Sex Au Naturel (25 page)

A Vermont judge declared that Isabella has two mommies; and appellate courts in Virginia (the state where Isabella was born and has lived most of her life) directed Virginia to fully recognize the Vermont orders giving the ex-lesbian partner (Vermont resident Janet Jenkins) wide unsupervised visitation rights. How was Isabella conceived? By in vitro fertilization when Miller and Jenkins were in a civil union over six years before.
⁷
On November 20, 2009, a judge found Miller in contempt of court for continuing to deny Jenkins access to her daughter, now seven years old. Authorities ordered Lisa Miller to give her daughter Isabella to Janet Jenkins on New Year’s Day, 2010. Miller refused and, as of this writing, remains a fugitive with the little girl.

These pretzel-like visions of chaos show how reproductive technologies strike at the very foundation of marriage, of family and parenthood. Further, at stake are not merely arcane legal disputes but the very idea of personhood. The question “Who am I?” is closely tied to others such as, “Whose son am I”? “Who is my father?” “How did I come to be”? The end game in all this is total chaos over how, and with whom, we ought to pass on human life.

The sheer ability to medically intervene doesn’t necessarily justify intervention. All science comes with ethical limits, as Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, and the prescient 1997 movie
Gattaca
, remind us. Examples of the truism could be multiplied.

The reproductive technologies under discussion represent a relatively new challenge for the teaching Church, spawned as they were in the darkest of all centuries: the twentieth. This is the same era that produced the bloodiest wars, the shadow of nuclear annihilation, the unlimited abortion license, hardcore pornography, no-fault divorce, and the rise of a new global persecution of believers unmatched perhaps since Roman times. In other words, we have a neo-pagan culture of death.

Only a culture of death thinks it can produce life without God.

Notice the difference between “reproductive” and “procreative.” To re
produce
is literally to manufacture again. It’s a solely human enterprise; whereas procreation is a much richer concept, suggesting man’s
supporting
role in God’s creation. With reproductive technology, the warm sheets of the marital bed are replaced by crisp smock of the lab technician.

At first blush, this distinction may sound totally contradictory: If the Catholic Church is so pro-baby, then how can she be against the very methods that can enable infertile couples to have the babies they badly want? Have Catholics no sympathy for the pain of childless couples that are unable to conceive?

Absent from these objections is the forgotten truth that children are a gift, not a right. The unlimited abortion license since
Roe v Wade
has taught us to view children as disposable commodities to be doted on, or destroyed, at will. But no one has the right to a child. If that were true, there would exist a duty somewhere to provide one.

A gift belongs in an entirely different category. Gifts can only be received, and given by another. As the
Catechism
puts it, “A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The ‘supreme gift of marriage’ is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged ‘right to a child’ would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right ‘to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,’ and ‘the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception’” (2378).

The Catholic Church is the world’s largest provider of healthcare in the world. A quick glance at her tradition of building hospitals, clinics, and medical universities shows that the Church is hardly opposed to medical interventions when they assist and repair nature’s flaws and diseases, e.g., eyeglasses help the eyes, hearing aids help the ears, braces help the legs, insulin helps the pancreas, and so on.

The Church, in fact, explicitly encourages the use of fertility drugs and procedures that increase the chances of conceiving so long as they assist the body’s natural processes. “Research aimed at reducing human sterility is to be encouraged,” in the words of the
Catechism, “
On condition that it is placed ‘at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights, and his true and integral good according to the design and will of God’” (2375). For instance, if the woman has a blockage in her fallopian tube, “it is permitted to move the egg (through a laboratory procedure) past the blockage so that it can be fertilized through the natural marital act. In the case of the man, it is permitted to collect sperm that is the product of natural marital intercourse and deposit it in the tube where it can fertilize the egg.”
⁸

Here is the moral rub. Reproductive technologies do not merely compensate for nature; they commandeer it. They do not merely bolster, underpin or support nature; they bypass, usurp and substitute it. In vitro fertilization, donor insemination, surrogate motherhood, and cloning are all to be rejected because they violate the right of every child to be born from the fruit of a loving mother and father through the natural means of transmitting life.

Obviously, children born through morally problematic means are to be loved and cherished like any other. Yet it simply does not accord with human dignity to be the product of an impersonal biologic exchange outside the Godordained portals of spousal love.

Each era of Church history, even broken down to smaller units, brings new challenges to the Church as Teacher. You can chart how this has played out in the last forty years.

• In 1968, Paul VI wrote
  Humanae Vitae
  in response to the world’s new preoccupation with sexual pleasure at the expense of its human and marital context.
  

   
  

• In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the important, if lesser known, document titled
  Donum Vitae
  (“the gift of life”) in response to the world’s new obsession with the pursuit of parenthood while bypassing marital intercourse. This document sets forth moral principles for evaluating the new reproductive technologies, and was signed by the Prefect of the CDF, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
  

   
  

• In 1995, Pope John Paul the Great published
  Evangelium Vitae
  (“the Gospel of Life”) in response to the world’s new penchant for killing human beings.
  

   
  

These three successive attacks—upon marriage and the beauty of human sexuality, upon the right of the child to be born from the love-union of his parents, and finally the attack upon human life itself—were answered by the Church in her defense of the rights of the marriage bed, the rights of children, and the very right to life, respectively. Serious Christians are called to embrace this answer and make it their own.
⁹

The
Catechism
quotes generously from all three
“Vitaes”
in its sections on marriage. “Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe upon the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ ‘right to become a father and a mother only through each other’” (2376).

Further, “Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that ‘entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children’” (2377).

But there is an even bigger moral problem with in vitro fertilization, and that is its close connection with the abortion industry and the attitude of the disposability of human persons. IVF involves, at the beginning, obtaining the sperm sample via masturbation; and, at the end, of harvesting many fertilized ova (the clinical term for tiny babies) and picking the healthiest for implantation. The rest are discarded or frozen, exposing these tiny human beings to further abuse and manipulation.

The 1860s error of the Victorians said that the ickiness of sex could only be redeemed by the intention of a baby. A hundred years later, the 1960s error of the Hedonists shouted from the rooftops that sex and babies have no inherent connection at all, and have divorced amicably, thank you! As we said in Chapter One, this separation of sex from babies led directly to the “ideal” of “free” “love” and the cult of the non-procreative orgasm.

By one of those “God-incidences,” on July 25, 1978, Pope Paul VI was vindicated ten years to the day after
Humanae Vitae
debuted. That day, twelve days before the Pontiff died, Louise Brown of England was born—the world’s first IVF baby.

You can draw a straight short line from Louise Brown to “octomom” Nadya Shuleman. A brave new world will continue to carve itself out if we ignore the Christian vision of human sexuality in all its integrity, beauty, and order. The person shapes the couple, the couple shapes the family; and the family, for good or for ill, shapes the society. The micro is the macro.

We close this little book with the common sense observation that art sometimes succeeds where arguments fail. Stevie Wonder’s 1975 hit song
Isn’t She Lovely
is a tribute to his newborn daughter. In it, he articulates beautifully, if inadvertently, the Catholic intuition of the unity between love and life and of the exquisite splendor of
sex au naturel
: