Category Archives: Bioethics

Avoiding Therapeutic Tyranny

Bioethics, Conscience, , ,

Because of the atrocities that were carried out under the Third Reich, there was a global awareness of the dignity of the human person especially when it comes to performing medical experiments. Experimentation today is mostly benign because of the fact that the war crime tribunal of Nuremberg articulated 10 standards by which researchers must conform when performing medical experiments on human subjects. These standards have now been adopted throughout the world and form the basis of our clinical trials system.  The first of these standards was that “[T]he voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”  The Principle of Free and Informed Consent as it has come to be known has been included in nearly every code of medical ethics throughout the world.  It is meant to protect human beings from a medical totalitarianism by which people are treated as guinea pigs.  Tyrants always try to control the population and, thanks to medical technology, the temptation to chemically control them is greater than it was even 75 years ago. 

The Principle of Free and Informed Consent

Although this principle has been articulated in secular code only recently, the Magisterium of the Church has taught this principle throughout the history of the Church.  Her teaching has been summarized succinctly in the Charter for Health Care Workers that was promulgated in 1994 by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers

“To intervene medically, the health care worker should have the express or tacit consent of the patient.  In fact, he ‘does not have a separate and independent right in relation to the patient. In general, he can act only if the patient explicitly or implicitly authorizes him.’…Besides the medical relationship there is a human one: dialogic, non-objective. The patient …‘should be called upon to share in the improvement of his health and in becoming cured. He should be given the opportunity of personally choosing, and not be made to submit to the decisions and choices of others.’  So that the choice may be made with full awareness and freedom, the patient should be given a precise idea of his illness and the therapeutic possibilities, with the risks, the problems and the consequences that they entail.  This means that the patient should be asked for an informed consent.”

Charter for Health Care Workers, 72

While the principle of free and informed consent is fairly straightforward, in practice it can be difficult to secure fully informed consent.  The response to a given medical treatment varies greatly from individual to individual.  This means that it is often impossible to explain to someone all of the possible complications involved in a given treatment modality.  Some complications may be extremely remote and a listing of all possible complications may only serve to frighten them away from participation.  At other times, not all of the related hazards are known. 

Free consent is somewhat easier to achieve in practice because it is essentially consists in a negative.  Any sort of coercion ought to be completely rejected.  Because the goal of the research study is therapeutic in nature, this therapeutic benefit should be sufficient “payment” for their participation.  They must remain free to determine whether the personal benefits outweigh the burdens.  Likewise, there must be no “outside” coercion from either public or private institutions that threaten the person in some way.

For this reason, the principle of free and informed consent should really be interpreted as requiring “reasonably” free and “adequately” informed consent as governed by the a “Medical Golden Rule.” The US Bishops in their Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services stated the principle in this way: “Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all” (27).

Why the Principle Matters Today

What makes this principle particularly important is that we are in the midst of the largest medical experiment in human history.  No matter where you stand on the Covid vaccine—its safety or its effectiveness—you should be appalled at the gross violation of this principle. 

First of all, the vaccines are advertised as “safe and effective”.  They may yet prove to be so, but at this point to make such a claim is really unsubstantiated.  Before such a claim can be made, there must be thorough risk-benefit analysis done.  Other than the J&J vaccine, this has not occurred.  They also have not been forthcoming with the data.  Why, for example, when we are concerned about getting people vaccinated, would the CDC not report hospitalization and death data comparing the vaccinated and unvaccinated? It gives the appearance of hiding something.  In fact, even if they aren’t hiding anything, it does gives credence to those who are concerned about a conspiracy. 

What about the rates of adverse events?  To say they are rare lacks a precision that they can readily quantify.  This is vitally important when different subpopulations have greatly different risks from Covid.  When, for example a 20-year-old already has a rare chance of suffering death or long term effects from the virus itself, why should they take a vaccine that also has rare side effects?  How can someone compare them without anything more than the vague designation of rare?  To appeal to public health is a two-edged sword as there is also a drain on public health should the person suffer one of said rare side effects.  Public health is far more than just the elimination of communicable diseases and people are far more than incubators. 

The point is that all of this and more makes it practically impossible to give informed consent.  But more disconcerting is the growing attacks on free consent.  The amount of coercion has reached a fever pitch.  Federal agencies, universities both private and public and private companies have all instituted mandatory vaccination.  Public officials have offered to pay people to be vaccinated and even have offered a lottery system that rewards one lucky winner a million dollars.  All of these forms are coercion are morally reprehensible and should be of grave concern to us all.  Mandatory vaccines today, mandatory sterilizations for the “public good” tomorrow.  Once the principle of free and informed consent is no longer recognized, there is nothing to keep it from becoming a therapeutic tyranny. 

The Covid vaccine might prove to be a good thing (that is why we are performing an experiment), but public health is not an element of the common good.  It is essentially a private good because not everyone shares in it equally.  Elements of the common good, as the name suggests, are shared equally among all the members of society.  Freedom of conscience (properly understood). on the other hand, is part of the common good.  To coerce vaccination, whether it is “safe and effective” or not is ultimately harmful to the common good and therefore must be opposed by even those who are personally in favor of vaccination.

An Act of Charity?

Abortion, Bioethics, Science, , , , , ,

In the last post, it was discussed that an evolutionary paradigm, motivated by a spirit of transhumanism that was at the heart of the development of the new delivery methods for so-called vaccines.  It was also mentioned in passing how much of the debate so far as centered upon the question of the use of aborted fetal tissues in both the testing (Moderna and Pfizer) and delivery (AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson).  Despite this connection to abortion, there are many in the Church that have reasoned that it is morally licit and perhaps even laudatory to receive the vaccine.  In this post, we will discuss why it is neither and we should avoid these and all abortion tainted vaccines.

As usual, the devil is in the details—except this time, the Devil really is in the details.  The four current vaccines all make use of fetal cell lines originating in an aborted child.  Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca all used cells derived from the HEK293 cell line while the Johnson and Johnson used cells from the PER-C6 line.  These came from different children; the former came from the kidney (HEK=Human Embryonic Kidney, one can imagine that it was not the only sample since it has the number 293,even if it is the most “fruitful” of the collection) of a child in 1973 and the latter from the retina of a child in 1985.  The degree to which each of these vaccines is tainted by the evil of abortion is certainly different.  Although whether this is morally relevant or not is open to discussion.  Before getting to that however, it is good to ponder just what we mean when we say it is tainted by abortion.

The Devil Is in the Details

Most of us would have difficulty imagining how these cell lines are gathered.  Perhaps we might think that a bunch of abortions are performed and they have a bunch of tissue left over that they then sell to harvesters and researchers.  Or maybe we think that the harvester went door to door at abortion mills and ask if they had any extra tissue around.  In truth however the harvester must have arranged a priori, presumably through informed consent of the mother, to gather the cells from the child at the time of the abortion.  Like regular organ donation, fetal organ donation must be fresh in the sense that the live tissue would be preserved right as the abortion is happening.  It might also be that the child is removed along with the womb and kept alive until the harvesting could occur at some secondary site.  The point is that the developer wasn’t just some opportunist, but absolutely complicit in the abortion.  He arranges with both the abortionist and the mother beforehand and does nothing to stop it at the time. Presumably, there is compensation both to the abortionist and the mother, meaning that he has actually encouraged it.

But it isn’t just the abortion that is the problem now.  The developer of the line commits a further evil when he keeps the child alive and harvests his or her organs.  Let that settle in—a child is removed from (or with) his mother’s womb, possibility refrigerated and then, while still living, has his organs removed.  This is the stuff of Mengele’s dreams.  The evils now begin to multiply.  The researcher, because he demands the cell lines for testing, may or may not be cooperating with the abortion, is most certainly cooperating and complicit in organ harvesting.  So while we might be able to say there is a moral difference between simply using the cell line for testing versus using it for delivery, it is not a difference in degree but in number.  Any researcher that uses the cell line formally cooperates in the organ harvesting.      

In order to avoid the reductio ad Hitlerum accusation, it is important to discuss the reference to Josef Mengele.  Regardless of the usefulness of the results and the data, everyone agrees that to use data from any of his experiments is unethical.  This is because the way in which these experiments were conducted was so evil that conscience forbids the use of the results.  Certainly a Catholic conscience should shudder at having anything to do with abortion and organ harvesting tainted vaccines, regardless to what degree a given Pharmaceutical Company used them.  Some actions such as harvesting organs from innocent, living pre-born children is so evil that there is no good that would justify using them.  As the former abortionist Bernard Nathanson said, “it is impossible to separate the issue of abortion from the use of the tissue obtained therefrom.”

