From: kriz@skat.usc.edu (KRIZ)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Cath. Christianity 101 - Church on artificial insemination, etc
Date: 15 Aug 1992 17:29:43 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: skat.usc.edu

In article <1992Aug15.071616.21175@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
>In article <l8os3iINNojo@skat.usc.edu> kriz@skat.usc.edu (KRIZ) writes:
>
>>Recently Loren posted that an objection of the Church to artificial
>>insemination was that it involved masturbation on the part of the
>>male.
>
>>Actually, the primary difficulty the church has with artificial
>>insemination is that it places the creation of human life under
>>domination of technology.
>
>	I almost cannot believe that I am reading this argument, since
>it is posted by a true-blue computer geek (well, I'm a true-blue
>computer geek, also).
>
>	Someone who wears clothes, eats cooked food, lives inside of
>structures built for that purpose, moves around in vehicles driven by
>internal-combustion engines or electric motors, and sends messages
>across computer networks cannot complain too much about dependence on
>technology :-)

Actually it has long puzzled me that while technological solutions
to everything from nuclear safety to missile defense to protection
against insect pests are relentlessly questioned, most of the people
doing the questioning put almost totally blind faith in technological
solutions to issues involving human sexuality and human life. 

People will ridicule a scientist for suggesting that a nuclear
containment shield (over a reactor) can protect their community
from radiation in the case of a nuclear accident.  But condoms
are "impregnable"

People find no problems with arguments that SDI is hopelessly 
unfeasible, but to suggest EVEN THE POSSIBILITY that AIDS once
contracted may by the HIV's very nature (that it attacks the
very cells on which the human immune system depends to defend
itself from disease) be virtually incurable ... is to commit
heresy.

People find no problem in suggesting to others a chaste habit
in management of one's resources ... recycle, use less water,
use less heat, carpool, etc ... but suggest to someone to
abstain from sex or to simply be monogamous ... and the answer 
is IDENTICAL in nature to those ridiculed by conservationists
in other contexts.

Chastity (Conservation) won't work.  What we need is better
artificial birth control, a cure for AIDS, abortion on demand.  
(What we need is more nukes, more strip mining, more off-shore
drilling, a rapid deployment force to defend and kill for
"our" oil overseas).

Indeed, I don't think there is an organization in the world
has has seen this obvious similarity ... other than the 
Church.

Pope John Paul II in his 1989 statement on the environment
declared it to be fundamentally a moral issue.  We do not
have a right to unrestrained progress if it mortgages future
generations of human beings in the process.

>...Second, REGARDLESS OF HOW the male's 
>>sperm fertilizes the woman's ovum, if the two are not spouses,
>>the Church will ALWAYS consider the act or procedure performed 
>>to be contrary to moral law.
>
>	Why's that?
>
>	I would consider it against "moral law" _only_ if artificial
>insemination or IVF took place without both sides agreeing for the
>procedure to take place.

And what of the kid?  The kid has no right to expect a stable
union between his/her parents?  Granted kids don't get that
much anymore ... but don't they have a right to expect that?
Or is the kid just a commodity ... and accessory to a house,
a swing set, its parent(s)'s ego(s)?

>
>	And that applies even _inside_ of marriage.
>
>Third, the Church is opposed to 
>>the use of artificial insemination IN PLACE of normal conjugal 
>>relations between spouses:

>>   [The Church teaching on human sexuality] is founded upon the
>>   the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be
>>   broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings
>>   of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative
>>   meaning (Pope Paul VI Encyclical HUMANAE VITAE , #12; the 
>>   CDF's Instruction on Respect for Human Life at its Origin
>>   and the Dignity of Procreation, III, 4).
>
>	The Vatican is awfully prissy about reproduction, it seems to
>me.
>
>	And has God told the bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) that it's a
>no-no to have all the non-reproductive sex that they have?
>
>	Male dolphins will sometimes mate with other male dolphins;
>does God ever complain?

Yup Loren, we're nothing but a bunch of protoplasm that takes itself
too seriously.  And if we're nothing but a bunch of protoplasm, why 
get so upset about things like genocide.  What difference is there 
between Auchschwitz and a standard meat-packing plant... or even a 
wheat farm?  Would it be better if the Nazis ate their human victims
instead of "merely" killing them? Is that their "only crime"?  How "dare" 
we condemn Claus Barbie for doing what a wheat farmer does every year?  
He was just harvesting a "different sort of crop" ...

HUMAN BEINGS ARE DIFFERENT ALL OTHER FORMS OF LIFE.  WHY?  BECAUSE THEY
ARE CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD (Gen 1:26).  If we don't begin there,
we are doomed.... to reduce ourselves to >>nothingness<<.

