Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

The manufacture of babies

It would be odd indeed if the birth of three cloned goats in Quebec is the catalyst which leads the federal government to introduce long-overdue legislation outlawing the cloning of human beings. It has been six long years since the government received the report of the Royal Commission on Reproductive Technology. The report itself took four years and $30 million to produce its 293 recommendations.

Because reproductive technology is rapidly expanding, those recommendations should have been implemented immediately. In 1995, the government introduced a "voluntary ban" - whatever that means - on nine reproductive technologies. In June 1996, it admitted that wasn't working and it introduced legislation to outlaw 13 reproductive technologies, including human cloning, the sale of human sperm and eggs, the removal of sperm and eggs from fetuses or corpses, surrogate motherhood, and commercial sex selection for non-medical reasons.

The 1996 bill could have and should have gone further. It should have defined all human zygotes, embryos and fetuses as human beings. Instead, the proposed bill would have set up an agency which would have licensed practices such as the creation of embryos for research purposes.

Be that as it may, the legislation died when the government called the 1997 federal election and has not been resurrected. This failure has been an act of gross negligence. Not only is the "voluntary moratorium" being ignored, but the consensus in favour of the 1996 bill has had a chance to unravel. The architects of reproductive technology have had amply opportunity to quietly lobby for less-restrictive legislation. We can hope that the new bill - if indeed there is one - will be more protective of human dignity than the 1996 bill; the fear is that it will be less so.

In a May 14 editorial, The Globe and Mail pressed the case for "choice." It argued "The decision to buy or sell eggs should be a matter of personal choice and circumstances. We don't outlaw other risks that people willingly take with their bodies. Why should harvesting eggs be different? . . . Why should we deny women the right to sell their eggs or to be surrogate mothers?"

This is pernicious reasoning. Although the physical risk to the woman is one reason for opposing egg harvesting, it is not the main one. The main reason is that the creation of a human person is a sacred task, a task rooted in love. It is not the manufacture of a product.

As such it is not a matter for private industry - even if that industry be a legally-formed partnership between a man and a woman who then enter into a new legal arrangement with another party to produce the desired product.

The manufacture of babies and the treatment of fetuses as things is a natural consequence of the desacralization of sex and marriage. If we don't see sex and marriage as holy, how will we ever see a difference between procreation and reproductive technology? In the long run, we won't.

Pertinent to this discussion is the comment by the secular bioethicist Margaret Somerville in the May 15 National Post: "I think we really need . . . to somehow find again the wonder at anything that's living. If we do that, I think we might see these things differently."

A society filled with awe at the sign of a newborn baby and at the marvel that has taken place over the previous nine months for that child will be hesitant to reduce that wonder to "reproductive technology." It won't be bamboozled by arguments about "choice" and it won't be asleep at the switch when such technology is growing up all around it. It will know that the creation of new human life is a sacred act of love. Society puts itself in grave peril when it allows procreation to be degraded into technology.

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