Appropriation vs Cooperation

This is why framing the use of these vaccines only in terms of cooperation is incomplete at best.  Cooperation with some act in the past is almost always remote.  Appropriation, that is, whether we can reap the fruits of someone else’s past evil act in the present is another question.  We might not cooperate to the evil of abortion and organ harvesting, but that does not automatically mean we are free to benefit from it.  For example, suppose I buy a bike that I later find out was stolen.  I am obligated to return that bike to its rightful owner, regardless of whether I actually cooperated with its theft and regardless of how desperately I need the bike. 

The theft of the bike is illustrative because in a very real way the organs have been stolen from these children.  Once we become aware of that fact, we must make restitution by returning them to their rightful owner, God by providing them with a proper burial.  This is why it is always an act of charity to bury a person.  When these aborted children were murdered, in justice they must be buried and as long as they remain unburied, the evil is ongoing.  While we may not have the means to gather up all the remains from this child, we most certainly have no right to benefit from their murder and dismemberment.

This is why the two vaccines, Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca, that deliver the vaccine through cultures grown in the cell line (that will contain a part of the child’s body, namely their DNA) must be avoided.  There is no question as to whether if there is a grave enough cause or not. It is a clear violation of justice.  The other two vaccines currently on the market, might be justified for an extremely grave reason.  I say might because it is hard to imagine that given the evil that has been done to the unborn persons anyone would in good conscience be willing to do so.

What is clear is that receiving any of these vaccines can not be reduced to an act of charity nor as an obligation to the common good.  Charity is a love of God and love of neighbor for His sake.  It cannot be an act of charity to compromise with evil or reap the fruits of a gravely evil action.  Furthermore, the common good must work for the good of every member of a society.  For the vaccines to truly be instruments of the Common Good, then the goods attached to them must flow back over even the unborn members of society. Clearly, these vaccines are prejudiced against some of the unborn.

In closing it is worth mentioning that the Church’s teaching that focuses on the principle of cooperation has truly backfired.  There are many cases in which a child (or an adult with the COVID vaccines) receives a “a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin” when there is no serious “danger to health.”  Not surprisingly the “the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available” (c.f. Donum Vitae, 8) has fallen upon deaf ears.  We are currently 0 for 4 on the COVID vaccines and there is no reason to think that will change.  Perhaps if, and this would need to happen from the top, Catholics en masse refused the Covid vaccines, then we wouldn’t be in this moral quandary. 

Evolution and the COVID-19 Vaccine

Abortion, Anthropology, Bioethics, Evolution, , , , , , ,

It has been noted on a number of occasions on this site, the bait and switch that those wedded to scientific materialism use to sell their evolutionary worldview.  They use the term Evolution in such an elastic manner that it is refute.  Only the most narrow-minded Fundamentalist would fail to see evolution in action in even the tiniest bacteria that grows resistant to antibiotics.  Darwin himself used the example of finches on the Galapagos islands with their varying adaptive beak lengths.  In short, the fact that there is abundant evidence of limited variation within species does not allow us to conclude that finches turned into something else.  This grand claim does not follow from the smaller claim.  In fact, the smaller claim fits perfectly well with the Biblical notion that God created various kinds of creatures.  But this foundation of limited variation (or what we might call microevolution) is not strong enough to carry the weight of Macroevolution.  In fact, intellectually honest scientists all admit that limited variation is little more than a prop for Evolution because there is no currently accepted mechanism among scientists by which, even given long time periods, one kind becomes another.  The insistence that the evolutionary claim is true, despite no solid evidence, is really meant to be a smokescreen that scientists are actually not as sure as they present themselves to be.  This smokescreen is necessary because it is really because Evolution is a philosophy and not about science at all.

Humanism and the Evolutionary Smokescreen

For evidence of this we need look no further than the ongoing Covid crisis.  Under the microevolutionary model, we should expect that as time goes on, different variants of Covid-19 would tend to be more contagious and less deadly.  Why is that?  Because of survival of the fittest.  Those variants which are able to spread easier while not killing their host, would naturally be selected.  Viruses that are deadly, even if they are highly contagious, simply don’t last because they kill their host.  Assuming that the numbers are accurate, this is precisely why we are currently seeing an uptick in “cases” while the attributed deaths are in decline.  This is exactly what should be expected according to the microevolutionary model.

Why then, if we are following the “science” should we have terror in our hearts for the new variants?  Because science, even when it fits the evolutionary narrative, always takes a backseat to philosophy.  The philosophy that is propped up by scientific evolution is humanism and when science is not useful then it must be discarded or ignored. 

Humanism represents a catch-all philosophical school in which man is the measure of all things.  All forms of it end up in the deification of man and the de-deification of God.  It is at the heart of the not-so-modern attempt to fulfill the promise that “you will be like God”.  Buttressed by the view that man has evolved from bacteria rather than as a Special Creation from the hand of God, it professes that man is at the pinnacle of reality.  Every problem, every limitation, natural or not, can be overcome by human reason aided by technology.

Humanism and the Vaccine

It is this viewpoint that causes the oligarchs to set aside actual science in pursuit of their humanistic ambitions.  If the evolutionary truth that the virus is losing some of its power gets out, then people will not get the “vaccine” which is, in a very real way, the next step in humanism’s evolution of man. 

I put vaccine in scare quotes because what is currently being pedaled as a vaccine isn’t a vaccine, at least in the traditional sense of the term. Vaccines are artificial attempts to trigger the body to act in a natural way, enabling it to defend itself when it encounters the wild-type virus.  There are various schools of thought as to whether this triggering of the immune response works, but its goal is to keep you from getting sick using the natural processes of the body.

The new mRNA vaccines, at least according to the manufacturers, are altogether different.  Rather than acting as vaccines, they are akin to gene therapies.  They do not keep the person from getting the virus but instead attempt to stimulate them to create it.  More specifically, it injects a strand of artificial mRNA into the person that causes them to create the S1 spike protein.  In short, it has your body create the very toxin that normally makes it sick.  The hope is that your body will become “familiarized” with the protein and not have as strong of an immune response when it encounters it in the wild.

The details matter not just from a health standpoint but also from a moral and anthropological standpoint.  The ongoing debate in the Church about the moral obligation to receive these vaccines and their complicity in abortion is mostly a red herring.  And not just because these are not vaccines in the traditional sense, but they also represent an attempt at transhumanism.  Coaxing the body to produce something that is not natural is simply an attempt to modify human nature.  It is not in accord with the nature of man to make spike proteins.  This power of making spike proteins, in other words, goes beyond (trans) human nature.  And the Church has always taught that such attempts to alter human nature, either temporarily or permanently, is a grave evil.   

Summarizing then we can say that these “vaccines” even if they didn’t rely on aborted fetal cells would still be wrong.  Catholics should recognize that they are thinly veiled attempts at transhumanism and the Church should condemn them for what they are.  Unfortunately, the pandemic of humanism has even infected many in the Church as well.

It is an evolutionary mindset that is behind this attempt.  If random selection is true, then tinkering with human nature itself is not only licit, but laudatory.  It is simply speeding up man’s ultimate deification through evolution. As Harvard University Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson once said, “The fact that man knows he evolves entails the possibility that he can do something to influence his own biological destiny. The fact that uncontrolled evolution often leads to denegeneration and usually to extinction makes it highly advisable that man take a hand in determining his own future.”

This understanding of reality, in which man is “nothing but” a collection of cells arranged by natural selection, means that it is possible to manipulate man’s production of certain cells, without upsetting the rest of the body.  This paradigm ultimately does great harm to the whole person because the body is not just a conglomeration of parts, but an integrated whole designed by God. If the vaccine ultimately doesn’t work then it really doesn’t matter because the more fit will survive either way.  There is no way to lose because it has moved evolution chain ever upward to man’s deification.

Augustine and the Culture of Euthanasia

Bioethics, Culture of Life, End of Life, Human Dignity, , ,

Nearly sixteen centuries after its publication, St. Augustine’s City of God remains a seminal text in Christian political philosophy.  With the Fall of Rome as his backdrop, the Doctor of Grace contrasts the forces at work that seek to claim men’s souls.  History, from the Fall of the Angels to the Fall of Rome, has consisted of battle between the City of God and the City of Man.  From the vantage point of over a millennium and a half, one can see how, using the Augustine’s principles, Christendom emerged as the City of God dominated the City of Man.  But we seem to be living in a time where the transition is going in reverse and the weeds of secularism are choking out the wheat of Christendom so that Augustine’s text can serve as a blueprint of sorts for restoring the City of God and rebuilding a Christian society.

