"SCIENCE REALITY IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION"

Technology turns babies into consumer products
Thomas G. Wenski Special to the Sentinel
March 11, 2009

In the early 1800s, a young author, Mary Shelley, wrote one of the most famous works of science fiction about a mad scientist who in his quest to create life never stopped to consider the consequences of his actions. This gothic novel, Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, was a warning against the overreaching of modern man in the Age of the Industrial Revolution.

Two centuries later, science reality is stranger than science fiction: While scientists have not learned to "create" life, they have learned to manipulate life with various reproductive technologies. That they do so without sufficiently considering the consequences of these actions is born out by the controversy surrounding Nadya Suleman, whom the press has dubbed the "Octomom" after she gave birth to eight children conceived through in-vitro fertilization. Of course, her offspring are not "monsters" but children. But precisely because they are innocent children, one must ask about the morality of such procedures.

Before the birth of these octuplets, in a recent statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of a Person), the Holy See reiterated the teaching of the Church against in-vitro fertilization and certain other reproductive technologies. In condemning these forms of reproductive technologies, the Church does not wish only to be a scold. In fact, the Church welcomes and encourages the strides that biomedical research has made in opening new possibilities for the treatment of diseases. After all, the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic priest.

However, the Church insists that the dignity of a person be recognized in every human being from conception to natural death. "This fundamental principle," according to Dignitas Personae, "expresses a great 'yes' to human life and must be at the center of ethical reflection on biomedical research ... "

Because it is possible to do something does not make it necessarily right to do it. Science, if it is to truly serve humanity, cannot separate itself from the demands of ethics. The ends do not justify the means.The process of in-vitro fertilization frequently involves the deliberate destruction of embryos; some 80 percent of embryos produced artificially are sacrificed in efforts to secure successful implantation. Each embryo, however, is an individual human being and not just simply a mass of cells to be used, selected or discarded.

John Paul II observed: The "various techniques of artificial reproduction, which would seem to be at the service of life and which are frequently used with this intention, actually open the door to new threats against life." (Evangelium Vitae 14.)The desire for children is both legitimate and laudable, but not every means is morally acceptable for those wishing to become parents. As Dignitas Personae says, "The origin of human life has its authentic context in marriage and in the family, where it is generated through an act which expresses the reciprocal love between a man and a woman. ... The desire for a child cannot justify the 'production' of offspring, just as the desire not to have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.

"A child should be the fruit of the parents' love — a gift received and accepted and not a consumer product to satisfy someone's subjective desire.

Artificial contraception opened the possibility of sex without procreation; now in-vitro and related technologies proffer procreation without sex. Such technologies divorced from moral reasoning devalue the meaning of human sexuality itself.

Medical science — like any other human endeavor — is not above ethics. Each of us is called to be ethically and socially responsible for our actions. In giving her judgment on the immorality of these procedures, the church insists on "both the unconditional respect owed to every human being at every moment of his or her existence, and the defense of the specific character of the personal act which transmits life." (Dignitas Personae 10.)

The Most Rev. Thomas G. Wenski is the Catholic Bishop of Orlando. source