Sex Au Naturel (24 page)
Authors: Patrick Coffin
Protesting
. The late English philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, mentioned in Chapter Two, painted a picture of disgruntled factory workers who have legitimate complaints against management.
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They can choose two ways of expressing them. They can implement a work-to-rule strategy and resolve to work at a minimal speed, which would slow down production, bring profits down, and force management to cough up some justice. Or they can wander through the factor destroying equipment as a way of expressing their gripe. Same message; different means. The former workers are like NFP (a legitimate end is achieved through non-action), the latter like contraception (the same end achieved through an additional anti-life act.).
Wedding Planning
. Professor Donald DeMarco asks us to imagine two pairs of engaged couples who are planning their wedding reception. In both cases, the hall is too small to hold all their friends, so they must pick a limited number of attendees. Couple A mails invitation cards to their chosen friends. (They’d like the others to be there but the space limitation forbids it.) Couple B also sends out cards to those whom they invite, but then they also mail other cards to the people whom they couldn’t invite, which read, “Please do not come to our wedding reception.”
Couple A acts with an NFP mindset in which non-attendees don’t receive the “stay away” cards. Couple B acts with a contraceptive mindset in which the non-invitation is joined by an action designed to make extra sure they aren’t there. In the analogy, God is the friend who is positively excluded from being present, so to speak, to bless the act of intercourse.
I give the last word to Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen, who is now on the short list to become the first American-born male saint:
Is my eye finding the best self-expression when it is blindfolded? Is my ear delighted in its individuality when it is plugged? Is my tongue finding its noblest expression when my mouth is bandaged? When then should I say that husband and wife are finding their individuality and best expressing themselves when they stifle, frustrate, and contracept those faculties which God has given to them, and through which they may find an expression so genuine that their own individuality stands incarnate before them? The deepest wound one could have inflicted upon Michelangelo or Raphael would have been to tell either of them that a certain work of his did not measure up to the possibilities of his genius; so, too, a husband and wife who have the slightest pride in the creative artistry of their lives should deem their lives a failure if they have fallen short of what might have been expected of them, and certainly nothing can be more reasonably expected of life than life.
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1
^
This basic idea is also rendered
iustae rationes
and
iustae causae
in
Humanae Vitae
(10, 16). It means reasons or motives that are just, and sufficiently serious (i.e., not for frivolous or materialistic reasons). While the Church wisely does not lay down explicit dos and don’ts, Paul VI alludes to reasons “based on the physical or psychological condition of the spouses or on external factors” (HV, 16).
2
^
Elzbieta Wojcik, “Natural Regulation of Conception and Contraception,”
International Review of Natural Family Planning
9:4, cited in Smith,
Humanae Vitae
, 390. See also Nona Aquilar,
The New No-Pill, No Risk Birth Control
(New York: Rawson Associates, 1986), 186–191.
3
^
Ibid., 391.
4
^
For an extended review of this evidence, see Mary Eberstadt, “The Vindication of
Humanae Vitae
” in
First Things
, August/September, 2008,
http://www.frstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6262
.
5
^
Mary Rosera Joyce,
The Meaning of Contraception
(New York: Alba House, 1970), 41.
6
^
Anscombe,
Contraception and Chastity
, 20.
7
^
Fulton J. Sheen,
Old Errors and New Labels
(New York: Alba House, 2007), 184–185.
Chapter Eleven
Reproductive Technologies
The inability to conceive can be an arduous emotional and spiritual trial. Rachel’s cries to her husband Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” (Gen 30:1), echo in many hearts today. And these cries rightly elicit our sympathy and our support even as we share the teaching of the Church.
Christ invites us to unite our sufferings to His Cross, the true source of all spiritual fecundity. Childless couples in particular, if their situation allows, “can give expression to their generosity by adopting abandoned children or performing demanding services for others” (CCC 2379). It bears emphasizing here that the condition of sterility, while involving a level of suffering and hardship, is not an absolute evil.
Although the desire for a child is obviously a very good end, the means to that end must also be morally good. The goal of this chapter is to explain why reproductive technologies—in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, surrogate motherhood, and cloning—are not morally good means.
Humanae Vitae
The main idea—or, in the parlance of the music industry, the A-side—of
Humanae Vitae
is that the natural connection between sex and babies should not be cut. In shorthand, no sex without babies. This idea, as we have seen, is a scandal to the world, a folly to dissenters, and a muddle to many since the Sixties.
But there is also a B-side, which is, in a sense, even more difficult to explain to people with no appreciation of the A-side: Human beings have a right to come into existence the way God has ordained, which is through the bodily union of father and mother. It is the A-side in reverse. In shorthand, no babies without sex.
