Tag Archives: right to life

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.

A Right to Die

End of Life, Human Dignity, Suffering, , , ,

Ambiguity is the mother of all social ill.  The less clear we are in our social discourse, the easier it is to pull a fast one on society at large.  Many states across the country have fallen victim to this through the “Death with Dignity” movement.  “Right to die” legislation has been either been accepted or introduced into legislation in 28 states in our country.  With this issue being raised with such regularity, it is worth investigating the merit of a so-called “right to die.”

Before we can even approach the question of whether there is a “right to die”, we need to examine what a right is.  Despite all of the talk we hear about rights in our country, few can actually define what a right is.  It is the steady refusal to examine rights philosophically that leads to all the muddle-headed discussion surrounding rights.  A right is the moral power to possess, do, or exact something that is due to the person.  Within this definition we find that there are three components.  First, there is the person who owns the right.  Second, there is the person who has the duty to respect the right.  This can be either passive, as in a duty of non-interference, or active, as in the duty to satisfy the right, or both.  These two are bound together morally by the final component, the thing in question.

One of the great dangers that our culture’s obsession with rights poses is that there are always those who will use the language of rights to mask something far more nefarious than it appears to be.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the “right to die” or “death with dignity” movement.  This is why having clarity about rights in general can protect many innocent people from suffering at the hands of those who are fighting for our “right to die.”  It will remove any doubt that there is such thing as a “right to die.”

Flatlines

First we can look at the holder of supposed right.  Is death something that is due to a person?  In the strictest sense, no, it is not something that is owed to someone.  Rights flow either directly or indirectly from human nature itself.  Ultimately any rights claim is based upon the assumption that the thing being claimed is a good.  As John Paul II said many times the right to life is the “fundamental right and source of all other rights” (EV, 72).  Even if you look to the foundations of modern liberalism rooted in the works of Hobbes and Locke, you will find that because all rights are given by nature, they assume that we all by nature have a self-interested attachment to our own lives.  In other words, the right to life is inalienable in that it flows from the fact that life is a good by nature.  This becomes clearer when we look at the person whose duty it is to respect the right.  If life is an “inalienable” right then this means that there is a corresponding duty to protect life.  Practically speaking, there is an obligation to protect another’s life when it is in jeopardy.

While this may appear to be quite cut and dry, reality is more complicated than that.  The question of a “right to die” arises not just because autonomy has run amok in the West.  Medical technology has made it so that we now have more control than ever over when and how we die.  Thanks to some medical interventions, patients can be kept alive long after nature would have taken its course.  From within this setting, we have to ask whether a person has a “right to be let to die.”

In essence the “right to be let to die” means that a person has the right to choose not to receive life-sustaining medical treatment.  In order not to interfere with the obligation of others to protect life, the treatment must be excessively burdensome in that its benefits are outweighed by its burdens.  Those responsible for taking care of the person still have the obligation to provide routine attention to the patient by bathing them, keeping them warm, controlling pain and providing food and water.

So while this means no one has the “right to die” per se, it is reasonable to assert that they do have a “right to be let to die.”  The problem at this point is that people who label themselves as “Death with Dignity” advocates have piggybacked onto this legitimate right and wedded it to something else, namely a “right to be made dead.”  By hiding behind a sweet sounding name, Euthanasia (which literally means “good death”), what is being claimed is a right to positive assistance in bringing about death.  This means that what appears on the surface to be a mere personal freedom is really about placing an obligation to kill on another person.  This obviously contradicts one’s obligation to protect life.  This self-contradictory aspect of the “right to be made dead” shows why it is not a true right.  It also helps to reveal what this is really about.

This movement has very little to do with medical technology or terminal illnesses.  What is really being sought is acknowledgment of a right to commit suicide.  Given the will, there are very few people who could stop someone that wanted to kill themselves, so why would we need legislation for a right to commit suicide?  The answer is all about money and power.  First, in the states where it is legal, insurance companies must pay out when someone commits suicide.  This means that previously what was a deterrent, namely the financial well-being of a family, is taken out of the equation.  In fact the family may end up better off financially when their loved one is dead.  One can easily see that there could be familial encouragement to end it all based on a monetary windfall.

Second, this is ultimately about some people having the power to determine who lives and who dies.  If we recognize a “right to be dead” then there is a corresponding “duty to make dead.”  Who is the one who must exercise this duty and when should it be exercised?  Already we can see how the person and the proxies could be compromised, but what if they are not coming around to what is obvious to doctors and other “experts”?  While no one likes slippery slope arguments, this is precisely what has happened in places where a “right to die” has been recognized like the Netherlands.  The emphasis is no longer on the right to die, but the obligation to take the life that has been deemed unworthy of life.

What makes this particularly evil is that it plays into people’s emotions.  No one wants to be a burden to their loved ones, especially when there seems to be a painless way to avoid that.  As usual though, it is not enough to have our hearts in the right place; we must get our heads their too.  Demanding clarity when it comes to rights, especially the “right to die,” is a good place to start the journey from our hearts to our heads.