This article elucidates how Catholic doctors in Belgium, a dominantly Catholic country that was home to the largest Catholic university in Europe, creatively handled church teachings on assisted reproduction from roughly the 1940s until the 1980s. Catholic thought on reproductive medicine is mostly represented as restrictive and conservative, but this is not the full picture. On the contrary, this article reveals that many Catholic moralists and physicians looked for loopholes within church teachings, creating ‘Catholic’ versions of assisted reproductive technologies. A few progressive Catholics fundamentally questioned the authority of the Vatican, justifying donor insemination and in-vitro fertilisation by means of personalist ethics. By drawing attention to the diverse ways in which Catholics in Belgium negotiated their own moral understandings of assisted reproduction, this article adds a new dimension to recent histories of contraception, which complicate narratives of conflict between religion, science, and sexual liberation.

中文翻译：

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“天主教，但不遵守规则”：比利时的辅助生殖和天主教医生，1940 年代至 1980 年代

本文阐述了比利时的天主教医生如何在大约 1940 年代至 1980 年代创造性地处理教会关于辅助生殖的教义，比利时是一个以天主教为主的国家，拥有欧洲最大的天主教大学。天主教关于生殖医学的思想主要表现为限制性和保守性，但这并不是全部。相反，这篇文章揭示了许多天主教道德家和医生在教会教义中寻找漏洞，创造了辅助生殖技术的“天主教”版本。一些进步的天主教徒从根本上质疑梵蒂冈的权威，通过个人主义伦理为捐赠者授精和体外受精辩护。