Butler is understandably a little bit whiny and mopey, as Annie works through the adoption bureaucracy while continuing to recover from a serious depression over the years of miscarriages, in-vitro-fertilization attempts and fertility drugs.
In practice, the embryos used in the collection of stem cells were left over from attempts to assist reproduction -- donated by couples who used in vitro fertilization.
The Vatican has over recent decades issued blanket condemnations of artificial methods of birth control, in-vitro fertilization, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, and human embryonic stem cell research.