Tag Archives: Marriage

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. 

Marriage as the Ultimate Act of Human Freedom

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Modern sensibilities find arranged marriages to be utterly repulsive.  They represent a great affront to human freedom and harken to a time of patriarchal repression of women.  Nevertheless, for much of human history men and women came together in marriage, not through courtship, but through some prior arrangement.  I am not suggesting that we return to those days, but instead to admit that given the glass house of marriage that we are living in, we should not be so quick to throw stones of subjection and patriarchy without first grasping the wisdom in the practice.  In particular, we can look to see how both love and freedom were actually protected and promoted by this practice so that we can apply these principles to the decrepit institution of marriage today.

In order to begin, we must put aside our gut reactions in order to see why, at least in principle, arranged marriages could work.  A father, when he truly loves his daughter, sees her as a gift and wants her to be fulfilled in the truest sense of the word.  That fulfillment includes the time when she must join herself to a husband.  Because of his great love, he wants to make sure that she will be yoked to a man who has a sense of responsibility of the great gift that has been bestowed upon him.  And so, in arranging the marriage, he was vetting his future son-in-law to make sure that he was worthy of such a priceless gift.  Did it always happen like this?  Of course not.  But the principle which animated it is wholly lacking in today’s culture and so bears some further examination.

Attraction in Marriage

What if the woman was not attracted to the man or vice versa?  Attraction, both sensual and emotional, is very important, but only in the sense that they contain the seeds of love.  But love is not the same thing as attraction.  Attraction is about the pleasure your presence brings to me.  In other words, it is a love of the feelings that you stir in me.  It draws me towards you, but I must decide whether you have more value than the mere trigger of pleasant feelings.  It is ironic that we recoil at the idea of our parents arranging our marriages while we have no problem submitting to the genetics of our passions, the same genetics we have received from our parents.

Attraction should serve to spur me towards love to see if the good that I detected is a real good for me.  When it does, love emerges in which my consciousness of the fact that you are gift (“a good for me”) stirs me to make a gift of myself (“to be a good for you”).  This is a solid foundation of love in which the couple sees each other as a gift and takes responsibility for the well-being of the other.  Once love emerges then genuine attraction roams free because it is directed towards the full value of the person and not just some attributes that I happen to like.  When a relationship never grows past attraction, then true love never develops—infatuation, lust, cupidity, yes—but not true love.  This seems to be one of major obstacles facing marriage today; an inability to move past attraction.  Marriages end because “I just don’t love you anymore,” which really means “I never really loved you, only the feelings you stirred in me.”  They put too much stock in the laws of attraction and when the market crashed they were left with nothing.  Arranged marriages may not have been the solution to this problem, but at least they recognized that attraction was only a seed of love and not a foundation; a lesson we would do well to learn.

Freedom and Marriage

The modern distaste for arranged marriages also sees them as a great affront against freedom.  We are right to think we should be free to marry whomever we choose, but we fail to see that true freedom comes not in choosing who to marry, but in being married.  What this means is that marriage truly is the ultimate sign of human freedom.  When a couple says “I do” it constitutes the greatest act of human freedom.  Why is that so?  Because they are saying that no matter what happens, nothing will change their will to be yoked to the other person.  They are free from any feelings that come or go—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any person who might come or go in their life—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any external circumstances that might happen—their freedom is stronger.  In fact, far from diminishing their freedom, holding onto the “I do” and making it an “I am” they are actually increasing it.  To give in to any of the thousands of temptations to call it quits is not freedom, but slavery.

Unlike the marriages of today, arranged marriages emphasized the freedom through the permanence of their consent.   We on the other hand emphasize the “I’d like to” even going so far as to cohabitate on a trial basis.  With no real emphasis on the “I do” we find it just as easy to say “I no longer like to.” To say “I do is to say “I will” and it shows that the human will is stronger than any other compulsion or external circumstance.  Marriage is the great sign of human freedom.

A Culture of Divorce

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Once, when Our Lord was speaking with the Pharisees, they tried to test Him by asking Him about the lawfulness of divorce.  In response, He invited them to return to the beginning when, in God’s plan, man and woman became one through marriage.  In revoking Moses’ concession to man’s hardness of heart and outlawing divorce, He announced the indissolubility of marriage as a key aspect of the New Covenant.  This teaching however has become a source of controversy among Christians to the point where only the Catholic Church has remained faithful to Our Lord’s teaching of marriage as indissoluble.  Moses may have allowed divorce outright, but this is not the only way to “allow” divorce.  There is a second, more subtle way, that many within the Church would like to adopt—the “yes, divorce is wrong, but it doesn’t really matter” approach.