Without diving into all of the themes Augustine presents, the focus will be on his opening theme: suffering.  Why, in introducing the two cities, would Augustine choose to focus on suffering?  As he points out, the sack of Rome led to seemingly indiscriminate sufferings; both the good and the bad, the Christian and the Pagan suffered.  Suffering doesn’t seem to distinguish them at all.  But when we look not at the nature of the sufferings, but the response of the sufferer, we find great differences.  He says, “though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different.  Virtue and vice are not the same even if they undergo the same treatment…What matters is the nature of the sufferer not the nature of the sufferings.”  So then suffering becomes like a great identification card enabling us to determine residency in either of the two cities.  

The Two Cities

Why this is so becomes apparent once we grasp that ultimately, the two cities are distinguished by their loves.  The “two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point if contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self…The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God ‘I will love You, my Lord, my strength.”  For Augustine suffering is brought about when men love the world more than God, the City of Man more than the City of God.  The good and bad suffer together because even the good (even if to a much lesser degree) love this world rather than despising it.

Both the Christians and non-Christians were equally affected but the sufferings of the Christians have “tended to their moral improvement because they are viewed through the eyes of faith.”   For the residents of the City of God suffering becomes an opportunity for growth in virtue and holiness.  “Viewed through the eyes of faith,” sufferings become necessary because they are the most expedient (i.e. most gentle and most merciful) way that God naturalizes us as residents in the heavenly city.  They may be free from criminal and godless wickedness they still see that they are not so far removed as to not to deserve to suffer temporal ills for them.

The residents of the City of Man see suffering as the greatest of all evils.  Rather than viewing them as opportunities, they see them as something to be avoided at all costs, even to the point of self-inflicted death.  From within this context Augustine visits the question of noble suicide within Roman culture.  Drawing from two historical examples at key turning points in Roman history, Augustine shows why suicide is always wrong.  His first case study is Lucretia.  After becoming a victim of rape she killed herself and Rome celebrated the nobility in doing so.  Augustine asks why should she, who was innocent, have suffered a worse punishment than the offender?  “One does not take vengeance on oneself for another’s crime.”  To suffer some injustice and then commit another injustice, even against oneself, is like killing the innocent.

His second example is Cato who killed himself as a political act, a steady refusal to live in a Rome led by Caesar.   As the prototypical Stoic, he thought happiness was only to be found in escaping the body and not something that was achieved in the soul through the body.

The City of God and the Culture of Euthanasia

But he does more than simply prove the immorality of suicide.  He also shows how one might argue against a suicide culture.  In this way he provides us with a blueprint for overcoming a Culture of Euthanasia.  In both of his case studies Augustine chose to focus on “cold-blooded” suicides.  Both Lucretia and Cato were deliberate suicides, not merely acts of impassioned despair.  Augustine thinks there is nothing noble about killing oneself and a culture that elevates it as such is a culture that bestows victimhood on its members.  He wants to empower men and women so that they can be truly noble in facing their sufferings, even the final ones, head-on.

Augustine’s argument and ours as well depends upon strong Christian witness.  If we are to overcome the Culture of Euthanasia we must preach that the only “sweet death” is one that opens wide the door to eternal life.  We cannot “accompany” someone who chooses to kill themselves because it is accompanying a lie that says that God does not use the death He has chosen for us as a means to bring about life.  Instead we should accompany them in their sufferings by encouraging them to dying with true nobility, the nobility of Christ.  Dying with dignity is dying as conformed to Christ.  We will never overcome the emerging Culture of Euthanasia until we suffer like true Christians and encourage others to do the same.  This was Augustine’s way and it needs to be ours too.   

Bigmouths and Gender Ideology

Bioethics, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Sexual Ethics, , , , , ,

When Our Lord issued the Great Commission to the Apostles, He was telling them, and by extension us, to be bigmouths.  The Lord of all knew that the Enemy of man would never cease telling lies and that the only way to confront those lies is by never ceasing to tell the truth.  The Church has been, throughout her history, the Great Truth Teller.  Until recently that is.  No longer does she breathe truth upon the ideological lies that the World tells but plays the part of the mute.  As proof of this, let’s compare the number of Papal Encyclicals dealing directly with the Socialist/Communist Revolution.  Nearly every Pope from Leo XIII to John Paul II addressed this ideological lie directly, never growing weary of repeating themselves.  Now compare that with the number of Papal Encyclicals against Sexual Revolution—one.  That one, Humanae Vitae, landed with a great thud and has been unceremoniously dismissed.  Whatever work John Paul II did in this area has been caught up in the whirlwind of ambiguity that is the current pontificate (i.e. Amoris Laetitia).  The point is that the Church attacked Socialism and all its incarnations directly while they have left gender ideology unscathed despite John Paul II calling it  the “new ideology of evil”.  As the silence mounts, more and more Catholics fall in line with the ideological spirit, especially during the latest manifestation, Transgenderism.   This should not be read as a complaint or a rebuke of clergy, but an undeniable statement of fact.  Ideologies have a way of silencing dissenters, so I am more interested in mobilizing and arming those willing to speak truth against the lies, than to blame anyone for not speaking out. 

Because of the relative silence on this issue, there are no authoritative statements regarding Transgenderism.  Clarity is not a habit normally associated with this lie, but for the sake of clarity we will distinguish between gender dysphoria as the internal struggle that one has with their sexual identity and Transgenderism as the act of attempting to alter one’s sexual identity.  The former is a psychological condition and the latter is a physical action that is said to solve the conflict.  It is relatively easy to show via Catholic moral principles why Transgenderism is wrong.  It can never be a real solution to the problem and ultimately does great harm to the person.  Nevertheless, because it is cloaked in a medical solution it is important that we understand the principles.

The moral principles involve the recently discussed Principle of Totality.  To summarize and review, this bioethical principle says that “except to save life itself, the fundamental functional capacities which constitute the human person should not be destroyed, but preserved, developed, and used for the good of the whole person and of the community.”  Whether it is a surgical intervention or hormonal replacement, the “treatment” modalities involved always seek to destroy the biological sex characteristics and replace them with simulated versions of the opposite sex.  The use of the term “simulated” is deliberate because “sex reassignment surgery” simply is not possible.  The person may resemble the opposite sex, but they can never actually be the opposite sex.  No matter how much plastic surgery you perform, you cannot artificially manufacture a sex organ.  It will always fail in its primary purpose.

The Harm Done

These principles are masked because the harm that is done to these people is often hidden.  It is a pernicious lie that, rather than solving the problem, puts the person into a sexual void.  They will have mutilated the bodily capacity that identifies one’s true sex and they will never be their “new” sex.  To solve the problem of confusion by causing them to truly identify as neither sex is, self-evidentally, not a real solution.  But anyone who questions this, including doctors and psychiatrists are ostracized and vilified, although never refuted.   

Rather than acknowledge this they cover it with an ambiguous term gender.  It is labeled as a “social construct” because of the inherent failure to construct sex themselves.  This is probably why many gender dysphoric people choose not to have surgery.  It is also why one of the few (semi-)reputable studies done found that those who had surgery were 19 times more likely to commit suicide (and this was a study done in “tolerant” Sweden).

Hormone intervention likewise have lasting effects and often constitute a chemical mutilation of sort because they render the person sterile.  Included in this are so called “puberty blockers” which permanently stunt the growth and development of children.   When a child presents with gender dysphoria, this is the standard treatment modality.  We do not let children under 16 vote, drink, smoke or choose not to go to school because of their intellectual and physical immaturity.  We will however allow them to decide what gender they will be and to begin permanent steps in making that a reality.  There is a built-in mechanism to clear up confusion related to sexual identity called puberty.  That is why the reputable studies of gender dysphoria all show that between 80-95% of children who express discordant gender identity come to identify with their biological sex over time (a statistic cited in Ryan Anderson’s excellent book When Harry Became Sally).  Those two sets of numbers, the 80-95% and the 19 times more likely to commit suicide would suggest that any medical intervention should be delayed until the person has reached full maturity.  The fact that these are never mentioned is because the best interest of the person is trumped by ideology.

