“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.