decades, meaning that patients are subjected to aggressive ovarian stimulation protocols involving high doses of hormones, followed by an unrelenting battery of invasive and painful clinical examinations.
“The harsh scientific reality is that the actual success rates of these programs, considering the time involved and the high costs, remain extremely low,” Medina said.
“The immense emotional disappointment of discovering that pregnancy has not been achieved after days of pain, surgeries and exhausting treatments can be a truly traumatizing experience,” Medina also said.
Medina told Crux Now Ecuador’s Congress has repeatedly rejected past attempts to decriminalize or legalize practices that undermine the full defense of life from conception to natural death.
Over the past few years, however, she said such issues have become the target of a “systematic judicialization strategy.”
Lawyer Pablo Andres Proaño, a human rights specialist trained at the University of Notre Dame, said more than 70 percent of Ecuadorians are Catholic and that most of them hold pro-life views.
Lawmakers representing them, therefore, never promoted legislation seeking to legalize abortion or euthanasia.
“But there are intellectual and media elites with a strong anti-life stance. The judiciary ended up being filled with people who hold those views over the past decade,” Proaño told Crux Now.
With such legal authorities in place, an anti-life agenda has advanced since 2021, when abortion in cases of rape was decriminalized.
In 2024, euthanasia was approved, and earlier this year the Constitutional Court decided to allow the issuance of new identity cards for transgender minors.
“The assisted reproduction bill was also a demand from the Constitutional Court,” Proaño explained.
Indeed, the issue emerged in 2012, when a same-sex couple of English-born women living in Ecuador filed a lawsuit after they were unable to obtain an identity document for their daughter, Satya, bearing both of their names.
Satya was conceived through artificial insemination and was born in 2011. In 2012, Ecuador’s Civil Registry refused to issue Satya an identity document bearing the names of both mothers, arguing that Ecuadorian law did not provide for dual maternal parentage.
After years of legal proceedings, the Constitutional Court finally ruled in 2018 that the girl had the right to be identified by the names of both mothers.
The case led the Court to issue a ruling obliging the state and Congress to regulate assisted reproduction. In 2024, the Court determined that Congress had failed to make progress on the issue and gave it 10 months to do so.
“The pro-life movement is very large and had many victories in the past, when these issues were being debated in the legislature. People would gather, march, speak to lawmakers and engage directly with legislators,” Proaño said.
When the power to decide these issues shifted to the Constitutional Court, he said, “the pro-life movement failed to engage in this much more technical legal process, which also imposed significant restrictions on movements that were seen as strictly religious.”
“Hiring lawyers to analyze these issues is more expensive than mobilizing people who can speak to legislators or participate in demonstrations,” Proaño said.
He also said there is a need for a stronger response from Christian lawyers.
“I have met lawyers who would like to get involved but are reluctant to do so because they are afraid of problems with the large law firms that employ them,” he lamented.
Pro-lifers are seen by many members of the elite as curuchupas (roughly equivalent to “holy rollers” in English) and nobody wants to be stigmatized in the course of their professional work, he said.
Proaño explained that the debate in Congress has been suspended and that pro-life lawmakers need to vote in order to send the bill back to the commission where amendments can be made.
“It’s still possible. Most lawmakers aligned to the government have demonstrated a commitment to family values,” he said.