Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Posted on 10/05/2005 1:43:35 PM PDT by NYer
It seems like a simple question — the kid’s mom and dad, right? The people who made the baby.
But for decades, legal and technological changes have been reshaping families, as reproductive techniques like sperm donation, egg donation, and surrogate motherhood become far more embedded in our culture than most of us realize.
Now we have kids with two moms, four moms, or none at all.
These technologies, and the legal tangles they create, have shifted us to an understanding of family that pretends bodies don’t matter, and denies children’s need for their own mother and father. Here are only a few examples of how what we might call “third-party reproduction” is reshaping our culture; hundreds such stories emerge every month.
On Sept. 7, an Ohio judge ruled that an egg donor had parental rights to the triplets she created with a surrogate mother and a 64-year-old single man. It should be obvious: She is the children’s parent. But egg and sperm donation are based on the fiction that her messy biological tie is trivial. And so there’s no marriage here, no love between the three people claiming parentage; only contracts and legal disputes.
On Sept. 23, NBC’s fertility-clinic drama “Inconceivable” premiered. The show’s co-creators have both used surrogate mothers. One co-creator told USA Today that just as women once borrowed a cup of sugar from a neighbor, “Now they can borrow an egg or a uterus.”
In an ongoing case in California, Guadalupe Benitez’s case awaits oral argument. Benitez planned to conceive a child through donor insemination and raise the child with her female partner. The clinic where she was receiving infertility treatment refused to perform the insemination for religious reasons (and claims it also refused to inseminate heterosexual single women).
Benitez brought a lawsuit against the clinic for sexual-orientation discrimination.
The longing for one’s own child is powerful and, in itself, good. But using a surrogate mother or a sperm or egg donor brings a third parent into the picture (you could think of it as adultery-for-reproduction instead of adultery-for-sex), leaving children at risk of “parental rights” disputes and filled with their own unacknowledged longings for biological fathers and mothers they will never know.
The weblog of the Institute for American Values, www.familyscholars.org, is a great resource, often featuring stories about the emotional struggles of the first generation of children of sperm and egg donors.
In my own case, my parents have been married all my life. Like most children, I needed an intuitive, obvious sense of my place in the world. It was in many ways important for me to realize that I took strongly after my mother in looks and my father in personality. That helped root me in my family, and in the world — especially necessary since I was in other respects a difficult and alienated child.
I know I’m the product of my parents’ love, the symbolic and literal result of their union. Every child deserves that sense of belonging. Every child, whenever possible, deserves her own mom and dad.
We need a serious debate about third-party donation and its effects on children and society. If we want to limit uses of this technology, there are many routes. For instance, egg and sperm donors could be held legally accountable the way other biological parents are; this rule alone would make the practice much less appealing to both donors and those who would use their services.
When a Pennsylvania woman went to court earlier this year to force her sperm donor to take legal responsibility for his child, the judge asked her lawyer, “What man in their right mind would agree to [donate sperm] if we decide this case in your favor? Nobody.”
Anonymous donation could be barred, giving children the right to know their biological parents. (Britain barred anonymous donation last February.) This too would make the practice less attractive.
The President’s Council on Bioethics has issued a report calling for intensive study of third-party reproduction’s effects on both children and adult participants, and exploring other regulatory possibilities.
These reproductive strategies should in no way be further normalized in culture or in law. This is one reason to oppose same-sex “marriage”; as liberal philosophy professor J. David Velleman put it, “Marital rights generally go hand-in-hand with parental rights. … Equality between homosexual and heterosexual marriages may therefore require us to deny that donor-conceived children have both a mother and a father, thereby expunging the children’s connection to half of their biological past. … My worry is that a purely affectional conception of marriage will tend to favor a purely affectional conception of parenthood. And I think that denying the importance of biological parenthood leads us to violate fundamental rights of children.”