>	And since I'm not "man", I can do whatever I want to :-)

>>Fourth, the Church does not recognize the parents >>RIGHT<< to
>>have a child:
>
>>   The suffering of spouses who cannot have children or who
>>   are afraid of bringing a handicapped child into the world is
>>   a suffering that everyone must understand and properly 
>>   evaluate.
>
>	Do those old men _practice_ crying their crocodile tears?

They're trying to put down a teaching to defend humanity from
being reduced to the whims of the "possible" -- dogmen, farms
of human embryos fertilized in a lab solely to harvest chemicals
or tissues from them -- talk about the *ultimate* human servitude.

>... Nevertheless, marriage does not confer
>>   upon the spouses the right to have a child, but only the
>>   right to perform those natural acts which are *per se*
>>   ordered to procreation.
>
>	Talk about heartlessness.

So Loren, where does the "right" to have a child end?  Again, what
if the parents/parent decided that they wanted a child to be part
dog or part horse perhaps with scales (to fulfill some sick notion
of "self-expression")?  Oh the kid might not like having a hoof.
(but Johnny we just wanted you to be big and strong ... the evil
doctor screwed up ... don't worry though that's what lawyers are
for ... we'll get a big settlement and then all will be ok.  Oh,
but you still don't like being different from the other kids ...
well that's what a psychologist is for.  We'll set ya up with a
good shrink so that after enough therapy or perhaps a good set of
personality altering drugs you'll come to "accept" indeed "love" 
what we did to you).

>	One must perpetually _act_ as if one was trying to produce a
>child even though one can't.

One could adopt.

>...For this
>>   reason, the child has the right, to be the fruit of the
>>   specific act of the conjugal love of his parents; and he 
>>   also has the right to be respected as a person from the
>>   moment of conception.
>
>	"Right" to be conceived in a certain way?
>
>	I personally just don't care, just so long as I don't get too
>many bad genes.

But what if you did ... and not even by accident ... but rather by
the CHOICE of your parents... or even worse by the whim of a mad
doctor in a laboratory somewhere in Scandinavia ... experimenting
whether it is possible to create a "human-cockroach" (aka Kafka).

>	It wouldn't matter to me if the sperm and egg cell that
>produced that zygote that grew to become me were united in a Petri
>dish.
>

Just be sure you enter a womb afterwards.

>
>>Finally, the reason why the Church insists on the child's
>>right to be conceived in the specific act of conjugal love
>>of its parents returns to safeguarding the origin of the
>>human person from technological domination:
>
>
>...The one conceived must be the fruit of his
>>   parents' love.
>
>	Does that mean that if one's parents just did it for the fun
>of it, then that screws up one's genes? Same for artificial
>insemination or in-vitro fertilization.

If the parents did it "just for the fun of it" ... it won't screw up
his genes (though chances are the kid will suffer anyway ... from
being born to parents or a parent who didn't really want him and
may not be able to properly take care of him (that if he is not
aborted before all that).  At least the kid in this case could be
certain that he is genetically fully human.

>...He cannot be desired or conceived as a 
>>   product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques;
>>   that would be equivalent to reducing him to an object of 
>>   scientific technology.
>
>	Those old men are sounding like big babies. They need to do
>some growing up.

Sounds like you don't know and don't want to know what you are talking
about.

>	Is adoption illegitimate?

Adoption is fine.

>	Do parents of a child conceived _in vitro_ hate their
>children? I've never heard of any such thing.

That's if there will always be identifyable parents.  In vitro
fertilization doesn't need them ... just nominally their sperm
and egg cells... perhaps at some point, not even that ... just
biological splinters of them.

>...No one may subject the coming of a child
>>   into the world to the conditions of technical efficiency which 
>>   are to be evaluated to standards of control and domination.
>
>	What's wrong with producing children free from defective
>genes?

What can legitimately be labeled a defective gene?  What of those
children who are born with such genetic defects (conceived "the
old fashioned way")?  Are they to be dehumanized even more than
they are now?  

>	And that's a strange objection from a bunch of control freaks.

They are trying to save humanity truly from itself.

>...I do think it is an intrinsic good for the
>>readership here to learn about what the Church actually 
>>teaches on these issues, rather than rely only on what
>>someone says it does.  
>
>	After reading these documents, I really must ask whether or
>not it was worth the trouble. All my second-hand sources turn out
>correct.
>
>	[Embryos at the blastocyst stage fully human...]
>
>	A strange absurdity. I fail to see much difference between a
>blastocyst and a scraping of skin, except for where they are headed,
>development-wise.