The Intersex Exception

There is another aspect of this that is important to grasp.  Abortion supporters often argue from “the rape and incest and mother’s life in jeopardy exception” in favor of abortion on demand.  Transgender ideologues do something similar with their Intersex exception.  The argument goes something like “because intersex are biologically neither sex, therefore there are more than two sexes.”  Even if this was true, it is an example of the exception proving the rule.  Intersex individuals have a genetic defect, that is, they have a deviation from the normal condition.  Transgender ideologues, like the abortion advocates, would have us think the exception should be the rule and therefore a person should be able to decide on his own what sex he will be.

Second, the intersex condition is based upon direct observation. Transgenderism is based upon a subjective belief not rooted in any external condition.  The intersex individual is not changing their sex characteristics but attempting to repair them.  Quite frankly, it is surprising that the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) is so ambiguous in their language and allow the Transgender idealogues to co-opt what is a true medical, as opposed to psychological condition.  The ISNA says that persons with disorders in sexual development are not a third gender, but male or female.  Those are the only two options, even if may not always be easy to decipher.

In order not to appear to be “obsessed” with all of the issues of the Sexual Revolution, the Church has chosen to be silent.  It isn’t the Church that is obsessed but the culture.  In order to break that obsession the Church cannot be silent.  Millions of people are becoming ideological and there won’t be a culture to save unless we speak out.  We must arm ourselves with the truth and a willingness to engage.  We must be the bigmouths that Our Lord calls us to be.

On Prenatal Testing

Autism, Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Family, Moralilty, , , ,

Thanks to a noninvasive prenatal testing procedure called NIPD, a test which can predict Down Syndrome with 99% accuracy, the number of children born with Down Syndrome worldwide has greatly been reduced.  This is not because they can repair the defective condition, but because it fashions the DNA into a bullseye, systematically marking them for death.  Between 2/3 and 4/5 of children with Down Syndrome are aborted, reducing the overall rate by 30%.  In other countries such as Denmark and Sweden nearly 100% of the children are aborted.  This, of course, is an example in which pre-natal testing has been used under nefarious circumstances, but not all of them are bad.  In fact, as more and more data pours in from the work on the Human Genome Project we should expect the ability to make more accurate pre-natal diagnoses on any number of conditions to increase.  With knowledge always comes power, but this power can be seductive unless we are guided by solid moral principles.

What makes navigating the moral waters upon which pre-natal testing floats particularly perilous is the fact that most of the tests themselves do not carry any moral weight.  There are some, like amniocentesis, which present significant dangers for both mother and child.  These tests should be avoided unless there are serious medical reasons for doing so.  But tests like NIPD and ultrasounds are practically harmless to both mother and child and become part and parcel of the standard of care.  The moral issue comes in with the intention of the parents of the unborn child.  In other words, what are they going to do with the information?

Why You Want to Know Matters

If they desire to know so that they can abort the child then it becomes morally problematic, even if they don’t actually follow through with it.  Knowing that this might be a real temptation, then they shouldn’t have the test.  On the flip side, a couple may want to perform the test so that they are better prepared medically and emotionally for parenting a child with serious medical needs then the test can be safely (morally speaking) performed.  There continue to be many advances made to in utero diagnosis and surgical interventions that these tests can often be life-saving.  Just this week the Cleveland Clinic announced that they had performed successful in utero surgery to repair Spina Bifida.  This obviously was made possible through pre-natal testing. 

Summarizing, The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (1994) presents these principles succinctly:  “Prenatal diagnosis is permitted when the procedure does not threaten the life or physical integrity of the unborn child or the mother, and does not subject them to disproportionate risks; when the diagnosis can provide information to guide preventive care for the mother or pre- or postnatal care for the child; and when the parents, or at least the mother, give free and informed consent.  Prenatal diagnosis is not permitted when undertaken with the intention of aborting an unborn child with a serious defect” (50).

With abortion off the table, what are the guidelines we can use if the unthinkable happens and a child is diagnosed with a medical problem.  The Church speaks of avoiding “disproportionate risks”.  This assumes a sort of calculus on the part of the parents by which they weigh the seriousness of the disease against the risk of surgery.  This might include experimental procedures.  Provided that there is an acceptable amount of risk involved and the surgery is done for therapeutic, rather than experimental reasons, then it would be morally permissible to do so.  As the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin, Donum Vitae, puts it,  “[N]o objective, even though noble in itself, such as a foreseeable advantage to science, to other human beings or to society, can in any way justify experimentation on living human embryos or fetuses, whether viable or not, either inside or outside the mother’s womb” (DV I, 4). 

Not only is abortion not an option, but also those procedures which are not inherently therapeutic. Procedures designed to influence the genetic inheritance of a child, which are not therapeutic, are morally wrong.  “Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are not therapeutic but are aimed at producing human beings selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities. These manipulations are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being and his or her integrity and identity. Therefore in no way can they be justified on the grounds of possible beneficial consequences for future humanity. Every person must be respected for himself: in this consists the dignity and right of every human being from his or her beginning” (DV, I, 6).

Genetic Counseling

Genetic counseling before a couple actually conceives is growing in use and popularity.   The man and the woman each submit to genetic screening that gives a genetic profile enabling them to predict how likely it is that they have a child with a serious genetic defect.  Like the pre-natal testing discussed previously there is nothing inherently wrong with doing it.  What matters is what you are going to do with the information that is gleaned from it.  For example, suppose a couple finds one or both of them are carriers for some genetic condition such as cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs, both of which pose serious risks to viability and lifespan of the child.  They may come to learn that there is a 50% chance that their child develops the condition.  Is this a good enough reason to forego having children and adopt instead?

This is one of those cases where the Church does not say one way or the other, although we can certainly apply Catholic principles to come up with a set of guidelines.  First, we must never forget that the goal of parenting is to raise children for heaven.  The most severely mentally handicapped child will only be so temporarily if they are baptized.  I say this not to over-spiritualize the issue, but to put it in perspective.  As a father of a special needs child this thought has brought me much comfort and has stifled my fears.  Having a child with something wrong with them is among the worst things a parent can deal with, but it is not the worst.  Having your child go to hell would be the worst.  Knowing that you raised your child and got them to heaven means that you have done all God asked of you.  “Well done my good and faithful servant.”  

This may not be a reason then to avoid having any children, but it might be counted as a so-called “serious” reason to postpone, even indefinitely, having more children.  If a couple has a child with many medical needs and knowing that they are at an increased likelihood to have another like them, they may legitimately decide to not have any more children, provided the means they use to avoid pregnancy are morally licit. 

On Circumcision

Bible, Bioethics, Judaism, Theology, , , , , ,

In a previous post, it was discussed how Catholics could not participate in Seder Meals.  The reasoning was that for one to participate in a distinctly religious act like a Seder Meal is a form of external worship.  When external worship does not conform to internal belief, then objectively speaking one has sinned against the Seventh Commandment.  In other words, it is a form of lying.  This applies not just to the Passover meal, according to St. Thomas, but to all of the legal ceremonies of the Old Law.  Each of the ceremonies of the Old Law expressed the expectation of the coming Messiah, those of the New Law reflect His having already come.  Regardless of what one actually believes, to participate in one of these ceremonies is to profess that Christ is yet to come.  Once articulated this way, it seems rather straightforward.  But there is another action associated with the Old Law that is performed with far more frequency today than Seder Meals—Circumcision.  Have all those who have been circumcised, or more accurately their parents who chose to have them circumcised, then sinned gravely?

St. Paul is rather straightforward in his condemnation of those who would choose to be circumcised.  In Galatians 5:2-4, the Apostle to the Gentiles says, “if you have yourselves circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you.  Once again, I declare to every man who has himself circumcised that he is bound to observe the entire law.  You are separated from Christ, you who are trying to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.”  St. Paul is reiterating and expounding upon what the Council of Jerusalem declared regarding the practice of Circumcision (c.f. Acts 15).  Baptism became the new circumcision, the means by which both the circumcised and uncircumcised entered the New Covenant (Col 2:11-12).  It was not necessary to first enter the Old in order to enter the New.  So, it seems that, just like the Seder Meal, one should not ever be circumcised.

A Possible Exception?

The problem with this view however is that St. Paul, on the heels of the Church’s declaration, tells the Gentile Timothy to be circumcised in order to be more effective in his ministry to the Jews (c.f. Acts 16:4).  What this “exception” opens up is the possibility that the act of circumcision can be performed for non-religious reasons.  But the fact that St. Paul refuses that Titus be circumcised means that circumcision is OK as long as it is not done for religious reasons (Gal 2:3-5).  And in this way, it is vastly different from the Seder meal in which the religious element cannot be removed.  Whether the only exception is when ministering to the Jews or if there might be others then does not necessarily matter.  What matters is that Circumcision can be viewed as a non-religious action and thus it is not intrinsically wrong for a Catholic to be circumcised.

