Recently in Bioethics Category

This is a tragic situation, no matter how you look at it (hat tip: Creative Minority Report):

A Spanish woman who deceived a U.S. fertility clinic about her age and become the oldest woman to give birth has died at 69, leaving behind 2-year-old twins, newspapers reported Wednesday.

Maria del Carmen Bousada gave birth in December 2006 after telling a clinic in Los Angeles that she was 55, the facility's maximum age for single women receiving in-vitro fertilization. Guinness World Records said the 66-year-old was the oldest on record to give birth and the case ignited fierce debate over how much responsibility fertility clinics have over their patients.

Bousada told an interviewer at the time that the Pacific Fertility Center did not ask her for identification, and maintained that because her mother had died at 101, she stood a good chance of living long enough to raise her children. [...]

There was no word on who would raise the twins. Bousada had once said she would look for a younger man to help her raise them.

A few things need to be made clear: first, as a Catholic I believe that all use of IVF is immoral. It is a grave moral evil whether a 26-year-old or a 66-year-old is using this means to manufacture a child or children. It is wrong whether a married couple or a single person decides to use it.

That said, it should go without saying that the children manufactured in this way are wholly innocent of the evil of their parent or parents in choosing IVF. Just as a child conceived in rape is wholly innocent of the crime and sin of her father, so are these twin boys innocent of the evil of IVF and of their mother's extremely imprudent choice to undergo this procedure at 66. Their tragic loss of their mother is to be deplored, and they, their mother, and any other family are in my prayers.

However, because the children are innocent does not mean that we can't or shouldn't condemn IVF as being a threat to the intrinsic dignity of the human person. Children deserve to be conceived in the context of the marital embrace of their loving parents, and to be raised by them. Granted, a married mother who is much younger than 66 when her child is born is not guaranteed that she will live to see her child grow up, but that doesn't mean that nature, which usually permits a woman to be fertile for a certain time period and no longer, should be ignored altogether, subverted, and overruled by those who would objectify children and manufacture them "to order," so to speak.

As we continue to de-couple the notions of marriage and parenthood, and of natural conception and parenthood, we're going to see a lot more situations like this one, I'm afraid. And so long as we see the creation of a child as a "right" which has nothing to do with marriage or natural, biological parenthood, we're going to keep losing any grounds on which to object to such things.

So says Terry Mattingly, in an e-mail to me. He's talking about maintaining religious freedom against the coming changes in health care regulations, and gay civil rights. I asked him to explain. He responded:

It's really a matter of simple math.

When you look at the number of American religious institutions that will be affected by the next legal wave of the sexual revolution, the numbers all skew Catholic. There are Baptist hospitals, but do the math.

Then you get into the issue of religious schools. Now, in recent decades, that's where the Protestant world has grown. How many Protestant schools will surrender the right to hire according to their own doctrines? Will there be evangelical schools and "in the
evangelical tradition" schools?

Meanwhile, you can argue that the world of Catholic education has become "Catholic" education. Witness the divisions at Notre Dame. Witness the Ex Corde wars.

But that's all old news. The question that matters is how these divisions will, in the end, be reflected in the US bishops, as a body. Will some dioceses compromise? Will the bishops hold the arguments that matter behind closed doors, so that even the Vatican cannot hear?

What do you think?

Like Amy, I despised the "Body Worlds" exhibit, considering it to be defiling the human body for entertainment purposes (despite its scientific pretensions). Guenther von Hagens, its originator, has now tipped his hand, showing what a sick SOB he's always been: his new exhibition depicts cadavers having sex. Says Wesley J. Smith:

But breaking "taboos" is all that matters in a hedonistic culture crumbling from the destruction of social cohesion. Further, hedonism denigrates human exceptionalism by reducing us to the level of instinctive and self indulgent beings living for the next, ever more nihilistic, thrill.

We can break this downward spiral only by seeing clearly what is happening and refusing to participate in it.

The Catholic philosopher Tom Hibbs wrote about why "Body Worlds" is so morally objectionable back when it came through Dallas. Excerpt:

Merely asserting that one is engaging in the laudatory practice of overcoming taboos about the proper use of dead bodies does not make it, in fact, laudatory. One might equally claim that hard-core pornography can educate viewers about sex by reducing sex to the manipulation of body parts stripped of any larger human significance.

The problem with death in our culture is not that we have taboos about it, but that we lack a rich language for articulating the experience and its meaning. It's hard to see how Body Worlds will help solve that problem. Indeed, what is on display is not the mystery of death, but the reduction of bodies to inert plasticized parts displayed for viewers - a pornography of the dead human body.