You'd make a very good slave owner a century ago.  Blacks?  They're
"property".  Right?

Personally, I can't imagine a more demonically evil form of slavery
than to artificially create humans in a laboratory for no reason
other than harvesting from them hormones or tissues, perhaps going 
to the point of mutating them so that their growth is stunted in a
manner so as to develop only a particular organ and then to fit 
(say as a gasket) in a piece of processing equipment.  

If we don't recognize the humanity of human embryos ... this WILL be
the solution offered to the "unseemliness" of using human tissue from
abortions for medical use.

>	[Complaint about their destruction...]
>
>	Some sizable fraction, about 2/3, don't implant under
>"natural" conditions, and the non-implanted ones die. Should every
>woman examine her menstrual blood under a microscope to look for
>un-implanted blastocysts and have a funeral for each one that she
>finds? Tossing it into a garbage can is no way to treat a dead human
>being, as I'm sure you will all agree.

Could you imagine a nuclear scientist justifying the failure to protect
people from radiation at a nuclear power plant because "people can
get cancer naturally anyway"?

Somehow that people get cancer "naturally" does not remove the guilt
of intentionally causing innocents to get cancer by not taking proper
precautions with regard to nuclear power, pesticides, etc. 

>	[Long rant about how it is wrong to perform artificial
>insemination or IVF when the sources of the sperm and the eggs are not
>married to each other]
>
>	Well, there are interesting questions about paternity, but I
>don't think it absolutely _wrong_.

So Sally, kids make fun of you because "your daddy was a test tube"
Let's see what's the number of the shrink again ... he'll help you
"not mind" that you don't have an identifiable father.

>	[How surrogate motherhood is wrong]
>
>	Tell that to the surrogate mothers of the Bible. :-)
>
>	Examples:
>
>Surrogate motherhood -- (Genesis 16:1-4) Since Abraham's wife Sarah
>was barren, she gave Abraham her maid Hagar, to have children for her.
>She produces a son, Ishmael. There is even surrogate fatherhood (the
>Levirate). (Genesis 38) Onan refuses to have sex with his brother's
>widow, and God strikes him with lightning.

And what happens to Hagar and Ishmael?  How were their relationships
with Sarah, cordial?  At what point in in Biblical revelation do the
examples you site occur?  One could say at the point where humanity
was furthest from the will of God.  God only sets in motion his plan
of salvation of humanity with Abraham (Gen. 12:3).

>	And they weren't even artifically inseminated!
>
>	[Even between husband and wife it is wrong...]
>
>	Well, we went over that earlier :-)
>
>>  Contraception deliberately deprives the conjugal act of its
>>openness to procreation and in this way brings about a voluntary
>>dissociation of the ends of marriage.
>
>So "Natural Family Planning" is just plain wrong?

By the nature of Natural Family Planning, the sexual act remains open
to transmission of life though the odds of conception can be certainly
reduced.  In addition for this method to have a chance of succeeding,
the partners will have to know each other (and particularly the woman's
cycle) very very well.  It's next to impossible to use this as an
option in a "wham bam thankyou mam" mode.  

>...Homologous artificial
>>fertilization, in seeking a procreation which is not the fruit of
>>a specific act of conjugal union, objectively effects an analogous
>>separation between the goods and meanings of marriage.
>
>	So women are not allowed to try to make themselves "virgin
>mothers"?

Not unilaterally anyway :-)

>	I'm sure that those old men must be burning with jealousy over
>what modern medicine has been able to achieve -- a woman being able to
>have children without having sex, just like what they believe about
>Jesus Christ's mom.

Actually, they are fearing how they will have to deal with cases like
"sponge people" and the like.  How many human genes must an organism
have before it becomes "fully human"?  

Don't be surprized if the position taken will again be on the conservative
end ... that those e-coli bacteria genetically engineered to produce
human insulin are to be considered human, even if they never will have
the chance to develop into a recognizable human being.

Of course people will laugh ... and science will continue to send us down
the path of techno-biological oblivion.

The Church is trying to call us human.  But progress is reducing us
to protoplasm.

>	And why are a bunch of aged celibates like them so _obsessed_
>with marriage?

Because marriage works.  

>	[If one is sterile...]
>
>...Spouses who find themselves in this sad situation are
>>called to find in it an opportunity for sharing in a particular way
>>in the Lord's Cross,...
>
>	Religion is to be the opium of the people.
>
>	I see.
>
>	Swearing by Loki,
>

They can adopt.

dennis
kriz@skat.usc.edu