 During the Middle Ages, the Church spoke authoritatively regarding the practice of circumcision and disallowed it in all cases.  Most prominent among the decrees is that of Pope Eugene IV who, in the Papal Bull Cantate Domino declared that “all who glory in the name of Christian not to practice circumcision either before or after baptism, since whether or not they place their hope in it, it cannot possibly be observed without loss of eternal salvation.”  It is clear from his language that again, it is not the physical act of circumcision per se that is the problem but that it is impossible to separate it from its religious meaning given the current climate.  Only Jews were circumcised during the Middle Ages clearing the way for either irreligion (for those who professed it did something) or scandal.  What this does not say however is that somehow Jews, because they are circumcised before Baptism are somehow lost.  That would obviously go against the testimony of Scripture (c.f. Romans 11:25-29).  Pope Eugene IV makes it crystal clear when he says “Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart “into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock.”  Jews, despite being circumcised can still be saved through Baptism and remaining within the “bosom and unity of the Church.”

Therapeutic Circumcision

If we advance four hundred years, arguments are being put forward for therapeutic reasons why circumcision may be advisable.  In other words, there may be non-religious reasons for being circumcised, reasons that once it became more commonplace such that its practice would not link a person intrinsically to the Jewish faith.  It was from within this climate that the Church began to change her tone and now begin to look at the morality of circumcision from within the context .  Pope Pius XII, in a discourse from 1952 even explicitly taught that circumcision was morally permissible “if, in accordance with therapeutic principles, it prevents a disease that cannot be countered in any other way.”  Nontherapeutic reasons have yet to receive an endorsement from the Church and so it should be assumed that, although there may be morally licit nontherapeutic reasons (like Timothy), there needs to be further development and understanding what those reasons might be.

It is instructive to delve deeper into the particularities of the therapeutic viewpoint so as to understand more deeply when it is wrong.  Therapeutic modalities are governed by the principle of totality which is meant to protect bodily integrity.  The principle of totality and integrity says that we may not modify the body of a person except in the case of medical necessity or to restore proper functioning.   Summarizing, the Catechism says about bodily integrity, “[E]xcept when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against moral law” (CCC 2297).  

Strictly speaking, circumcision as it is commonly performed within Western medicine is not a mutilation or a sterilization.  Both of these are related to bodily function.  Circumcision does not alter the functioning of the penis.  It is however an amputation and is medically defined as such (posthectomy).  Thus we cannot perform a circumcision for nontherapeutic reasons.

Did God then command something that was wrong in commanding the Jews to be circumcised?   The medical circumcision that we perform today is different from that of the Old Covenant Jews in the time of Jesus.  They did not amputate the entire foreskin but instead made a ceremonial (although probably no less painful) cut of a flap of the foreskin called a Brit Milah.  Obviously, this would not be a full amputation like we currently perform today, called a Brit Peri’ah.  This may also mitigate the “Timothy exception” since his circumcision was not an amputation.  This is mentioned as well because we are likely not dealing with the same thing, even though we call them both “circumcision”.   But even if they are then the permissibility then hinges on whether or not there are therapeutic reasons for doing so.    

This is a question for medical science and not for theology and so the Church as remained relatively silent in recent times about the issue (unfortunately).  Most circumcisions today are performed, at least by parents, under the assumption that there are good therapeutic reasons for doing so.  Medical science is starting to come to a different conclusion, although coming to a consensus has been rather slow.

Given all that has been said and if we are to assume that there are not good therapeutic reasons for being circumcised in most cases, it is natural to ask whether one is culpable for being circumcised.  The obvious answer is no for, even though the parents may consent for the children, the sins of the father do not fall upon the children.  Circumcision is done to you, not something you choose to have done and thus you bear no moral responsibility.  But we did speak about the “sins of the father “suggesting there may be some culpability on the part of the parents.  Most parents have no reason to question convention, especially when medical professionals assume the procedure is to be done.  Thus, they are operating under invincible ignorance and any culpability they do bear is for not considering the question more thoughtfully.  But it is also assumed that the parent-to-be reading this essay will take the time to form themselves now that they know it is a debated issue and overcome their ignorance.

In conclusion we can say that as far as we can discern without further instruction from the Church, all non-therapeutic circumcisions are wrong.  There certainly are therapeutic reasons for performing one, although they may be less serious than the culture at large would have us think.  Although this is a medical question, each person should do their homework and exercise cautious prudence when deciding to have their sons circumcised.

On Embryo Adoption

Abortion, Bioethics, Conscience, Culture of Life, Fatherhood, Human Dignity, Theology of the Body, , , , , , ,

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there are over 620,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the United States.  Even though the “vast majority” of them are still being considered for use for “family building efforts” and others have been “earmarked by the creating couples for use in research,” there are still as many as 60,000 unclaimed frozen embryos currently.  With the growing popularity of IVF, we should expect these numbers to rise dramatically over the coming years.  All this has left pro-lifers scrambling for ethical solutions that free these children from their cryogenic prison.  One Evangelical Christian group called Snowflake Embryo Adoption matches the embryos with women who are willing to “adopt” them.  In essence the embryos are implanted into the wombs of women who carry them to term and raise them as their own children.   This solution, as we shall see, is not without moral controversy.

We must first admit that the plight of these cryogenically preserved children represents one of the greatest injustices of our age because of the sheer numbers alone.  But because many of the “consumers” of IVF are couples struggling with infertility, very few people are willing to call it out.  Instead it remains hidden away in laboratories and freezers.  Despite intrinsic evil of IVF, we must never forget that the children themselves are not an evil but a good that came from the evil.  They are members of the human community, regardless of how they were conceived, and thus are subject with rights, including the right to a safe environment in which they can thrive.  These voiceless children are crying out for justice, a cry that we are obligated not to ignore.  Therefore, it would seem that “embryo adoption” offers a compassionate solution.  The adoptive parents did not bring the children into existence and are simply looking for a way to “right a wrong” by rescuing these children from a frozen existence. 

Adoption?

When framed in this manner, it seems rather straightforward that this type of adoption is an irrefutable good.  But this is a case where we must be careful with our terms.  To label this an embryo adoption is really a form of begging the question.  This is why many moral theologians prefer the term “embryo rescue”.  For everyone know that adoption is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether this should be classified as a type of adoption.  Adoption has always referred to a legal process by which a child (usually although not exclusively) enters into a family and assumes all the rights and duties of a biological son or daughter.  Nowhere among these rights and duties however would we find the right to gestation.  That right is reserved only for biological children.  The question is whether this difference carries any moral weight.

The Church defines surrogacy as when “a woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of ‘donors’. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy” (Donum Vitae, A3).  Based upon this definition, embryo rescue is more akin to surrogacy than to adoption. The only difference is in the intention of the pregnant woman—in one case she carries the child for another and in the other she carries it for herself.  But surrogacy is not wrong because of the intention of the woman who is impregnated, but because of the nature of the act itself. 

A hypothetical will help to see why this is the case.  Suppose a woman and her husband go through the IVF procedure and find that the woman will never be able to carry a child to term.  She approaches her sister and tells her that they still have three “extra” embryos that are destined for destruction and asks if she would be willing to rescue one of them by offering her womb to carry the child.  She tells her that it would not be surrogacy, but “embryo fostering” because she is simply fostering the child for 9 months.  Verbal gymnastics aside, this clearly fits the definition of surrogacy, an action that the Church has always condemned surrogacy as an intrinsically evil act because it is an offense “against the unity of marriage and the dignity of the procreation of the human person.”  In other words, no matter how good the intention is, it can never be deemed morally licit.  Likewise, embryo adoption suffers a similar fate.

Surrogacy and the Rights of Spouses

Understanding why surrogacy is wrong will help to see why embryo rescue is not a real moral solution.  Notice that Donum Vitae said surrogacy was an offense, not against the procreative aspect of marriage, but the unitive.  A woman should only become a mother through her husband.  He has an exclusive right to her procreative powers and faculties.  When those powers are exercised without him, then the unitive good of marriage has been harmed.  She is a mother of the child, but her husband is in no way the father.  He neither had a hand in creating the child nor in its gestation (both of which a biological father does even in utero).  He may become the child’s adoptive father when it is born, but until then he is not a father.