Remarriage is not the Only Problem

A point of clarification is necessary at first.  At first it seems the issue is really about remarriage after divorce.  But the Church, echoing Christ’s words is really against divorce.  In Matthew 19:9 Our Lord issues an exception opening the path to divorce because of “unchastity.”  The actual Greek word used by St. Matthew is porneia and has remained rather elusive as to an exact translation.  All of the ink spilled on a proper translation of this word is pointless unless we understand two things.

First, regardless of whether it refers to serious sexual sin or other forms of infidelity such as abuse, divorce is only a legal arrangement of living apart.  The marriage bond is not, nor can it ever be, broken.  Nowhere throughout the history of the Church did this ever mean that the person was free to remarry.  This teaching comes directly from St. Paul who taught that the separated couple has two options: reconciliation or remain single (1 Cor 7:10-11).

Second, the exception proves the rule.  This needs to be mentioned because we now live in a culture where the exception becomes the rule.  GK Chesterton said that because we have an “incapacity to grasp that the exception proves the rule, …silent anarchy is eating out our society.” He goes on to say that “if you treat a peculiar thing in a peculiar way, you thereby imply that ordinary things are not to be treated in that way…Anything in a special situation shows by implication that all things are not in that situation.”  In other words, the argument that there is an exception for “unchastity” says that divorce is normally wrong.  There can be no such thing as “no-fault divorce” because it takes the exception and makes it the rule.

That being said, divorce really does matter and we should not merely turn a blind eye to it.  Divorce really matters because of its effect on the Family.  When I say capital F Family, I mean the social reality that is the Family.  Yes, obviously, it has profound effects on those families touched by it directly, but no family remains immune to it.  Divorce leads to a divorce culture; a culture born not just by imitation, but also by intimation.

Marriage and Children

To see this, we must first acknowledge the relationship between marriage and children.  Most of us know these things are intrinsically connected but would struggle to articulate it.  Even the most ardent supporter of same-sex marriage knows this and often goes to great lengths to simulate it as part of their relationship.  The purpose of marriage is the mutual perfection of the spouses.  Marriage is an end in itself—it is not a means to have children.  A man and a woman desire marriage with each other, not because it will bring children into the world, but because they desire to be completely united to their spouse so that the two become one—spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

What does the Church mean then when she says that “Procreation and education of children is the end of marriage”?  What this means is that when the two become one, children naturally follow.  In other words, children are the fruit of conjugal love.  Procreation and education of children is the end of marriage not as the reason why spouses come together, but as a result of their coming together.  Marriage is the natural place in which a child is brought into and up in this world.  Yes, there are exceptions and courageous ones at that, but the exception proves the rule.  A child brought up with only one parent is at a disadvantage.

Clarity as to why this is a disadvantage emerges when we examine our brokenness.  As a result of the Fall, conflict and division emerges between men and women (c.f. Gn 3:16).  Their relationship becomes mainly one of competition.  But, “in the beginning, it was not so.”  Humanity is not man or woman, but both.  A child brought up with only a father(s) or mother(s) is really only half-educated on what it means to be a human person.  They need, and therefore have a right to, both parents.

But not any man and any woman will do.  They must be indissolubly united by love because each child must know that they are not a result of some random encounter, but through an act of everlasting love.  They remain incomprehensible to themselves unless they know they were loved into existence.  This is why their security always rests in the stability of their parents relationship and the love between the spouses must be the primary catalyst for the love of the parents for the child.

The Hidden Effects

In this setting, the child intimates what becomes a very important belief that puts structure his whole life.   A child needs a father and a mother not as separate or competing influences but as cooperating influences in their complementarity.  The world, especially today, says that men and women are mostly competitive and will only come together when, and for as long as, there is mutual benefit.  By remaining indissolubly united, the children learn that men and women are not naturally competitive but cooperative.  The minute divorce enters the picture, the child only sees the competitiveness.  When this happens enough and divorce within society gathers a certain momentum, indissoluble marriage becomes the exception and society built upon the Family crumbles.

Chesterton calls divorce, especially when there is remarriage, the height of superstition.  Can we really expect someone who broke a vow at the altar to keep a vow the second time at that same altar?  Vows mean very little and within a divorce culture integrity becomes an anti-value.  We are married at an altar because an altar is a place of sacrifice.  Marriage leads to the fulfillment of spouses because each learns to truly love.  It is a sad world where happiness (in the worldly sense) and love must co-exist.  Marriage is the school where love is learned and taught, and not just to the children.  Divorce says all of that was a lie.