Now that the von Hagens has created actual pornography with dead bodies. As Smith says, what's left now? This stuff is Satanic. In a sane society, this ghoul would be in prison or in an insane asylum. In our culture, he is rich and famous.

Some thought I was over the top yesterday in describing Marissa Evans, the Texas sperm-harvesting mama, as ghoulish for her strip-mining of her dead son's gonads. Well, Evans has now appeared on the Today Show, and said she's going to find a surrogate ASAP (is Octomom free?) so she can get those grandchildren in the oven. Doing so, she told Matt Lauer, "would help to heal my heart somewhat."

Marissa Evans is creating human life, absent consent from her son (who can't give it, because he's dead), for the sake of her own personal therapeutic needs. The "ethics of entitlement" that Philip Rieff warned of in "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" could hardly have a more pure, or more chilling, expression.

Sick, sick, sick -- but legal:

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A judge has granted a mother's request to have someone harvest sperm from her dead son's body, so she can have the option of carrying out his wish to have children.

Nikolas Colton Evans, 21, died Sunday at a Brackenridge hospital after being punched and falling outside an Austin bar March 27.

His mother, Marissa Evans, told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper that he wanted to have three sons someday and had even picked out their names: Hunter, Tod and Van.

"I want him to live on. I want to keep a piece of him," she told the newspaper.

I want to keep a piece of him. So now, human beings that may be created using her son's sperm, without (obviously) his consent, will be grandmother's little souvenirs.

When I woke up this morning, I wouldn't have even imagined such a thing possible. Now it seems we are going to have to pass a law forbidding our parents from harvesting our own eggs and sperm after we die, so they can get the grandkids they want no matter what. What a world.

I don't even know where to begin with this. Think of it: a dead man has no say over whether or not he will have children, because his mother has cannibalized his body with the consent of the state.

Slate's William Saletan makes a provocative point: To most of us, Rove's attack is familiar and infuriating. We believe, as Obama does, that it's possible to save lives without crossing a moral line that might corrupt us. We reject the...

We all knew Obama was going to reverse Bush's policy on federal embryonic stem cell research, and now he's done so. In his remarks, he indicated that he was turning back what he characterized as the Bush administration's attempts to...

Did you see the NBC interview with Mother Suleman? Here's the key excerpt: Nadya Suleman: That was always a dream of mine, to have a large family, a huge family, and - I just longed for connections and attachments with...

Couple of great opinion pieces in the WSJ; this first takes a look at an issue that's probably going to get bigger in our day: surrogate motherhood: Now Ms. Kuczynski's trademark concern for the moneyed becomes memoir as she relates...

Via Tyler Cowen, a shocking story about an Oregon woman whose state health plan wouldn't give her the money to pay for drugs that might prolong her life, but was eager to pay out for drugs that would allow her...

From the Culture of Death file, these entries, both cited on The Corner this morning: 1. Britain's leading moral philosopher looks forward to the day when licensed euthanists can put old people whose existence is a burden on the welfare...

Via Get Religion, a story about Protestants in Austin who have decided not to use artificial contraception, but rather to rely on Natural Family Planning. Excerpt: Phaedra Taylor abstained from sex until marriage. But she began researching birth control methods...

Modern medicine has done some pretty amazing things to improve the survival chances of babies born prematurely. This article in Business Week discusses the fact that babies born at 28 weeks gestation, once thought doomed to die, are now surviving...

You know me, I strongly believe that we should show more respect and stewardship (versus exploitation) for the natural world. But the Swiss government bioethics panel arguing in favor of "plant rights" is asinine. Wesley J. Smith writes that the...

Here's a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of President Bush's deliberations on his decision early in his first term on federal embryonic stem-cell research funding. Jay Lefkowitz, who was a Bush adviser during this period, tells an extraordinary story revealing the moral...

From the New York Times comes the exciting news that we may not need embryonic stem cells after all. The news that human skin cells can be turned into cells that behave rather like embryonic stem cells should be good...

Have you been following the enormous, and enormously nasty, controversy over what the great geneticist and Nobel laureate James Watson said about race and IQ? Here's the story. Basically he got into a world of trouble because he said our...

Somehow I missed this one: this past summer, the Roman Catholic bishops of England said that chimeras -- the part-human, part-animal creatures Britain's mad scientists are to concoct in their labs -- have the right to life. Excerpt: But the...

I see things like this, and think: we're not going to be able to get away with this forever. And then I think: Please God, don't let us get away with this forever. As horrible as rule-by-mullah is, it does...

Matt Yglesias writes: "I'm also always curious as to where the opponents of stem cell research stand on issues related to in-vitro fertilization." His point -- and it's a good one -- is that if you oppose embryonic stem-cell research...