The unitive good of marriage is maintained when husband and wife must become parents through each other.   Even in the case of adoption, they become parents together and not independently of each other.  This is why we should hesitate to call embryo rescue, adoption.  This solution then introduces a new injustice, mainly against the husband’s exclusive rights to his wife’s procreative faculties.  This is ultimately why the Church has said this is “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (Dignitatis Personae, 19).

What can be done about this then?  For the time being we have an obligation to keep the children already in existence alive until a solution can be found.  This form of embryo adoption by which someone keeps the child from being terminated or subject to scientific testing would be laudable.  When St. John Paul II spoke on the topic he made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”(quoted in Dignitatis Personae, 19).  Putting an end to this sanitized barbarism then should be our primary goal. 

Knowing when Your Time is Up

Anthropology, Bioethics, Heaven, Last Things, , , , ,

In a study that confirms what fans of The Princess Bride have long known, researcher Dr. Sam Parnia found that those whose hearts stopped and were clinically dead were only “mostly dead”.  He found that nearly 40% of patients who were revived after their hearts had stopped beating reported some level of awareness and consciousness.  The doctor even went so far as to say that “you know you are dead because your brain keeps working” for some short period of time.  Since the results of this study, which he dubbed AWARE, were published in 2015, there have been a slew of studies attempting to better understand death and so-called near death experiences.  Unfortunately, a number of these studies ignore what we already know through philosophical anthropology and so end up taking researchers down into bottomless rabbit holes.

With the advent of the age of the “specialist” these types of studies, that is, studies that apply empirical science to questions philosophy can, and usually already has, provide an answer are becoming more common.  Very often science, because it relies only upon empirical methods, comes up with incorrect conclusions.  We already know, and have known for a long time, that you know when you are dead.  This is because the soul is immortal.

Philosophy as the Handmaiden of Science

Some might think this is a theological claim and dismiss the question a priori has something that must be “believed” and not known.  While the question of the soul’s destiny might be a theological claim, the fact that it is immortal is a philosophical truth.  Human beings are capable of three types of actions.  There are those that depend solely upon the body like digestion.  There are those that depend upon the interaction of the body and the mind like choosing what to eat based upon both knowledge of nutrition and personal tastes.  Finally, there are those actions that do not depend upon the body like abstract thought in some intellectual field like mathematics or even reasoning about the immortality of the soul.  This latter group, because it does not depend upon the body as a completely immaterial operation, means that man has the capacity, at least in part, to act when the soul is separated from the body.  We may use the body (such as our memory and imagination) when we perform these abstract operations, but these operations do not depend upon the body. 

We may not be able to definitively say how we know after the soul has been separated from the body, but we can say with certainty that we continue to know things even after our brains cease operating.  This, because it goes outside of ordinary human experience, would have to be revealed in some way to us.  The point though is that it is not unreasonable to posit that one of those things that we know is that we are dead.

If philosophy already confirms this when it proves the immortality of the soul, then what value do studies like this have?  Death, properly defined, is the separation of body and soul.  Because the soul is an immaterial substance, its presence cannot be directly detected using scientific (materialistic) methods.  Instead medical personnel must look for signs that the soul has, in fact, left the body.  To see how this might be done, we again must turn to philosophy.

What do we mean when we say the soul is “in the body”?  To say that a spiritual substance is in a material substance is to say that it is acting upon it.  So, it is said that the soul is in the body, it does not mean that it is stored in some area of the body, but that it acts upon it.  The soul does not act on every part of the body directly, but instead acts through the brain which serves as the body’s integrative organ.  Once the brain is no longer able to perform this integrative task, then the soul leaves the body.  This is the reason that the Church suggests what is called the Neurological Criteria for determining death. 

Science as the Handmaiden of Philosophy

This study and studies like it seem to empirically verify what we have long known through reason—even if the heart stops beating, this does not mean a person is dead (i.e. the soul has left the body).  Studies like this should also make us pause on questions of organ donation since many people use clinical death as a criteria to determine whether to harvest a person’s organs.  The person, using the Neurological Criterion, may still actually be alive and even capable of higher brain activity associated with human thought.  In so far as these studies help to refine and better pinpoint the moment of death, they are very helpful.  But when they get off on tangents such as “you know you are dead” they undermine the task of true science.  They seem to adopt a materialistic conception of man, without the strings that are attached.  If you are “dead” and your body is all you are, then who is the I that is knowing he is dead?  To even make the statement implicitly assumes there is someone who survives death.

When framed in this way these studies also feed the universal fascination with near-death experiences.  As this particular study showed, these experiences are relatively common place.  There is no reason why we should be skeptical of these accounts in general, especially when as Christians we have examples, including Lazarus, of people who have definitely died and are resuscitated.  But there are reasons why we might be skeptical in particular instances.  Few, if any, of these people describe the presence of the demonic or mention the epic struggle with fallen angels that we know happens in the dying.  To say that all of these people have avoided the same epic struggle that Our Lord instructed us to pray against in the Our Father, stretches the Christian imagination.  In fact, it stretches it thin enough to say that it is probably not common place at all.  It is more likely that most of these are either illusory or demonically caused.   

The Danger of Playing House

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Moralilty, , , ,

“Playing house” is a common children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually centering around family life.  What happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable still like to play the game?  Something along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a “61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself — acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.”   Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into which our culture is descending.

Imagine little baby Uma, when she is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really creepy for us.”  On it, she will find the name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge.  Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her grandmother.  Now this permanent public record will look like a case of incest.  Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better?  In truth she will know that she was pieced together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts.  She will know she was a “product” of conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s sister’s egg.

Straight Out of A Brave New World?

As the origins of life grow to more closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to point out this injustice.  Justice requires that equals be treated as equals.  When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is, as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology.”   

No one can measure the psychological effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has attempted to study it.  Children of divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their parents “love them very much.”  That is because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you came from love, that is, you are not an accident.  Likewise children conceived in a laboratory could face a similar identity crisis.

If you doubt the person-product connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop into a healthy baby.”  If you are going to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.  Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception.  The article doesn’t say what happened to these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human experimentation.  At least there was some semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the child was too much “like playing God.” 

Procreation and the “Right to Make Life”

Perhaps the clearest indication of where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question.  After laying out all of the specific costs of the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?”  And this is, the battleground over which must fight if we are to rectify this injustice.

Humans do not reproduce, they procreate.  This is more than a mere semantical distinction.  Reproduction is a closed activity.  It simply requires two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce offspring.  Human procreation is different however.  Like other material creatures, humans exchange genetic matter.  But they lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their offspring.  This must be created by Someone else and requires His intervention.  Because procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed.  Couples receive children rather than grasp at them. 

The biological limitations that God has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own thriving.  Seizing what should otherwise be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents.  But it need not be so for the children.   Even though the children conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product of technology, in truth they are not.  They are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings, God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist.  He still loved them into existence, even if their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.

One way to put a halt to the skid down this slippery slope is to change our rights language.  Even if the State grants them, there are no such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly speaking, reproduce.  As proof of this, notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people connected to these rights.  In fact, they render children’s rights obsolete.  What people do have are procreative rights.  These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.   

In closing, there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already lost.  This is no mere “playing house” precisely because of stories like this.  In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death or a frozen existence.  This couple may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.  The demand for procedures like this (as well as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase unless we do something to protect these children.

The NFP Lifestyle

Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of Life, , ,

In recent years there have been a number of sociological studies linking marital happiness/success with methods of birth regulation.   Most of them show positive differences between those couples who practice NFP and those who use other methods of birth control, although not always to the degree that NFP Catholics like to advertise.  This is mostly due to the fact that couples practicing NFP fall into two categories—those who do so with a contraceptive mentality and those who live an NFP lifestyle.  It is the latter group which would likely show a significantly higher marital satisfaction.

I called it a “lifestyle” because it is about so much more than just family planning.  NFP reinforces the one flesh union of marriage even when the couple is not engaged in the marital embrace.  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I will mention that, unlike woman, man’s fertility is non-cyclical.  He is fertile all the time.  This means that the burden of self-mastery often falls upon him.  In fact one could say self-mastery is at the heart of being a man.  The man, as he finds stamped into his body, is made to make a gift of himself.  But to give oneself away, you must first own yourself, that is, have total self-mastery.  Your yes only means something when you are free to say no.  Without this requisite self-mastery comes the constant temptation to “lord it over the woman” (c.f. Gen 3:16).  When you do not have control over yourself, you will attempt to control other people, especially those that are close to you.

