In September of 2008, the Holy Catholic Church released a document entitled Dignitas Personae, or The Dignity of the Person in English. (To read it, follow this link: http://www.usccb.org/comm/Dignitaspersonae/Dignitas_Personae.pdf.) This document provides the Church’s moral assessments of recent trends in the science of human procreation. Addressing everything from in vitro fertilization, freezing embryos, and Introcyptoplasmic Sperm Implantation (ICSI) (when doctors inject a single, pre-selected and highly evaluated sperm into one egg in a laboratory) to gene therapy, cloning, and the use of stem cells, Dignitas Personae categorically affirms the Church’s dedication to preserving human dignity in the face of science.
According to the document, humans comprise a human and divine element. Humanly, we physically symbolize the Trinity. As such, our mere existence presupposes and reflects the relationship that God the Father shares with his Son and the Holy Spirit: a relationship based upon love that produces incomprehensible wonders. Spiritually, we exist to commune with God. Granted souls, God means us to live for and eternally worship Him. When these two purposes meet, according to the Church, they provide all forms of human life with a dignity that none can deny. In other words, as God’s children made specifically to reflect and worship Him, all stages of human life have been specifically designed by God to best meet his purposes for us.
The document confirms this by observing that the Incarnation gives every stage of human life – from the pre-nascent period of gestation to the honorable stoicisms of old age – meaning. This implies that because Christ gestated in his mother’s womb, God intended all life to gestate in their mother’s womb. Two implications rise from this. First, going through the human process – i.e. being conceived and developed in the womb – is an inherent part of the human process and is therefore inherent to what it means to be a human and made in God’s image. Secondly, God’s plan and means for conception are the only way to procreate honorably and with dignity. It is this with this second implication that Dignitas Personae struggles for the majority of its text.
The Vatican makes it terribly clear that unless a scientific procedure aids procreation via the act of sexual intercourse between a man and wife, it is morally prohibited. It says this because God intends procreation to only occur within the realm of marriage and via an act that represents Christ’s love for the Church and His promise that through this love it will grow and prosper. Because the physical acts of procreation represent something so sacred, the Church concludes that to permit procreation through any other means than the physical act of intercourse would be to offend God’s intentions for human life in general. While the Church acknowledges the painful realities inherent to this decree for the men and women of this world who cannot physically make their own child, it states that this is why adoption exists.
To put this ruling into plain terms, here is an example. When it comes to fertility assistance the Church states that men and women may undergo any treatments they want that will either increase their virility or increase their chances of conception via sex. Unless the physical act of sex occurs and creates life, any medical action, whether it be in vitro, artificial insemination, etc., is prohibited. This is a stark ruling, but the Church believes in it wholeheartedly.
The Church rules the way it does because of fear. It concludes (rightly so) that the vast majority of scientific fertility aids lead more to the destruction of life than its creation. Take embryo freezing or in vitro for example. What do you think happens to all the fertilized eggs that doctors do not place in the mothers? They are either destroyed or permanently frozen, sentenced to eternity on pause. The Church concludes that such procedures are neither fair nor moral. It continues and states that by permitting such actions, we have inadvertently opened the door to eugenics. Why not, it asks, permit mothers to then select the best traits in their child if they are already in a test tube under a microscope? Why not use the “best” sperm, the one that will make their child taller, faster, or stronger? The Church finds such propositions disgusting. God did not give us the right to engineer humans. How do we actually know what characteristics are best? Maybe eugenics will simply be another avenue to strip God of His sovereignty over our lives in the pursuit of physical materialism as manifested by our children.
I write all of this not to question the policies in Dignitas Personae (because, honestly, some of them need to be questioned), but to point out two things: (1) the Church, in its role as God’s voice, has undertaken a daunting challenge in taking on the liberal, scientific establishment that views human life as merely another play toy and (2) it does not condemn anyone. Instead, it merely asks all of us to evaluate our reproductive behaviors to see whether or not they coincide with God’s intentions. Morality is ultimately an individual choice. Unless we begin to choose life, we will undermine everything it means to be human. Christ called us to live for Him. It is time that we began doing that in all things – even in situations where it might break our hearts to acknowledge that we might not be able to have children. They are not a right. They are a privilege.
No comments:
Post a Comment