From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Cath. Christianity 101 - Church on artificial insemination, etc
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 05:11:55 GMT

In article <l8r8bnINNbld@skat.usc.edu> kriz@skat.usc.edu (KRIZ) writes:
: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

	There is a heck of a lot of technology that goes unquestioned,
and the "questioned" technology is really more feared than seriously
questioned.

:doing the questioning put almost totally blind faith in technological
:solutions to issues involving human sexuality and human life. 

	Blind faith?

	Or is it because the technology can _work_?

: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

	My own feeling about this is that a heck of a lot of people
are worrywarts. But I also think that the nuclear industry has not
been doing its share of effort.

:are "impregnable"

	Most of the time, that is :-)

	And condoms are a lot easier to test than nuclear reactors or
SDI systems, so one can have more confidence in their reliability.

	Would any nuclear reactor operator want to melt down the core
of their reactor just to see how well the containment shell holds up?
Or even do a near-meltdown to see how fast it can be shut down?

:People find no problems with arguments that SDI is hopelessly 
:unfeasible, but to suggest EVEN THE POSSIBILITY that AIDS once

	I do :-)

	SDI is a good idea in principle, but it would require a REALLY
massive system of MANY components that would have to work RELIABLY the
FIRST time around, or else there will be a big embarrassment. Let's
say we and the Russkies (we're talking Cold War times, now) get into a
big confrontation because Israel and Iraq have just nuked each other,
and some Russkie gets the idea of nuking our missiles before we nuke
them... The defense system works, catching most of the Russkies'
warheads, but one of them makes it past the numerous kill vehicles
sent its way and lands on the Pentagon. Although most of our top
officials had been hiding out in caves in West Virginia or
thereabouts, it's still a pretty big bang for DC, and a BIG
embarrassment.

: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.

	Like how?

	There is no cure for smallpox, yet it is essentially extinct
outside of a couple labs. How? By giving people a vaccine that arouses
their immune systems against the virus. When the real thing arrives,
their immune systems can then destroy it before it multiplies too
much. The same applies to other diseases that can only multiply inside
of human beings. Most STD's, like syphilis and gonorrhea, are like
that, and would probably be banished by now if it wasn't for the
moralists who seem to think that they are nice to have around to
punish people for their sins.

: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.

	I don't consider conservation a form of chastity. It's just
like trying to make something last as long as possible. I wouldn't try
too hard it it was too difficult, however.

	Safe sex is a legitimate thing to promote. I think that people
have a right to sexual enjoyment, in or out of marriage, and I don't
think that one should needlessly deny oneself that. I don't think I'd
want to masturbate in public, but I don't want to cut myself off
(whether figuratively or literally) from that option either. Besides,
masturbation is safe sex, and why complain about safe sex?

	And plenty of unmarried relationships are monogamous over time
scales of at least several months.

	And plenty of married relationships are not monogamous.
Consider all the men who think it OK to cheat on their wives. And
whom the Church has been unable to stop.

:Chastity (Conservation) won't work.  What we need is better
:artificial birth control, a cure for AIDS, abortion on demand.  

	Why not???

	And why this objection to abortion on demand? Is the only
abortion to be permitted an abortion on command?

	Examples of abortion-on-command:

	Aristotle, who recommended that a city's leaders can order
abortion to prevent overpopulation before there is "life and
sensation". (BTW, he's the main inspiration for the Church's official
philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas)

	China, which uses abortion as a means of population control

	The Bible, Numbers 5, which states that a priest is to give a
potion of bitter herbs to a woman suspected of being unfaithful. What
happens if she is guilty looks like some of the side effects of an
abortion. (Yes, there it is, the Bible)

:(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).

	Questions best asked of that klutz in the White House and his
admirers :-)

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

	It aint' no similarity.

	Putting on condoms is like putting on seat belts in cars and
using public transportation.

: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.

	Now he tells us :-)

	I wonder what's his opinion of James Watt ("Why worry about
protecting the environment? Jesus Christ will be making his Second
Coming any day now.")

::...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

	Does it have to be biological parents?

: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)?

	You never know about some parents :-)

::	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 

	Well, I would get upset if the last smallpox viruses were
destroyed without any effort to sequence their genes. But I don't
think I would want any smallpox viruses returned to their natural
habitat :-)

:between Auchschwitz and a standard meat-packing plant... or even a 
:wheat farm?  Would it be better if the Nazis ate their human victims

	That's because of a certain difference between sentience and
nonsentience. Chimpanzees and dolphins come awfully close, cows are a
bit farther off, and wheat plants are even farther. And that is not
even to mention bread mold, let alone smallpox viruses :-)

	And there is a difference between animals and plants that get
sympathy and those that don't. Dolphins and whales get a lot of it,
while mice and rats don't. Redwood trees get a lot, while crabgrass
doesn't.

