More on embryo adoption
In a previous post, I nibbled around the edges of the question of embryo adoption, pointing out that the Church does not permit it in practice right now, but it has not closed down debate over it. I used this debate to show a difference between the New Natural Law movement, Catholic intellectuals who are enthusiastically in favor of embryo adoption, and the traditional natural lawyers (e.g., the Holy See) who think it is a bad idea practically and a mortal sin to boot. This is not the first time advocates for the New Natural Law theory has concluded that what traditionally is a sin, even a mortal sin, is not a sin at all--other examples include the use of sex toys and masturbation within marriage, and calling a man a woman.
The substantive question of embryo adoption is surprisingly complicated. There is the central question of whether it is morally neutral under ideal conditions, and the much more practical question of whether it is moral under current and near-future conditions. For example, an embryo that’s frozen can survive for a decade or longer before dying a natural death, while in thawing the embryo and attempting to impregnate an adoptive mother there’s currently a significant chance that the embryo (the vulnerable child) will die as a direct result. One could imagine a situation where the science makes this process perfectly safe, therefore removing this objection to embryo adoption; but it’s unlikely that the science could move forward without a lot of trial and error, which would kill a lot of vulnerable children in the process.
So practically, for now, even the New Natural Lawyers ought to have objections to embryo adoption as possible under existing technology--and that’s independently of the horrifying prospect of companies sorting through the embryos to figure out the best ones to advertise to prospective adoptive parents (”Her mother is a knockout...and a genius!” “Worried about birth defects? We have a full line of genetically perfect embryos...”). But what about the idea of embryo adoption? The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seems to say that it is intrinsically immoral, while John Finnis, Robert George, Chris Tollefsen, and others insist that it’s our best way forward.
The big difference between traditional natural law and the new version is whether our bodies matter for the analysis of moral acts--the new version says not really, it’s all about our intention or motive; the traditional version says that since God created our bodies a certain way, a moral act works with the way God created our bodies while it would be immoral to work against the way God created our bodies. An example of this traditional reasoning can be found in this helpful paper by Charles Robertson, “A Thomistic Analysis of Embryo Adoption.” Here’s the beginning of the meat of the argument:
“First in the order of intention, but last in execution, then, is that the adoptive parents raise the embryo as their child. On the hypothesis of this end, a certain order of means becomes necessary: first, the mother must give birth to the child; second, the woman must become pregnant; third, the means to pregnancy is the transfer of the existing embryo into the woman‘s uterus. The first action, then, in the order of execution will be the woman‘s allowing a technician to act upon her body in virtue of its potential to carry a child. This potential exists in her because her physical constitution is such that certain of her bodily organs are ordered to the procreation of offspring. These bodily organs are the vehicle of her generative power. The generative power has as its subject the whole body-soul composite and as such is dependent for its operation on the existence and proper functioning of certain bodily organs, namely, the organs of the reproductive system (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (ST), I, q. 77, a. 5). This single power, which exists in all living things, is the ontological basis of the organs of the reproductive system‘s activities, and has as its formal object the continued existence of the species (ST I, q. 78, a. 2...). Since the uterus is an organ of the reproductive system, to direct this organ to its proper activity (gestation of a conceptus) is to introduce an order into it that is either in accordance with the teleological order of the generative faculty or not. The uterus exists for the sake of the generative faculty's proper activity, hence to intend to use the uterus entails a use of the generative faculty itself. The intentional order of the action is accomplished by the use the adoptive mother makes of her generative faculty, first, by allowing a technician to introduce the embryo into her womb, then by gestating the child for nine months and finally by giving birth. Consequently, the intention to give birth to a child, whether that child is one‘s own or not, always entails the choice to make use of the generative faculty.18 Hence the moral goodness or malice of embryo transfer will be determined by the order of reason governing the proper use of the generative faculty.”
fn18. Contrasted with traditional legal adoption, then, there is a very clear difference: in traditional adoption, the intention to raise a child as one‘s own does not entail the choice to use the generative faculty whereas embryo adoption necessarily entails that choice.”
Anyway, you can start to see why this argument is not just complicated in the number of factors to be involved, but also complicated (or at least, technical) in its core argument. It’s not the sort of thing one can answer casually. Even our analogies are difficult--is a frozen embryo more like a child in an orphanage (the above analysis explains the difference), or more like a patient in a coma who will likely die if taken off life-support? The second analogy (though very imperfect) helps us understand the perspective that the embryo’s state is sad but ultimately just another death, the fate of all human persons in this fallen world, and not the worst thing.
A different question, though, is whether the embryos can be baptized.
