The choice of Edwards for the prize “isn’t completely out of place,” Carrasco de Paula said. Still, he faulted the scientist for creating a “market of donor eggs.”

The reaction to the Nobel winner contrasts with some of the Vatican’s more stringent criticism in the past. The Roman Catholic Church had condemned embryonic stem cell research and artificial fertilization, most definitively in a 2008 bioethics document released a month after Barack Obama was elected the U.S. president.

IVF violates “the sacred and inviolable character of every human life from its conception until its natural death,” according to the document, entitled “Dignitas Personae” or Latin for “The Dignity of a Person.”

...“Without Edwards, there wouldn’t be freezers full of embryos waiting to be transferred in utero or, more likely, be used for research or to die, abandoned and forgotten by all,” Carrasco said.

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