Despite the fact that the frontiers of bioethics have changed, Leon Kass’s 1985 book, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (Free Press) continues to be a stimulating source for reflection (for those with ears to hear). The first section of the book includes five chapters under the heading “Eroding the Limits: Troubles with the Mastery of Nature.” The chapter titles in this part of the book are “The New Biology: What Price Relieving Man’s Estate?” “Making Babies: The New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality,” “Perfect Babies: Prenatal Diagnosis and the Equal Right to Life,” “The Meaning of Life — in the Laboratory,” and “Patenting Life: Science, Politics, and the Limits of Mastering Nature.”

In the chapter on making babies, Kass asks what is really new about technologies that make babies. “Such life will still come from preexisting life, no new formation from the dust of the ground is being contemplated, nothing as new — or as old — as that first genesis of life from nonliving matter is in the immediate future. What is new is nothing more radical than the divorce of the generation of new human life from human sexuality, and ultimately, from the confines of the human body, a separation that began with artificial insemination and which will finish with ectogenesis, the full laboratory growth of a baby from sperm to term. What is new is that sexual intercourse will no longer be needed for generating new life. (The new technologies provide the corollary to the pill: babies without sex.) This piece of novelty leads to two others: There is a new co-progenitor, the embryologist-geneticist-physician, and there is a new home for generation, the laboratory. The mysterious and intimate processes of generation are to be moved from the native darkness of the womb to the bright (fluorescent) light of the laboratory, and beyond the shadow of a single doubt.

“But this movement from natural darkness to artificial light has the most profound implications. What we are considering, really, are not merely new ways of beginning individual human lives but also, and this is far more important, new ways of life and new ways of viewing life and the nature of man. Man is defined partly by his origins and his lineage; to be bound up with parents, siblings, ancestors, and descendants is part of what we mean by human. By tampering with and confounding these origins and linkages, we are involved in nothing less than creating a new conception of what it means to be human.

“Consider the views of life and the world reflected in the following different expressions to describe the process of generating new life. Ancient Israel, impressed with the phenomenon of transmission of life from father to son, used a word we translate as ‘begetting’ or ‘siring.’ The Greeks, impressed with the springing forth of new life in the cyclical processes of generation and decay, called it genesis, from a root meaning ‘to come into being.’ (It was the Greek translators who gave this name to the first book of the Hebrew Bible.) The premodern Christian English-speaking world, impressed with the world as given by a Creator, used the term ‘pro-creation.’ We, impressed with the machine and the gross national product (our own work of creation), employ a metaphor of the factory, ‘re-production.’ And Aldous Huxley has provided ‘decantation’ for that technology-worshipping Brave New World of tomorrow.”

Related reading and listening

  • “Gender” as ultimate separation — In this November 2018 lecture, Margaret McCarthy explains how the predictions of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae regarding the consequences of separating sex from procreation have proven true. (38 minutes)
  • Why not hatcheries? — Ethicist Paul Ramsey (1913–1988) challenges “the unchecked employment of powers the biological revolution places in human hands.”
  • The logic of “making” babies — Gilbert Meilaender on the temptation to instrumentalize our bodies
  • Medical tools and the shaping of identity — C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)
  • Freedom from the nature of things? — Leon Kass on the pressure exerted by the authority of science to embrace reductionistic materialism
  • Life, liberty, and the defense of dignity — In a 2003 interview, Leon Kass discussed his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. The unifying theme in the book’s essays is the threat of dehumanization in one form or another. (36 minutes)
  • On moral authority and medicine — Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 minutes)
  • “Broken Bodies Redeemed” — Today’s Feature presents a reading of a 2007 article by Gilbert Meilaender that explores the significance for bioethics of the mystery of human being as body and soul. (39 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Thinking Christianly about the body — Theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender discusses some of the themes he explores in two of his books: Body, Soul and Bioethics; and Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. (19 minutes)
  • “Death lies at the heart of modern medicine” — Dr. Kimbell Kornu, who teaches health care ethics and palliative medicine at St. Louis University, talks about why modern medicine can’t adequately explain health or suffering, even as doctors promote health and try to eliminate suffering. (28 minutes)
  • Medicine and the narrative of progress — Jeffrey Bishop explains how modern Western medicine is intertwined with politics and technology within a vision of progress that has an eschatological quality to it. (25 minutes)
  • Six recent books worthy of note — Ken Myers shares a summary of six recent books that we want our listeners to know about but whose authors we won’t be interviewing. (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Science, technology, and the redefinition of the human — In a lecture presented in Washington in 2018, philosopher Michael Hanby argues that the meaning of the human is being radically redefined in our modern “biotechnocracy.” (57 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 118 — FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, Ron Highfield, Mark Mitchell, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Helen Rhee, and Peter Brown
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 106 — FEATURED GUESTS: Adam Briggle, John C. Médaille, Christopher Page, Christian Smith, Herman Daly, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jake Halpern, Stephen J. Nichols, Richard M. Gamble, Peter J. Leithart, Bill Vitek, and Craig Holdrege
  • The embryo question — Robert P. George and Patrick Lee, Eric Cohen, Leon R. Kass, Yuval Levin, and Amy Laura Hall examine the debate about whether or not human embryos should be destroyed for stem cell research.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 70 — FEATURED GUESTS: W. Wesley McDonald, C. Ben Mitchell, Carl Elliott, Richard Weikart, Christine Rosen, and Dana Gioia
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 66 — FEATURED GUESTS: Leon Kass, Nigel Cameron, Susan Wise Bauer, Esther Lightcap Meek, John Shelton Lawrence, and Ralph Wood
  • Human Nature, Human Dignity — Leon Kass outlines what is at stake in our era’s crisis concerning the definition of human nature, and sets forth a framework for indispensable discussions surrounding biotechnologies. (60 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Wandering toward the Altar: The Decline of American Courtship — Produced in 2000, this audio documentary explores the changing ways in which Americans have understood and practiced courtship. (257 minutes)
  • Bread and the Hungry Soul — Dr. Leon Kass talks about how the activity of eating provides clues for understanding human nature. And Br. Peter Reinhart discusses the art of breadmaking as a metaphor for spiritual life. (72 minutes)
  • Edge of Life, Edge of Death — Richard Doerflinger and Richard John Neuhaus discuss central issues in bioethics during the 1990s. (57 minutes)
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