In order to stay in touch with what’s happening beyond my immediate horizons in Sudan, when I have the opportunity I scan (there’ usually not time to do much more than that) the online version of The New York Times. I strongly disagree with the Times left-lurching, anti-Church, anti-life and anti-family editorial ideology which clearly skews its reporting, but it does a decent job of surveying national and particularly international new items that other media outlets overlook.
In the past few weeks there have been several unrelated pieces about “beginning of life” issues. The first, “Her Body, My Baby,” by Alex Kuczynski – a writer for the Times, a personal account of her experience of hiring a surrogate mother to bear the biological child of Ms. Kuczinski and her husband, appeared in the November 30 issue of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Ms. Kuczinski and her husband, a successful investor, are well-to-do and maintain a comfortable and fashionable – even glamorous – lifestyle. The surrogate mother they chose was a lower middle-income substitute school teacher. Rather than offer my own observations, I think it’s much more telling to refer to the more than 400 online comments the story received and the letters that were published two weeks later. The negative responses clearly predominated, and many were scathing in their denunciation of what was described in the article, using words like: “snooty,” “spoiled,” “snob,” “self-absorbed,” “self-obsessed,” “unreality,” “horrifying,” “condescending,” “elitist,” “exploitation,” “narcissism,” “disgusted,” “horrendous,” “smugness,” “obnoxious.”
I would like to quote from just a few of the letters published on December 14:
“If prostitution is unethical, immoral and illegal, why is it O.K. for one woman to pay for the use of another woman’s body? If it’s unethical, immoral and illegal to buy and sell body parts for transplantation, why is it O.K. to rent a uterus? Our morality seems so malleable in the hands of those who feel entitled.”
“I am filled with revulsion by Alex Kuczynski’s cover story. I find it unconscionable that in an era with so many children who cannot find homes there are rich, white, educated couples who can pay $25,000 so that another woman, living in far less well-off circumstances, can go through the physical ordeal and emotional pain of having and giving up her baby. Yes, it is her baby, not Alex Kuczynski’s. We are now so far from nature, morality and ethics that the violations of human bonds and trust are not even a consideration. Kuczynski wants a baby? Kuczynski must have a baby — who will look like her husband, who will satisfy some crazed yearning for a genetic variant of herself. I have never liked the idea that a ‘contract’ trumps nature.”
“Kuczynski, a recovering cosmetic-surgery addict, represents what the rich have become: an elite fringe that is so far flung from the majority of society as to seem freakish. And Cathy, the surrogate mother, represents how the once-stalwart middle class has diminished: an educated person who is relegated to selling space in her body to help pay for her own child’s education (surrogacy may feel like a gift, but it is a job).”
“In words that echo Aristotle’s view that a woman is a receptacle for the life force implanted by a man through intercourse, the author refers to Cathy Hilling as 'the woman who carried our child' and explains, 'Strictly speaking, she was a vessel, the carrier, the biological baby sitter, for my baby.' The title of the article, 'Her Body, My Baby,' engages in the same obliterating action, with the author as the stand-in life-force impregnator, situated outside the nine-month process of creating a child but claiming responsibility for and complete ownership of the result. And Kuczynski perceives Cathy as participating in this reduction of her role when she likens herself to an Easy-Bake oven. That simplistic formulation of so-called gestational surrogacy ('organ rental,' per Kuczynski) may have helped two strangers leap over chasms they couldn’t have traversed otherwise. But it is a shortcut that relies on denigrating concepts, concepts that have historically led to inhumane treatment. As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word 'mother,' we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts. A woman’s body and the growing being inside her participate in an astounding symphony for about 40 weeks to build from egg and sperm a human that can survive outside the woman’s body. The woman’s feelings, thoughts, meals and actions influence that symphony, helping create what the growing being experiences at every moment. Yet Kuczynski literally reduces Cathy’s whole self to her uterus. This is a disturbing denigration of a beautiful, astoundingly complex phenomenon that builds life and that bonds most living beings and their offspring for life.”
These are not letters from “right wing religious conservatives,” but rather from average Americans who are repulsed by the way that technology has been used to exploit human life, human persons and human relationships to satisfy the self-obsessed desires of those with money. Personally, I was very much heartened by these responses, and my appreciation for the moral fiber of my fellow Americans was reaffirmed.
