The seven McCaugheys Does fertility have its limits? Where does the pursuit of happiness end?
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY THE SEVEN McCAUGHEYS Babies as products The recent birth of septuplets in Iowa is interesting at a couple of levels. It focuses our attention on the difficult moral questions raised...
...At this writing the seven babies seem to be doing as well as premature children can do...
...In a godless culture, that really isn't a bad answer...
...Fertility drugs, which so frequently produce risky multiple births, put those new lives at risk...
...I could sympathize with her without knowing, in the flesh, her agonized longing for a baby...
...But for those of us who believe that the connections among the death penalty, abortion, and assisted suicide are profound, the need to connect them can't be waved away with a few decisions...
...Having a child shouldn't be like picking out the cutest puppy...
...Even before we get to the place where Christianity, or Judaism, or Buddhism, or any other serious tradition can address us, you must begin here, where tragedy is, where all of us live and will die, a place which our culture does everything it can to make sure we will never know...
...In fact, it is the only possible ethical answer, if God is not real...
...The implication is that there is something nearly sacred about the Supreme Court's decision where abortion is concerned-but the death penalty is another issue...
...The couple who had the children had used fertility drugs because of their difficulty in conceiving their first child...
...This is where the current confusion requires those of us who are religious to be annoying to the larger culture...
...Those in vitro processes, in which a number of embryos may wind up destroyed in order to produce a viable embryo, waste life...
...If we aren't in charge of our lives, from the very beginning to the very end, who is...
...I remember especially one friend whose desire for a child was fierce and elemental, who told me I couldn't possibly understand that yearning without having felt it as keenly as she had, and she is certainly right...
...The couple, evangelical Christians, refused...
...we had no trouble with fertility, and knew people who did...
...I have good friends who have insisted that those of us who disagree about (for example) abortion should accept the fact that the majority has spoken, through the courts, in favor of permissive abortion laws...
...We duck that question (forget the who stuff) and insist that we ourselves must be in charge of our lives, and no one else may be, and nothing random should be...
...There is something terrifying about the fact that babies are aborted for being the wrong sex (usually female) and something chilling in the "lifeboat" scenario of "selective reduction," where some lives are tossed out to save others...
...I have always had a problem with fertility technologies...
...The child as product, our life as a product, the idea of life itself as something which we must control from beginning to end-it is that, or allow something else into it, and as a society we have no idea what that might be-all of this is desirable because of an inability to accept the dimension of the tragic, the territory in which we must live and over which we can have no final control...
...Children are already being chosen from sperm banks devoted to the production of the right kind of embryo, where you can shop for children whose race, intellectual ability, or athletic prowess can be yours for the buying...
...We wanted children, and they came in the usual way...
...This is one of the problems with living in a secular society, which has a stake in not addressing these deeper questions...
...There is no other "who...
...I say this as someone with two children...
...When their doctors learned that the couple had seven fertilized embryos, the doctors advised "selective reduction"- aborting some, to give the others a better chance...
...Perhaps because they do not so obviously involve the taking of life, we see them as radically different, though they are part of the same culture of control...
...In both cases, the parents' desire for a child becomes more important than the particular reality of the child...
...Bless them for that...
...This is all part of the need for absolute control, which has to do with the terror behind permissive abortion laws and the movement for assisted suicide...
...It focuses our attention on the difficult moral questions raised by fertility technology, and the media reactions show just how odd and how callous we have become...
...It is important, though these have not yet become issues in law, for us to see in the fertility technologies a similar moral challenge...
...the desire matters more than the flesh...
...There, the courts are simply wrong, and according to this split line of thinking, we must fight them until they change...
...But babies are not products...
...The understanding of life as a gift, and the realization that parenthood is a form of scary stewardship, not ownership, should lead to respect for the gravity of what it means to accept the responsibility for accepting whatever, whomever, we are given here: a child who might be brilliant, or autistic, or both, as sometimes happens, or-this is so hard for many to accept-no child at all...
...We are faced with the possibility (not yet, thank God, realized) of finding genetic markers for traits that used to be seen as random, striking like lightning, so that we can now envision the possibility of eliminating not only the threat of having a female or male child, but also rid ourselves of a homosexual or nonblond or retarded or short or left-handed child...
...The pursuit of this possibility is not science fiction...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 22
