Loving Babies As They Come
Louis R. Tarsitano on God’s Providence & Procreation
Dinesh D’Souza, a writer I often admire, recently had an article in National Review entitled “Staying Human: The Dangers of Techno-utopia.” I usually don’t pay much attention to articles in either the “utopia” or “dystopia” genre, preferring my science fiction straight on those rare occasions when I indulge.
D’Souza, however, wasn’t writing science fiction, but merely providing a grim summary of current events. That last business of “techno-utopia” is a fancy way of saying that men in laboratories are preparing to enter the business of selling parents biologically engineered and genetically altered “designer children.”
To many people, this may not sound like a bad idea at all. There are parents now, producing children the old-fashioned way, who live vicariously through their children. They scheme of ways to get their child into Harvard or the National Football League almost from the moment of conception. They decide that this son will be a doctor or that daughter will be lawyer, not caring at all what vocation their children might choose for themselves or be offered by God.
Sidestepping nature and nature’s God is the whole point of designer children. “We can overcome nature. You don’t need God,” the human engineers tell their customers. “We can program your child to be smart or strong or musical by customizing his genes and heredity in the lab. Tell us what you want, and we have the recipe.”
Then there are married couples who in all innocence merely want a child to love and raise, despite their own infertility. In their desperation they turn to the doctors and scientists, either unprepared or afraid to ask the hard moral questions about what have been described to them as “medical procedures.”
Nor do most of the doctors inform them that to make a “test-tube baby” (by what is called “in vitro fertilization”) many other babies have to be conceived and thrown away, with less respect for life than is usually shown a litter of puppies. The same is true of cloning, the effort to make a genetic carbon copy of one of the parents, and true of the next step down into the abyss, the buying and selling of “super babies.”
A Limited Appeal
In his article, D’Souza did a fair job of trying to sort these things out, but his arguments faltered at times because he had limited his appeal to secular values. He invoked, for example, a shared sense or instinct of what it means to be “human.”
He cited the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, stressing a child’s right to his own life over his parents’ pursuit of happiness through redesigning him. He rehearsed the honorable arguments against chattel slavery, which once moved the entire civilized world to conclude that no man can own another human being in the same way that he owns inanimate property, arguing by them that parents cannot own their children in the same way that they own their house or car, able to do with them as they will.
These are all useful arguments as far as they go, but they do not go far enough. It may be that the scope of D’Souza’s arguments was limited by the type of magazine and the audience for which he wrote, but matters of morality can never be finally determined by secular (or “worldly”) values. A “value” is a worth that human beings put on a thing or an idea, and values can change dramatically, as human activities like the stock market or an auction demonstrate every day.
Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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