“Prenatal human beings, even at the earliest stages of life, should be treated with appropriate respect as members of the human family and not viewed as commodities.”
For years Prof. Donald De Marco has been pointing out the damage to personal relationships which may result from the new reproductive technology.
Fatherhood and in-vitro babies
What happens to the concept of fatherhood, for example, when the sperm with which a woman is fertilized was donated by a medical student she never met, who was paid $50 for his contribution, and was guaranteed anonymity?
Or when a lesbian makes certain that a father for her baby will never by identified by mixing together contributions from several donors?
In this excellent book, there are chapters on the norm of marriage, the place of love in human generation, biotechnology and feminist ideology.
In the author’s view, reproductive technology has a potential for creating more problems than it solves. He quotes a World Health Organization official as saying, “What we do know is that, at great cost, about eight per cent of couples in any country can be helped by in-vitro fertilization with considerable risk of not ending up with a healthy baby.”
Dr. DeMarco also agrees with those who state that the core of human ethics requires men and women to join together in opposing a headlong race toward social engineering.
Fatherhood and abortion
It is interesting to follow those parts of his discussion, which touch on abortion. As he points out, Roe v.Wade and other court cases in the U.S. (he could have mentioned the Daigle case in Canada) have stripped fathers of any legal status in coming to the defense of their unborn children threatened by abortion.
But the radical feminist ideology goes far beyond this.
It contends that women do not need husbands in order to raise a family, and mothers do not need fathers to initiate new life – only donors who contribute to “a necessary element.” There are even manuals which explain the art of self-insemination, the ultimate travesty of the marital act.
The feminist assumption that abortion is a right which women will not use wrongly, DeMarco observes wryly, is completely unrealistic. Abortion has led to “femicide”; it is hard to imagine anything more at odds with feminist principles than a woman aborting her child simply because it is female, but that is what happens in many countries.
Equally bizarre was what female athletes in East Bloc countries were encouraged to do: become pregnant through artificial insemination and then have abortions in order to help them win gold medals. Muscle power apparently increases greatly during the early stages of pregnancy, and so pregnancy in an early stage may give a woman an important competitive advantage. Once she is finished with her events, she terminates the pregnancy through abortion.
So much for the many repeated assertions that abortion is always an ‘agonizing decision’ for a woman and that ‘no one takes it lightly.’
Life’s value shifting
Such a practice, Dr. DeMarco comments, makes it clear that new human life is valued only for its instrumental significance.
Recent reproductive techniques, he goes on to say, make it obvious that th ebaby can really be regarded as a product.
He refers to a Time magazine article describing a surrogate motherhood case in which a child was delivered who was seriously disabled. The biological father asked that medical treatment be withtheld, so that the baby would die; its mother disowned I t, so it became a ward of the state. Condemning the affair, the Time writer sharply criticized the fact that “a procedure had been devised in which a human being is literally conceived as a manufactured product.”
Legal notions
As a philosopher should, Dr. DeMarco goes right to the essential significance of recent developments.
An 1986 article in the Harvard Law Review dealing with surrogate motherhood concluded that courts should consider promises not to abort as unconstitutional, but should uphold the promise the surrogate mother gives to surrender the child to the couple who contracted with her to bear it.
This view reflects a new social and legal attitude to life, which locates th ebasis for legal protection not in the nature of things but in the wills of the parties involved.
In the first case, the will of the surrogate mother is involved; so if she wants to abort the child, she should be free to do so. In the second case, the wills of th ecouple who commissioned her should be taken account of.
As Dr. DeMarco points out, there is something very strange about the notion that a surrogate mother may abort her child but may not be allowed to keep it!
This, however, is in keeping with a radical shift from the objective perspective of nature to the subjective perspective of will.
Roe v. Wade, the infamous 1973 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, gave women the right to abort, he notes, not because it proved that the fetus was not human, but because it considered the fetus to belong to the sphere of a woman’s privacy.
Reason would uphold the individuality of the fetus , but that it is not supposed to count; what matters is what the woman wants, or does not want..
New human beings
In a foreward, the noted moral theologian William E May calls attention to Donald DeMarco’s uncanny ability to deflate rhetorically swollen arguments – such as that no unwanted child ought ever to be born – and summarizes the central message of this book.
When new human beings come into being outside marital embrace, a terrible tragedy occurs. The children so conceived are precious human persons, loved by God; yet the means used to give them life are gravely immoral. Children are not pets, objects of human desires, or products inferior in nature to their producers and subject to quality controls. They are rather persons equal in dignity to their parents, beings who as St. Augustine said 15 centuries ago, are “to be lovingly received, nurtured humanely, and educated religiously.”
One of five public policy recommendations which Dr. DeMarco makes in his book is “That prenatal human beings, even at the earliest stages of life, be treated with appropriate respect as members of the human family and not viewed as commodities.” Here, as elsewhere I his examination of the results of biotechnology, he is dead right.