Our Lady of Fatima and Gay Marriage

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When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she warned that without conversion, Russia would continue to spreads its errors throughout the world.  The “errors” to which she was referring were mainly those of Communism, rooted in the philosophy of Karl Marx.  More than an economic theory, Marxism views all of history as the conflict between oppressors and oppressed and seeks to do away with all division, natural or not.  Marx himself presented it as a conflict between capital and labor, but those categories can readily be adapted to any two groups including gender, race or sexual orientation.  While the fruit of the Marxist tree that is Communism may be dying, the Marxist roots are alive and thriving within our own liberal democracy, a society that is deeply (and deliberately) divided.  This makes Our Lady’s words all the more prescient and ought to give us pause as we mark the 100th anniversary of her appearance at Fatima.

All of the prior Marxist attempts to remake human nature and society have met one almost insurmountable obstacle—the Family.  Marx himself envisioned this obstacle and called for the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto saying, “Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

As long as the foundation of society remained strong and in place, any attempt to change society as a whole would ultimately fail.  But weaken the foundation and society will fall with it.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party USA has been one of the most vocal supporters of the push for gay marriage.  They knew that by subverting marriage, the Family would ultimately be laid waste.  Ultimately this is why those who oppose Gay Marriage cannot give up the fight.  By removing one of the means by which the Marxist spread their errors, we are hastening the reign of the Immaculate Heart.

Thinking Clearly about Marriage

Pascal said that our first moral obligation is to think clearly so that before we do anything we must understand why Marriage and the Family are intrinsically linked.  Without marriage, the Family ceases to exist.

Amidst all the debate in the past decade about redefining marriage, neither side could actually define either the classical definition or the revisionist version.  In order to see why the family and marriage are linked, we must begin by offering a definition of marriage.  Marriage is the complete union of two persons.  It is the total union of their persons at every level of their temporal being—spiritual, emotional and bodily.  The conjugal bond is what makes marriage unique in comparison to any other relationship or community of persons.

What revisionists have tried to do is to remove one of the elements.  They would almost certainly call it an emotional and spiritual bond.  Although it may seem surprising it is the bodily union that they must remove; not because it isn’t a sexual relationship but because it is not a conjugal relationship.

Men and women are capable of performing all biological processes on their own, save one, procreation.  To perform this process they need a complementary other.  In other words, in performing acts that may lead to procreation, they become a single “organism.”  It is not just any sexual activity that unites them, but only sexual activity that is intrinsically ordered to procreation.  In order to be unitive, sexual activity must also be the kind that is procreative.  Any other sexual activity (including contracepted) simply becomes the exchange of pleasure and does not unite the two people physically any more than a handshake, a back rub, or putting one’s finger in another’s ear.  Only in the marital embrace can two spouses be physically united, an act that same-sex couples cannot perform.  Marriage, under the revisionists’ definition must therefore no longer be a complete union of two persons since the couple is unable to become one flesh.

A word of explanation as to why I have been careful about calling them acts that are “ordered to procreation.”  As a biological process, procreation has aspects that are under control of the person and aspects that are not.  One may choose to breathe, but one cannot choose to get oxygen into the blood.  Provided the conditions are right, that happens “automatically” and is outside the direct control of the person.  So too with acts ordered to procreation.  A couple can engage in the marital embrace, but whether conception occurs or not, happens after the fact and is outside of their direct control.  In other words, it is not the actual conception of the child that causes the act to be unitive.  It is unitive because it is a procreative act.  Grasping this helps us to see why an infertile couple may still be married (because they are capable of procreative acts even if they do not lead to conception) and a same-sex couple may not.

Marriage and the Family

It also helps us to understand what it means when we say that children are the end of marriage.  They are not the purpose of marriage—the purpose is the total union or communion of the persons—but they are the fruit of marriage.  In short, they are a natural result of the communion of persons in marriage.

With all that has been said, we can understand that the Church is not being old-fashioned when she defines the family as “born of the intimate communion of life and love founded on the marriage between one man and one woman” (Gaudium et Spes, 48).  The family as the first society a person belongs to forms that person in his vision of reality.  Each child learns that he or she was generated from an act of love and was quite literally loved into existence.  It is the school of love where the child learns both how to love and be loved.  In short, “a society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 213).

Joining the Battle

If the goal is to destroy the family, then get rid of marriage.  Erotic love is too powerful to destroy it altogether, but modifying it to the point that it becomes unrecognizable is sufficient to destroy the family.  Not surprisingly with a change in marriage we are seeing a change in what people call a family.  A “family” that is not founded upon marriage as the communion of persons is built on sand.  It is only the complete bond of the spouses to each other that keeps the family together.

Since the Obergefell decision almost two years ago, many Catholics have disengaged from the battle for marriage.  It is time to pick up the battle once again, especially considering what Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary once said.  “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. However, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”  Let us re-engage and fight for marriage and the family!