Family ties will always be messy — hence the old proverb, “It’s a wise child who knows his own father” — but we shouldn’t capitulate to harmful trends. Children need to be able to answer the deceptively simple, profound question, “Who’s your daddy?”
Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Biology is inconsequential, unless we are merely animals.
Sperm and egg donors ought have no right whatsoever and should be subject to jail if later they try to contact the children against parent's wishes.
Makes perfect sense.
Don't we have biblical examples like moses to look to to extrapolate how such situations should be viewed?
There is a natural curiosity on the part of most children to know "who they are". Not long ago, one of the MSM morning programs invited on a single parent and her teen daughter. The daughter was the product of donor insemination and wanted to "know" her father. Finally, the camera shot to a monitor on which was her biological father, his wife and their child. The girl learned that her large feet were from her dad. She was so happy to finally meet her father. In the course of their "live" conversation, she learned that she had 1000+ siblings.
That's just wrong.
That would be weird. What if you were to find out you ended up marrying one of your 1000 half-siblings? I mean, that's a LOT of people and you wouldn't really know unless you researched the other person.
exactly.
Biology is inconsequential, unless we are merely animals.
not quite - it'd be very good to include the genetci donor's medical history, as well as that of his/her family lineage. This is medically important for the child, but has no mopral weight, and confers no shade of a parental right on a third-party donor.
Sperm and egg donors ought have no right whatsoever and should be subject to jail if later they try to contact the children against parent's wishes.
agreed.
And they should not be asked for child support.
Why, yes, we do.
A few years ago two doctors told us that our daughter (now 13) would probably be sterile. Only God knows if this is true, but I would never deny my daughter motherhood. We've already talked to her about the possibility that she may never be able to bear children (trying to prepare her) and I've vowed to bear her child for if it's necessary. I pray that it won't be. (I'd hate for her to miss the joys of pregnancy, but if she can't bear her own children, at least she can raise them.)
I don't think that we've planning anything immoral or against God or nature. It's an act of love on my part and trust on her's.
eh?
Interesting post.
But, the replies are much more interesting . . .
Makes me want to pick a fight with everybody. :-)
You're joking, right?
An excellent point! What if?!
In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, "Human Life"), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use artificial birth control—contraception—to prevent new human beings from coming into existence.
Few realize that up until 1930, all Protestant denominations agreed with the Catholic Church’s teaching condemning contraception as sinful. At its 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican church, swayed by growing social pressure, announced that contraception would be allowed in some circumstances. Soon the Anglican church completely caved in, allowing contraception across the board. Since then, all other Protestant denominations have followed suit. Today, the Catholic Church alone proclaims the historic Christian position on contraception.
But what does this have to do with this particular article? Plenty! This Encyclical was almost prophetic in projecting the other implications arising from man's desire to control how, when, where, why and how he procreated. As Pope Paul VI notes,
It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.
HUMANAE VITAE
Modern science has enabled those who choose to follow its path, the 'opportunity' to reproduce on their own terms.
As an adoptee and an adoptive parent, let me assure you that just being a good parent is not enough. There is far more to our personal identification than simply being raised by "good parents". There is a natural, normal and inherent need to know who we are, how we came to be, why we are here and what we inherited. Last year my daughter set off in search of her biological parents, with my support and prayers. The encounter was not what she expected but, in the process, she was able to connect with her biological heritage and that meant a lot to her.
If you have never read Pope Paul VI's Encyclical, I have posted the link above. Read it to gain a better understanding of just why these 'modern day' technologies reduce current and future generations to nothing more than an experiment in human reproduction.
Very good point. And many moral theologians in retrospect believe that the Lambeth Conference was the beginning of the "culture of death", the decline of the family and Christian morality. Once you cross the line and say the creation of human life is not subject to the natural law of God, but to man's own desires, all human life loses it's inherent sanctity. It's just a continuum from contraception to sperm donorship to surrogate motherhood to abortion. The Catholic Church opposes all of these because they are against the intrinsic moral order natural to mankind, regardless of religion.
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