Similarly, on December 4th, an article entitled “Parents Torn Over Fate of Frozen Embryo’s” appeared, highlighting the conflicted response of many couples over the dilemma of what to do with unused frozen embryos “left over” from an earlier process of in vitro fertilization. Because they can’t bear the thought of having their offspring destroyed and are reluctant to offer them to other couples, many continue to pay “storage fees” year after year indefinitely. Some express a desire to be present and offer a prayer when their embryos are “defrosted,” or to have them implanted at a point in the woman’s cycle when they are unlikely to survive so that they die a natural death. All of this, however, points to a fundamental and widespread if often unspoken intuition that these are not mere clusters of cells but human beings at the very beginning of their existence, and that it’s wrong to treat them like biological garbage. This “dissonance” is another sign of hope and encouragement to me that the moral substratum of the US has not been eroded, and that many Americans are disturbed by procedures that tinker with and destroy developing human life.
These two stories could not have provided a more poignant prelude or a more eloquent justification for the publication of a new Vatican instruction on bioethics, Dignitatis Personae / The Dignity of the Person, issued – significantly – on December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The instruction confirms the moral repugnance of those who expressed negative responses to the Kuczynski article, as well as the troubled consciences of parents reluctant to destroy their own embryonic children in cryogenic suspended animation, by repudiating any technique or procedure that assaults the dignity of these human beings in the process of their creation or development.
The Kuczynski case, in particular, demonstrates the extremes of ethical absurdity to which techniques and procedures can lead once an initial moral boundary has been breached and the Pandora’s Box of inhuman technology has been opened. It’s not unlike the question of same-sex marriage. The narrowly viewed case of a single same-sex couple that wants to wed understandably tends to elicit sympathy. But once the natural and social basis for a one-man, one-woman marriage has been rejected, and the standard of purely subjective preference adopted, where does that lead when the lens zooms out? What if a brother and sister want to wed, or a mother and son? Or, a sister and sister, or a father and son? Or what if there are groups of several people of various genders who say they all want to form a single marriage?
In God’s timing, all this is taking place in the season of Advent, when we contemplate the mystery of the Son of God who emptied Himself into His mother’s womb to embrace our human nature from it’s very beginnings in the context of the sacred marriage and holy family of Mary and Joseph. As Dignitatis Personae rightly points out, there is no greater affirmation of the value of human life and the sacred nature of human procreation:
“By becoming one of us, the Son makes it possible for us to become 'sons of God' (Jn 1:12), 'sharers in the divine nature' (2 Pet 1:4). This new dimension does not conflict with the dignity of the creature which everyone can recognize by the use of reason, but elevates it into a wider horizon of life which is proper to God, giving us the ability to reflect more profoundly on human life and on the acts by which it is brought into existence.”
In the past few weeks there have been several unrelated pieces about “beginning of life” issues. The first, “Her Body, My Baby,” by Alex Kuczynski – a writer for the Times, a personal account of her experience of hiring a surrogate mother to bear the biological child of Ms. Kuczinski and her husband, appeared in the November 30 issue of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Ms. Kuczinski and her husband, a successful investor, are well-to-do and maintain a comfortable and fashionable – even glamorous – lifestyle. The surrogate mother they chose was a lower middle-income substitute school teacher. Rather than offer my own observations, I think it’s much more telling to refer to the more than 400 online comments the story received and the letters that were published two weeks later. The negative responses clearly predominated, and many were scathing in their denunciation of what was described in the article, using words like: “snooty,” “spoiled,” “snob,” “self-absorbed,” “self-obsessed,” “unreality,” “horrifying,” “condescending,” “elitist,” “exploitation,” “narcissism,” “disgusted,” “horrendous,” “smugness,” “obnoxious.”
I would like to quote from just a few of the letters published on December 14:
“If prostitution is unethical, immoral and illegal, why is it O.K. for one woman to pay for the use of another woman’s body? If it’s unethical, immoral and illegal to buy and sell body parts for transplantation, why is it O.K. to rent a uterus? Our morality seems so malleable in the hands of those who feel entitled.”
“I am filled with revulsion by Alex Kuczynski’s cover story. I find it unconscionable that in an era with so many children who cannot find homes there are rich, white, educated couples who can pay $25,000 so that another woman, living in far less well-off circumstances, can go through the physical ordeal and emotional pain of having and giving up her baby. Yes, it is her baby, not Alex Kuczynski’s. We are now so far from nature, morality and ethics that the violations of human bonds and trust are not even a consideration. Kuczynski wants a baby? Kuczynski must have a baby — who will look like her husband, who will satisfy some crazed yearning for a genetic variant of herself. I have never liked the idea that a ‘contract’ trumps nature.”
“Kuczynski, a recovering cosmetic-surgery addict, represents what the rich have become: an elite fringe that is so far flung from the majority of society as to seem freakish. And Cathy, the surrogate mother, represents how the once-stalwart middle class has diminished: an educated person who is relegated to selling space in her body to help pay for her own child’s education (surrogacy may feel like a gift, but it is a job).”
“In words that echo Aristotle’s view that a woman is a receptacle for the life force implanted by a man through intercourse, the author refers to Cathy Hilling as 'the woman who carried our child' and explains, 'Strictly speaking, she was a vessel, the carrier, the biological baby sitter, for my baby.' The title of the article, 'Her Body, My Baby,' engages in the same obliterating action, with the author as the stand-in life-force impregnator, situated outside the nine-month process of creating a child but claiming responsibility for and complete ownership of the result. And Kuczynski perceives Cathy as participating in this reduction of her role when she likens herself to an Easy-Bake oven. That simplistic formulation of so-called gestational surrogacy ('organ rental,' per Kuczynski) may have helped two strangers leap over chasms they couldn’t have traversed otherwise. But it is a shortcut that relies on denigrating concepts, concepts that have historically led to inhumane treatment. As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word 'mother,' we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts. A woman’s body and the growing being inside her participate in an astounding symphony for about 40 weeks to build from egg and sperm a human that can survive outside the woman’s body. The woman’s feelings, thoughts, meals and actions influence that symphony, helping create what the growing being experiences at every moment. Yet Kuczynski literally reduces Cathy’s whole self to her uterus. This is a disturbing denigration of a beautiful, astoundingly complex phenomenon that builds life and that bonds most living beings and their offspring for life.”
These are not letters from “right wing religious conservatives,” but rather from average Americans who are repulsed by the way that technology has been used to exploit human life, human persons and human relationships to satisfy the self-obsessed desires of those with money. Personally, I was very much heartened by these responses, and my appreciation for the moral fiber of my fellow Americans was reaffirmed.
Similarly, on December 4th, an article entitled “Parents Torn Over Fate of Frozen Embryo’s” appeared, highlighting the conflicted response of many couples over the dilemma of what to do with unused frozen embryos “left over” from an earlier process of in vitro fertilization. Because they can’t bear the thought of having their offspring destroyed and are reluctant to offer them to other couples, many continue to pay “storage fees” year after year indefinitely. Some express a desire to be present and offer a prayer when their embryos are “defrosted,” or to have them implanted at a point in the woman’s cycle when they are unlikely to survive so that they die a natural death. All of this, however, points to a fundamental and widespread if often unspoken intuition that these are not mere clusters of cells but human beings at the very beginning of their existence, and that it’s wrong to treat them like biological garbage. This “dissonance” is another sign of hope and encouragement to me that the moral substratum of the US has not been eroded, and that many Americans are disturbed by procedures that tinker with and destroy developing human life.
These two stories could not have provided a more poignant prelude or a more eloquent justification for the publication of a new Vatican instruction on bioethics, Dignitatis Personae / The Dignity of the Person, issued – significantly – on December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The instruction confirms the moral repugnance of those who expressed negative responses to the Kuczynski article, as well as the troubled consciences of parents reluctant to destroy their own embryonic children in cryogenic suspended animation, by repudiating any technique or procedure that assaults the dignity of these human beings in the process of their creation or development.
The Kuczynski case, in particular, demonstrates the extremes of ethical absurdity to which techniques and procedures can lead once an initial moral boundary has been breached and the Pandora’s Box of inhuman technology has been opened. It’s not unlike the question of same-sex marriage. The narrowly viewed case of a single same-sex couple that wants to wed understandably tends to elicit sympathy. But once the natural and social basis for a one-man, one-woman marriage has been rejected, and the standard of purely subjective preference adopted, where does that lead when the lens zooms out? What if a brother and sister want to wed, or a mother and son? Or, a sister and sister, or a father and son? Or what if there are groups of several people of various genders who say they all want to form a single marriage?
In God’s timing, all this is taking place in the season of Advent, when we contemplate the mystery of the Son of God who emptied Himself into His mother’s womb to embrace our human nature from it’s very beginnings in the context of the sacred marriage and holy family of Mary and Joseph. As Dignitatis Personae rightly points out, there is no greater affirmation of the value of human life and the sacred nature of human procreation:
“By becoming one of us, the Son makes it possible for us to become 'sons of God' (Jn 1:12), 'sharers in the divine nature' (2 Pet 1:4). This new dimension does not conflict with the dignity of the creature which everyone can recognize by the use of reason, but elevates it into a wider horizon of life which is proper to God, giving us the ability to reflect more profoundly on human life and on the acts by which it is brought into existence.”
Holy Family Cathedral, Nairobi, Kenya
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Congratulations! You've just been given the Premio Dardos Blog Award. See http://witnessinghope.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/my-first-blog-award/ for details.
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