: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" ...

	Cute perspective :-)

: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<<.

	Here is perhaps the last word of that, from a contemporary
named Xenophanes:

	Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are
a shame and disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and
deceivings of one another ... Mortals deem that gods are begotten as
they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form ... yes,
and if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could paint with their
hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the
forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies
in the image of their several kinds .,. The Ethiopians make their gods
black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red
hair.

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

	Well, to tell the truth, I just checked a Bible (Today's
English Version), and I find that it referred to God creating "human
beings", to "resemble" and "be like" him. As Xenophanes showed,
however, it is really the other way around :-)

	And do you mean that animals have no rights? That it's OK to
set a cat's tail on fire? Or do other mean things?

	Well, no one has ever claimed that smallpox viruses have the
right to grow in their natural hosts :-), so I suppose that there are
limits :-):-)

:::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
                                                 ^^^^^^
                                                 What?
:of human embryos fertilized in a lab solely to harvest chemicals
:or tissues from them -- talk about the *ultimate* human servitude.

	But they wouldn't experience anything :-)

	The most efficient "farms" would be tissues, anyway, and no
one's been claiming that each body cell is a human being. At least not
yet :-)

::... 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.

	To tell the truth, I wish I wasn't going bald or that I didn't
have to wear glasses. I wish I had started off with some better genes.

	Hooves might actually be convenient to walk on, actually. :-)

:(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).

	And I wonder if there will also be a comparable market for
drugs that destroy the sex drive so one can successfully live
celibate, and even have Josephite marriages (that is, celibate ones).
Interested?

::	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.

	Well, it would only be a couple of cells back then. And are
individual body cells 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.

	Like what?

	I don't think of myself as an "object of technology" when I
listen to music played back from a compact disk, create this message
on a computer, ride my bicycle, ride a BART train, live inside a
house, heat a TV dinner in a microwave oven, wear clothes, sleep on a
bed, read a book, or do any of a whole lot of things that involve some
kind of technology.

	Why should bringing a sperm and an egg together be any
different?

::	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.

	Why should that make any difference?

::...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?  

	Would _you_ like to be born with some genetic defect that
could have been removed? Like hemophilia, Tay-Sachs disease,
Huntingdon's disease, color blindness, and a host of others.

	But beyond that, I will concede a certain gray area.

::	[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?

	Well, black people are people just like white people, and to
compare a fully grown human being to a blastocyst is lunacy. A
blastocyst is what a fertilized egg cell (zygote) becomes after it has
divided the first couple of times or so. After a while, it stops being
a solid sphere and starts becoming a hollow ball. Even at this stage,
all the cells are undifferentiated; one can cut up an embryo at this
stage and produce two or more viable embryos.

	Furthermore, do identical twins have two souls or one? After
all, they both came from a single zygote.

::	[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"?

	That's actually an interesting question -- how much is one
willing to suffer? People seem amazingly willing to practice Russian
Roulette on the highways, yet they get uptight about nuclear reactors.

: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. 

	That was not what I was asking about. If a blastocyst is a
human being, and every one that does not implant dies, then we have a
heck of a lot of deaths. And what do we do with the dead blastocysts?
Tossing one into the trash can along with the rest of the
menstrual-blood-soaked tampon does not sound like proper treatment of
a dead body. One should mourn this child and bury it in the proper
fashion. One would probably not need a big coffin for a blastocyst,
however; just a pinhead-sized one :-)

	The whole "right-to-life" movement has a very cavalier
approach to all these unfortunate dead blastocysts.

::	[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.

	So what?

	If it wasn't that, the other kids would tease her about
something else :-)

::	[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.

	Does the Bible explicity say so?

...God only sets in motion his plan
:of salvation of humanity with Abraham (Gen. 12:3).

	...who may have been a mythical character, like Achilleus or
Theseus.

:::  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.  

	I think that there are better ways for partners to get in
touch with each other, but I won't try to stop anyone who wishes to
practice Vatican Roulette, a.k.a. NFP. However, I will _not_ enjoy
complaints about its low success rate.

::	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"?  

	"Sponge people"? What are those?

	And while we're on this subject, what are "dogmen"?

: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.

	These _Escherichia coli_ bacteria are still mostly _E. coli_
bacteria, and are still nonhuman.

:Of course people will laugh...

	For very good reason ;-)

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

:Because marriage works.  

	Then why aren't _they_ married?

/Loren