The logic of “making” babies

“That the sexual union of a man and a woman is naturally ordered toward the birth of children is, in itself, simple biological fact, but we may see in that fact a lesson to be learned. The act of love is not governed simply by the rational will; it is a passion that comes over us. Lovers experience ecstasy, which means that they go out of themselves, experiencing a pleasure that must be received as another’s gift rather than the product of one’s own reason and will. The child is God’s ‘yes’ to such mutual self-giving. That such self-spending should be fruitful is the deepest mystery not just of human procreation but of God’s being. From eternity the Father ‘begets’ the Son — that is, gives all that he is and has to the Son. Christians use just this language to affirm that God’s own being is a community in love. In begetting we too give of ourselves and thereby form another who, though other, shares our nature and is equal to us in dignity. If, by contrast, we come to think of the child as a product of our reason and will, we have lost the deepest ground of human equality — and, perhaps as important, have missed the meaning of the human act of love.

“A child who is thus begotten, not made, embodies the union of his father and mother. They have not simply reproduced themselves, nor are they merely a cause of which the child is an effect. Rather, the power of their mutual love has given rise to another who, though different from them and equal in dignity to them, manifests in his person the love that unites them. Their love-giving has been life-giving; it is truly procreation. The act of love that overcame their separation and united them in ‘one flesh,’ that directed them out of themselves and toward each other, creates in the child a still larger community — a sign once again that such self-giving love is by God’s blessing creative and fruitful. This close connection of marital love and procreation is a third aspect of the human, personal significance to be discerned in the ‘givenness’ of the biological tie between the generations. . . .

“To some degree in artificial insemination, and to a considerably greater degree with in vitro fertilization, we make of our body an instrument to be used in the pursuit of our goals. We do not simply give ourselves bodily in the act of love, but we instrumentalize the body and use it in order to produce a child. In one sense, of course, this is an exercise of our freedom not unlike others in which we make use of objects and even other animals in the world to achieve our goals. To do so is to exercise the dominion given humankind by the Creator. Caution is needed, however, when the ‘object’ used is the living human body, the place of personal presence. For in so instrumentalizing the body we are tempted to think of ourselves as only free spirit detached from the body. The real ‘I’ becomes that free and unconstrained will that now exercises dominion even over the body it uses. What we risk here is a separation of person and body that demeans the body and makes of it a ‘thing.’

“It is not surprising, then, if we also come to think of the child who results from this process as a product — as made, not begotten. Such a move may not be logically necessary, but it lies near at hand. In begetting we give rise to one like us, one with whom we share a nature equal in being and dignity. Since we do not transcend the child we have begotten, we do not give it worth and significance any more than we understand ourselves to have been given dignity by our progenitors. But if we make a child, we determine its meaning and use. Without supposing that every couple using assisted reproduction thinks in this way, we may still fear that a world in which we have learned matter-of-factly to accept the use of such techniques may be a world in which human ‘worth’ increasingly becomes something to be achieved rather than the birthright of every child. It may even be that the practice of adoption, properly understood, can help us to avoid supposing that our biological children are our possession. As Michael Banner has written, children ‘are only properly received when they are received as gifts from the hands of God — which is why adoption might have some claim to model an archetype of parenthood’ for all of us.

“In vitro fertilization raises this issue in an obvious way by forcing us to contemplate the moral status of the embryo. Sperm and ova are externalized in the laboratory so that fertilization may occur and an embryo be formed before it is implanted in the womb of the mother-to-be. We are increasingly able to ‘screen’ that embryo before it is implanted, to determine whether it is free of certain defects. We are able, that is, to consider whether this particular ‘product of conception’ (as it may be called) is one we desire, one whose worthiness for life we wish to affirm. Moreover, more than one embryo may be produced. All may be implanted, or only some. If some of the embryos are not implanted, we must ask ourselves what ought to be done with these others. They may be discarded, they may be frozen for future ‘use,’ they may (if the law permits what many researchers desire) be used as research subjects to improve our knowledge of the process of fertilization or to make progress in the struggle to cure certain diseases. It is hard for Christians to be content with any of these possibilities; yet, we should recognize that they are hard to separate from in vitro fertilization— and hard to separate conceptually once we have begun to allow ourselves to think of the embryo as made rather than begotten. Once again, we need not suppose that every couple setting foot on this path will come to think of their child as a product over which they must exercise quality control, but we deceive ourselves if we imagine that the routinized use of such techniques cannot and will not teach us to think about children in new and different ways.”

— from Gilbert Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, Fourth Edition (Eerdmans, 2020)