In other words, the Church rejects the above reproductive technologies because they attempt, among other things, to effect the creation of a new human being while evading the natural means ordained by God the Creator. Rich is the irony that an over-sexualized, anti-baby culture should excel at producing technologies aimed at making babies without sex!
Let us begin by defining our terms. The most common form of reproductive technology is
in vitro fertilization
, or IVF. With IVF, eggs (ova) from a woman’s ovary are removed and fertilized with sperm in a glass petri dish (whence the older term “test tube babies”), and then the fertilized egg (embryo, or new human being) is returned to the woman’s uterus to grow until birth.
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With
donor insemination
, sperm is collected from the man (married to the prospective mother—or even known by her—or not) and deposited into the woman’s reproductive system to conceive a baby. Sperm collection is typically done by masturbation. Both IVF and DI make life without making love—the exact opposite of contraception’s pattern.
Surrogate motherhood
, as the term implies, is the practice of using the womb as a rent-a-space in which a woman agrees—generally for a negotiated fee paid by a woman unable or unwilling to carry a child to term in the natural way—to bring to term a baby that belongs biologically to another couple. The disconnect between the mother-father-child unity is obvious.
The first animal to be cloned was a tadpole, back in 1952. After Dolly the Scottish sheep (1997–2003) became a household name, a variety of larger animals have been cloned—including goats, rabbits, cows, mice, pigs, and a wild gaur—albeit with very poor results. But according to the information service of the Human Genome Project, animal cloning is expensive and notoriously ineffective. Over 90 percent of all attempts fail or lead to early death; Dolly was produced only after 276 failed attempts.
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While
human cloning
has not yet been successfully done, maverick scientists are slouching toward that goal line.
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Cloning involves producing a new living being by inserting the genetic material from the nucleus of a donor parent cell into an egg that has had its nucleus removed. When that dual combination is stimulated electrically or chemically, the result is an identical twin of the original donor. Theoretically, there is no limit to the number of cloned organisms drawn from the genetic information of the adult donor.
One reason the B-side is hard to accept today is our view of medicine as a panacea. In our era of rapid medical advancement, with new treatments arising for a myriad of formerly grave conditions, we have come to look at the doctor as a kind of high priest, to medical procedures as sacraments, and to the medical profession generally as a magisterium.
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People often look to doctors for guidance on morality, yet would never dream of turning to a priest for his guidance on mononucleosis.
Millions of children have enjoyed P.D. Eastman’s storybook,
Are You My Mother?
It’s about a little bird that has been separated from his mother and wanders the landscape trying to discover his own, and his mother’s, true identity. The story is an unintended metaphor for the havoc wreaked upon children and their putative parents by reproductive technologies. When lab technicians, doctors, paid surrogates, and other parties outside the mother and the father get involved in bringing a child into the world, the forgotten person is the child. Also disregarded is what coming-to-be from multiple “parents” and “techniques” does to his or her sense of identity. Scant research has been done in this area.
What the above technologies have in common is the same unnatural separation between sex and babies that is condemned by
Humanae Vitae
. They each seek the kite of life without the string of love, the rose’s scent without the rose, the melody without the music. And whether considered singly or together (they often overlap in practice) these technologies invariably lead to troublesome legal quagmires. The courts are becoming clogged with examples. Here are three:
First, Janet Smith documents a case in which a woman got herself pregnant through DI using her husband’s frozen sperm, and they later divorced. The woman sued him for child support, but his attorneys won the day when the court determined that the legal father was not the ex-husband but the lab technician who had performed the insemination procedure, an act, said the judge, that was the proximate cause of her becoming pregnant.
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Second, in a television interview, ex-abortionist (now Catholic convert) Dr. Bernard Nathanson told Father Frank Pavone of Priests For Life about a California trial that sounds more like a Monty Python sketch than a real life case. An infertile couple (where both partners were sterile) hired a reproductive technologist to mix a male donor’s sperm with a female donor’s egg. Still follow? The resultant embryo was implanted in the womb of yet another party (a surrogate mother) and she delivered the baby nine months later. At the time of the trial, the child was eight. The litigation was meant to answer the legal question, “Who are the parents?” As that question began to be asked, the original couple that paid for all this filed for divorce. Who indeed are the parents? The original adoptive couple? The sperm donor and the egg benefactress? The implantee? The judge eventually placed the child in a foster home.
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Finally, a heartrending trial in Vermont shows how the insinuation of reproductive technologies into already difficult conflicts aggravates them and multiplies their evil effects. In 2008, a Vermont judge declared that the ex-lesbian partner is the rightful mother to another woman’s biological six-year-old daughter. The biological mother, Lisa Miller, became an evangelical Christian and left the lesbian lifestyle when the baby, Isabella, was seventeen months old. Janet Jenkins, Miller’s female lover at the time, sought full custody of the baby, claiming she was a parent even though she was not biologically related to Isabella and had not sought to adopt her.