The Burden of Fertility

While man does not experience his fertility as a burden per se, the woman does.  This doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing, only that it carries with it “labor” even if that labor is joyfully and willfully endured.  She is the one who, ultimately, must bear the consequences of fertility.  Family planning and birth control often fall upon her.  As proof of this, despite all the nasty side effects, a woman is willing to take a birth control pill.  This is also the arena in which NFP can facilitate a true one flesh union by enabling the man to help carry the load of her fertility with her.

The most obvious time of her cycle is during menstruation.  The man experiences his constant fertility as a burden so as to be united bodily with his wife during a particularly painful period of time.  The burden of fertility that she is feeling can also be felt, albeit in a different way, in his body too.  He literally is practicing compassion, that is suffering with.  When borne with love and patience he is making a bodily gift of himself to his wife.

Most men already do this, although perhaps in not such a deliberate way.  But for those men who practice NFP and have experienced the “disappointment” of the arrival of an early period, this can enable them to see how the one flesh giving might continue.  Likewise, when for “just reasons” the couple is using NFP to avoid pregnancy the man puts aside the drive of his constant fertility so as to share in and through his body her fertility.  This is where real manhood, that is manhood founded upon self-mastery, is particularly felt because he feels an increase in the burden of his fertility because of the inviting presence of her pheromones signaling her fertility.  Even in abstaining from the marital embrace the couple is experiencing a type of one-flesh union when they join their wills together in postponing pregnancy.

NFP’s Effect on Family Life

An NFP lifestyle also makes for a happier home life in general in the relationship between the parents and children.  Schooled in self-mastery by NFP the parents are better able to love their children in a disinterested fashion.  As John Paul II, in a defense of Humanae Vitae once said:

“[parents that are contracepting] cannot sacrifice their egoism to the good of their spouse, will likewise lack generosity, patience, serenity and calm assurance in their relations with their children.  They will love their children to the degree to which their children bring them joy—that is selfishly and not for their own sakes; they will cajole them and teach them self-indulgence and self-love.  Instead of the peace given by self-mastery, unrest will reign in the family, because the state of tension created by a truncated sexual act surrounded by precautions, an act that is to be an unreserved gift of self, must in the long term be communicated to the children.  It seems that the increasing prevalence of anxiety and even certain neuroses results in large part from contraceptive practices.”

For the better part of the last half-century, the teaching Church has been (at best) silent promoting her teachings on birth control.  It is time that the rest of the Church step out into the void and preach the freedom that comes from ditching contraception.  The one flesh union within marriage is a daily lived experience.

 

Power Play

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Theology of the Body, , ,

As the Church marks the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, much has been said regarding the prophetic character of Blessed Paul VI’s controversial encyclical.  In particular, the Pope predicted that four things would happen as contraceptive use spread throughout a society.  There would be an increase in marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a loss of reverence for woman as she is reduced to an instrument for the satisfaction of a man’s desires and governments would use coercive power to implement “family planning” policies.  In reading the signs of the times, the Pope saw the consequences clearly, but why he was so easily able to see this is just important.  For these consequences were just symptoms of a deeper mindset that the Holy Father feared would ultimately conquer the hearts and minds of men, a mindset that was just as soul-killing as the contraceptive mentality to which it was linked.  After uttering his prophecy of consequences, the Holy Father tells us the root cause is man’s unwillingness to “accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go” (HV , 17).

On the one hand this is nothing new.  One can even say that Original Sin itself is the mark of man’s unwillingness to accept his creaturely limits.  Man in his Edenic bliss can eat from every tree in the Garden, save one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (GN 2:16-17).  Made in the likeness of God, he is confronted with the choice to be “like gods who know good and evil” (Gn 3:5).  That is, he has a choice between conforming himself to the limits of reality, or shaping reality to his liking.  He quickly finds out that his decision was never a real option.  He passes his confusion on to his progeny along with a proclivity for choosing likewise.

Confusing Limits

Because man is now in a state of confusion, he must set out to discover reality as it really is.  To enter into a relationship with reality he must also (re-)discover himself as he really is (including his limits) as well.  At first, because of his confusion reality appears rock solid and he discovers many limitations in himself.  But as the field of discovery expands, he finds that he has the power to manipulate reality more and more.  His limitations become blurred except when he asks a simple question: does this new power over reality include power over myself?  If so, then it is actually a power within reality, which is the only true power.  Otherwise it is a grasping and remaking of reality.

In many ways chemical contraception represents a paramount example of this principle in play.  In the past contraception usually involved changing the act, but with the Pill and the like came the power to alter the reality of a woman’s reproductive system.  But this is no mere biological alteration, but an alteration to a person’s biology.  Therefore it has to be viewed through a personalistic lens.  Does the power the Pill gives over a woman’s cycle carry with it the power of the woman to master herself?  And, because a woman’s reproductive system is a relational system, does the Pill give the man in whom she enters into a reproductive relationship with a power to master himself?

Power

The wisdom of Blessed Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception begins to emerge, especially when we add a second principle.  With the emergence of new technology comes new power over reality.  This power is given at the service of controlling men.  The question is which men will be controlled.  Will the new power be used to control man himself?  Or will the power be used to control other men?  Or as CS Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means…the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

Blessed Paul VI was so accurate in his predictions because he knew that the Pill wasn’t really a medicine to control births, but a poison to control other people.  His forecasts are really about the power of one person over another.  More to the point, the Pill is about men exercising their power over women.  It tells women in order to gain her rightful share in society she must act like one of the big boys.  But because woman is a “misbegotten male” she must take a pill to do this.  But in truth it is a ploy in which man, who is fertile all the time, can find partners who are infertile all the time.  It absolves him of all responsibility and creates an injustice in which women are treated as inferiors.  What is so puzzling is that many of them, in the name of equality, swallow the pill anyway.  Shouldn’t society have to change and adapt to the feminine genius and not woman herself?  As then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future St. John Paul II) said ,

“Contraception makes no contribution to the woman’s personal rights.  Since it is a process that makes it possible to satisfy the ‘needs of the sexual instinct’ without taking on any of the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity, it primarily benefits the man.  This is why, once accepted contraception leads to sanctioning his erotic hedonist behavior.  In this situation, inevitably, the man benefits at the expense of the woman.  He ceases to regard the woman in the context of transmitting life.  She becomes for him simply the occasion for enjoying pleasure.  If one adds to this the fact that it is inscribed in the very structure of man to take initiative in the sexual realm and that the danger of being violated is a threat primarily to the woman, then one must admit that the more constitution of the woman appears grim indeed.  Therefore, when contraception is used, the woman faces not only inequality but also sexual slavery.”

In his opening paragraph of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI recognized that technology, especially reproductive technologies, were a force that the Church was going to need to confront.  Unfortunately she has not been up to the task and many women have suffered because of it.  As the Church continues to celebrate this Golden Anniversary of Humane Vitae, let’s work towards a rediscovery of the golden wisdom contained within this prophetic document.

Did Jesus Ever Get the Flu?

Bioethics, Incarnation, The Life of Jesus, ,

With frigid temperatures gripping much of the country confining much of America to the indoors, flu season has fully blossomed.  In response, many are scrambling to get flu shots so as to build up an immunity to the virus before it hits them.  Setting aside the question of the effectiveness of flu shots in general, I would like to focus on immunity to the flu.  Specifically, to ask whether Our Lord was immune to the flu during His earthly sojourn.  Did Jesus get the flu?

While some of us who are theology geeks might consider it “cool” to speculate on these types of questions, they appear to have little additional spiritual value.  It could be grouped among the other useless musings of the medieval theologians; musings such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  It is hard to imagine, however, that Saint Thomas Aquinas would spend so much time on theoretical questions without them also having spiritual value as well (like he does for this particular question in ST III q.14).  Questions like this one have value because they put the right amount of flesh on the doctrine of the Incarnation.  We can get so stuck on the idea of the Incarnation, that we forget it is first and foremost a real event touching even down to our own time.  Exercises such as these help us to meet Our Lord in the flesh with the right proportion of familiarity and wonder.

Like Us?

Our initial reaction might be to say, Our Lord was human, “like us in all things but sin” (Heb 4:15) and so, while He may never have caught the flu specifically, He almost certainly got sick.  Being fully human would mean He was subject to all kinds of bodily limitations in His human nature, sickness included.

