Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Mrs. Don-o

“The “modern” “technical” aspect of surrogacy is not what makes it objectionable. It’s the depersonalization and demaritalization of reproduction -— distorting procreation into being both a comemrcial transaction and a laboratory breeding technique “

But couldn’t that opinion be equally applied to heart transplants?? Placing another person’s heart into a patient could be considered distorting the Creator’s masterpiece! And heart transplants aren’t free, are they??


110 posted on 05/04/2012 4:11:33 PM PDT by Reddy (B.O. stinks)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 101 | View Replies ]


To: Reddy; madprof98
Surrogacy is like an organ transplant? Reddy, I understand where you're coming from (I think) but bear with me, I’m going to try to explain:

(Madprof, you want to listen in? Or add your thoughts?)

Almost any bodily organ (heart, kidney, lung) is part of a system whose function is that it keeps a person alive. It’s about survival. And if you can donate a kidney, or blood, or something under ethical conditions (not selling organs, not having an organ confiscated by some Organ Committee, but free gift) to help somebody else survive, well and good.

But the sexual organs have not a personal survival, but a maritally interpersonal meaning. For two reasons: they mean "you and I belong to each other (maritally) in an exclusive manner; and they can generate a new person, which gives sexuality an even deeper interpersonal meaning.

This isn't true of animals. That's why veterinary processes (insemination, cloning, interspecies breeding --- like making mules --- or any other laboratory reproduction technique) are not "depersonalizing" for animals. Not at all. But they would be for humans. It has to do with our identity, which is important to us. Animals don't have an intense “personal” interest in their "identity" or their "relationships" or a transcendent drive to ask “Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” or any sense of personal violation. They aren't personally violated no matter how they are bred with each other. They don’t give a flip who their mama is or who their daddy is.

It's quite otherwise with humans. One of the main immoral aspects of slavery, for instance, is that it fractured interpersonal relations, separated husbands from wives, separated children from parents, treated persons as if they were some kind of livestock. It broke natural marriage (husband – wife) and natural parenthood (father–child and mother–child) to pieces.

OK. Here’s the bottom line: Hiring a woman to be a surrogate is that sort of wrongdoing. It treats her not as a whole person, but as a rented uterus. It’s as depersonalizing as just renting her vagina (prostitution); it intentionally thing-ifies her so that she is to have no ongoing relation to the child or children she bears; and it makes human procreation a for-hire contract rather than a love til-death-do-you-part two-in-one-flesh union.

Human procreation is an image of God. It is life-giving and love-giving at the same time, and it creates another image of God, a new human. Surrogacy make the child-bearer less than a mother, makes her as hired procreative collaborator less than a wife, and makes the child the end-result of a kind of manufacture, as if he were a product, less than a person.

I'm not saying this detracts from the worth of the child: eery child has a right to life. God bless the child, the children: God belss them forever. I am saying that the child will lack something basic that any child would want and have a natural right to: to be the child of the woman who gave him birth, the fruit of the love-union of his father and mother. He is being deliberately deprived of that.

150 posted on 05/04/2012 6:13:37 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 110 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson