I anticipate that the most controversial part of my forthcoming book, The Desecration of Man, will be my discussion of how modern fertility treatments such as IVF and surrogacy have degraded our understanding of what it means to be human. Those pursuing the treatment have good intentions—the creation of new life—and desire to lavish their love on another human being. Who can object to that, least of all someone like me who has been blessed with children?
Anyone who raises a question about the legitimacy of IVF and surrogacy is vulnerable to accusations of being meanspirited or even of denying the humanity of the children born through these methods. My answer to such criticism has always been that I do not deny the humanity of such children but, ironically, the procedure itself encourages society to think of children as commodities. In the eyes of the law, they necessarily become analogous to pieces of property, to things, as the law must intervene in the many complicated situations that arise as a result of divorcing reproduction from its traditional context. When the surrogate child has Down syndrome, for example, who has parental responsibility? Those who donated egg and sperm, or the woman bearing the child in her womb? If the people paying for the process want the child aborted, do they have the right to demand the surrogate does as they desire? And as we move in the (near?) future toward the commercial creation of children from other body cells, the questions will only become more complicated.
I have never denied the humanity of a child born through IVF or surrogacy. Indeed, it is not the critics of the processes but the processes themselves that are shifting the cultural imagination toward seeing children not first and foremost as persons but rather as things, as pieces of property to be defined and disposed of by the law of the land, not the law of nature.
But is reproductive technology the source of the problem or rather something made plausible by longstanding shifts in other areas of our culture? A friend who read my manuscript in advance has raised an interesting point: Did the advent in the West of no-fault divorce effectively set this whole process of objectification in motion? In retrospect, it seems obvious how its redefinition of marriage as a sentimental, utilitarian contract paved the way for gay marriage. But what of its effect on how society treats children? No-fault divorce has made into a routine part of our cultural imagination something that previously applied only in extreme cases—the consideration of children as pieces of property whose relationship to parents is necessarily a matter for the courts to decide.
The point is a pungent one and a reminder that marriage is part of the ecology of what it means to be human. Alterations in its definition or function cannot be confined to the domestic sphere but necessarily have a transformative effect on the broader anthropological question. The practical definition of marriage in any given society is connected to how that society understands what it means to be human. Make marriage a sentimental, contractual bond and you have to revise the relationship between the children that are its fruits, and thus parenthood. In short, you have to revise the most basic of human relationships—and therefore the concept of humanity itself—at a foundational level. In a no-fault divorce world, all relationships become contractual, even that between parent and child. And given that the Christian (and Jewish) view is that human beings are made in the image of God, such basic revision of what it means to be human has religious significance. Revise the image of God and you revise the nature of God.
The next decade looks set to bring a cascade of novel moral challenges into the lives of many people, not least in the area of reproduction. The Protestant churches will find the challenge of fertility treatment to be particularly acute. That is not to say that Catholicism faces no difficulties. The routine and unchecked practical rejection of the Catholic Church’s teaching in the area of reproduction by vast numbers of her adherents is an ecclesiastical scandal, while the annulments of marriages that have produced children look, to this Protestant at least, just a little too culturally convenient when compared to Christ’s own rather more stringent teaching on the matter.
But those huge problems are for Catholics to address. My Protestant world has problems of its own. It has largely lost its sense of human teleology as a whole and it has bought into a pragmatic, utilitarian view of reproduction. How many pastors even know where to begin when it comes to IVF and surrogacy, let alone what conclusions to draw? Further, and to return to my friend’s comment, its casual acceptance of no-fault divorce many years ago not only altered the ecology of marriage but also of anthropology itself. The churches’ longstanding desecration of man is bearing fruit, not least in the way it accepted divorce laws that pressed us all toward seeing children as things. And that makes clear thinking about reproductive technologies such as IVF impossible, short of a willingness to take unpopular, distressing, and counter-intuitive positions.