The problem with this hasty response is that “except sin” marks a rather broad exception.  Most of the time we take it to mean that He didn’t do anything wrong.  That is, of course, true, but it does not fully capture the broad scope of the effects of sin, especially personal sin.

To properly frame the issue, let us make what is an important, albeit often misunderstood distinction.  Death in man, because of his composition of matter and spirit, is natural.  It was only a privilege that God gave to Adam and Eve in their state of innocence that they were exempt from suffering and death.  Put another way, man is naturally mortal and it is only by a preternatural gift that the first man and woman could avoid it.  Being “like us in all things but sin” means that Christ took to Himself a passible nature that included a body that was subject to death and suffering. Being “like us in all things but sin” means that His suffering and death were a natural consequence of becoming human and not as a result of Original Sin.

To be absolutely clear the Son, when He took the passible human nature to Himself, was under no necessity to do so, but instead did it voluntarily.  He could just as easily have prevented suffering and death, but He chose to endure them for three reasons.  First, and foremost, He did so that He might make satisfaction for our sins.  The second was so that He might show Himself to be truly human.  His human nature was a sacrament of His divinity in that it was the sign that made visible the reality that He was the Son of God and thus Our Redeemer.  Finally, He did so as to leave us an example of heroic patience.  In short, He did so because it was necessary to complete His mission as Redeemer.

By focusing on the fact that Our Lord willed to suffer, rather than to be the passive victim that Original Sin turns us all into, we can move advance the ball down the field towards a definitive answer.  Our Lord suffered only insofar as it was necessary to make satisfaction for the common sin of human nature.  his was provided that the defects He was subject to did not interfere with His mission as Redeemer.

This helps us to understand why Our Lord experienced hunger, thirst and exhaustion.  In order to make satisfaction for the common sin Our Lord would have to voluntarily assume these common penalties that were imposed on mankind because of Original Sin.  St. John Damascene calls these natural, but not degrading affliction.  This also helps us to rule out a few things.

What Our Lord Didn’t Suffer

First, He did not suffer anything as a result of any hereditary defect.  His constitution was perfect and He was not even prone to certain illnesses.  Second, He would not have suffered any illnesses that would be an indirect result of personal sin—things such as heart disease, diabetes or liver disease.  In summary He did not take on particular sufferings that afflict particular men.

So then, what about the flu and other illnesses?  Since the flu is not a common punishment meted out to human nature in general, then Our Lord would not have suffered it.  One might immediately object that neither was scourging and being crowned with thorns.  Those sufferings were willed because they atoned for the common sins of mankind, especially as they relate to sorrow for our sins and unwillingness to do penance.  Each of the sufferings of His Passion makes these sins visible so to speak and thus cry out for our participation.  These sufferings were a part of His mission as Redeemer whereas the Flu and other such illnesses would have hampered His mission, rendering Him unable to carry out good works.

Our Lord, because His soul was filled with wisdom and grace, could not suffer as a result of failures on either count.  Our Lord, filled with wisdom, would have known how to avoid illness, even if He were subject to it.  Likewise, filled with grace in His humanity and able to heal the sick, He would not have been subject to sickness Himself.

“When I was Hungry and Thirsty You Gave Me to Eat and Drink”

Bioethics, Last Things, Mercy, Suffering

In the past few months our family has been confronted with end of life medical care for two close members.  In both cases, we had to fight to continue providing nutrition and hydration.  After hitting so close to home twice, I began to wonder about other’s experiences and found that nearly everyone who has had to walk this journey with a loved one did not know what to do and eventually deferred to “the experts” in the medical profession.  Already emotionally overwhelmed and lacking confidence in their medical knowledge, they trusted that the medical professionals would guide them to do the right thing.  If our experience has taught us anything, it is two things.  First, the culture of death is so deeply imbedded that even those medical professionals who are genuinely compassionate and of good will can succumb to it and that we were glad that we did not wait until the situation came up to learn about the importance of nutrition and hydration at this most vulnerable stage of life.

This is not meant to be a condemnation of those caregivers who devote their lives to walking with families through this.  This is meant to raise awareness that the current “best practice” in dealing with those who are actively dying is morally repugnant.  By arming yourself now with a proper understanding, you can protect yourself later when your thinking may be clouded because of the stress of the situation.

Medical Treatment and Ordinary Care

First, there is an important distinction to be made between medical treatment and ordinary care.  In general treatment would include those interventions that may cure a disease or aid one in returning to health. Medical treatment would include things like antibiotics, dialysis, surgery, chemotherapy, and the like.  One may look at these treatments and decide that their burdens outweigh their benefits and decide to forgo them in order to live the remaining days of his life with a certain quality of life.

Medical treatment is different than ordinary care however.  Ordinary care is simply routine attention given to the patient.  This would include bathing, providing clean clothes and sheet, keeping them warm, and providing food and water.  Each of these is essential to life and to withhold any of these, especially to those who cannot provide them for themselves, and assuming you have the means to do so, is considered cruel.  No amount of misguided compassion would say that we should leave a sick person outside in December exposed to the elements.  Likewise, no amount of misguided compassion would say that we should allow someone to starve and become dehydrated.

It was this important distinction between medical treatment and care that Pope St. John Paul II brought attention to when in a papal allocution in 2004 he said,

“I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality, which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering” (Address of John Paul II To the Participants in the International Congress on “Life Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas”).

Notice as well that John Paul II did not say nutrition and hydration must be given in all circumstances.  He said that they are only to be given for as long as they are “seen to have attained its proper finality.”  What he means is that they should be given in all circumstances until it can be definitively shown that they no longer can be processed or assimilated by the body.  It must be “seen.”  There cannot be mere medical conjecture or blanket statements like “we see that as the patient is dying their nutritional and hydrational needs are greatly diminished.”  Even if their needs are greatly diminished, this is an argument for giving less, not cutting them out altogether.  All too often this argument is put forth as a reason for omitting them altogether.  The only time they should be completely removed is when it is shown that the body no longer can make use of them.

Other Arguments against Nutrition and Hydration

The “diminished need” argument is not the only one that is commonly put forth.  There are two others.  The first is what I like to call the “argument from technology.”  This argument essentially says something like “75 years ago we didn’t have the ability to use feeding tubes or IV’s and we can now keep people alive longer because of these technologies.”

What makes the flaw in this argument hard to see initially is that it is true.  We did not have the ability to use feeding tubes and IV’s for nutrition and hydration in the past.  The problem with this argument is that we have a lot of things because of technological advances that we did not have in the past.  The refrigerator that allows us to feed sick people (even those who can still feed themselves) in a relatively recent invention.  Indoor plumbing, another technological advance, keeps the sick who can still hold their own cups (another technological advance) hydrated.  But we also did not have the pain killers we have now.  Should we remove those as well?  Certainly, we are prolonging their lives by controlling their pain.  In the past they would have gone into shock and died.

One can easily see how absurd this line of reasoning can actually become.  Where do we draw the line?  If we have the ability and the technology to provide care for someone and it is care that they have the capacity to receive, then we ought to provide it.  The fact that nutrition and hydration extends one’s life is true for all of us.  Remove those things from even the healthiest person and they will die.  More accurately, removing those things from the person would be to kill them.  Allowing someone to die is different than causing someone to die, even if you do so by an act of omission such as withholding care from them when you have the means to do so.

The second argument is that by providing nutrition and hydration, even when the patient is still able to tolerate it, we are “postponing the inevitable.”  Again the difficulty in seeing where this thinking goes wrong is that it is true.  We are postponing the inevitable.  Although again, by me eating lunch today, I also have postponed the inevitable.

What those who use this line of reasoning surely mean is that when death is imminent we should do nothing to stop it.  But doing nothing to stop it, is not the same thing as aiding it.  Why not, as my son with Autism suggested when we told him his grandmother was going to die, push them off the roof then?  The fact that death is imminent does not mean we should kill the person, even if it is by omission.

The fact is that human life, even when the person is suffering, even when the person is close to death is a good that ought to be protected.  Life is a gift, one that none of us earned.  Therefore we are never free to give the gift back or decide that we do not want it any longer.  We must wait on the decision of the One Who bestowed the gift.  Until such time, we should see the person before us and care for them.  Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the sick—all corporal works of mercy that should never cease as long as a person is present before us.  Don’t allow anyone to take those acts of charity away from you.  Provided the person can still assimilate the food and water, you should never remove a feeding tube or a hydration IV.