FOOD FOR THOUGHT                                                       IS THERE THE RIGHT TO A CHILD?	
Fr Francis Marsden	  For 5th April 1987

Our age is quick to claim rights but slow to recognise its duties. To every human right there is a corresponding duty. “The right to live involves the duty to preserve one’s life: the right to be free to seek out the truth, the duty to devote oneself to an ever deeper and wider study of it.” (John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 29 (1963))

More than this, one man’s natural right gives rise to a corresponding duty in other men to respect and protect that right. “To claim one’s rights and ignore one’s duties is like building a house with one hand and tearing it down with another.” For example, the right to work implies the duty to find work, if possible, or at least to use one’s time constructively. Employers and governments, have the duty of creating jobs for the unemployed, redistributing the work available of encouraging new enterprises.

Much of the recent Vatican document on Bioethics hinges upon the rights of the human person from the first moments of conception - and our duty to respect those rights. The abortionist slogans of “a woman’s right to choose” and “the right to do what I like with my own body” are familiar. They betray a great ignorance of rights and duties.

The women concerned indeed have the right to choose: sex within marriage and child-bearing, or no sex at all. No-one has the right to do what they like with their own body. Our bodies are gifts from God. We have the duty to respect and treat them sensibly.

The Church is indeed strict about sex, precisely because sex involves a third person, at least potentially - the child who is: begotten.

“The child has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage: it is through the secure and recognized relationship to his own parents that the child can discover his own identity and achieve his own proper human development.”

	Sex outside marriage is therefore an act of injustice against the child who may be conceived, a fundamental offence against his/her human rights. However, if you use contraceptives. Contraceptives deprive the sexual act of much of its intrinsic meaning, by deliberately excluding God’s creative love. The act no longer expresses a generous life-giving love: “We love each other for ever. We share our lives together completely and are willing to bear and rear children by each other” instead it can degenerate into mutual selfishness and pleasure-seeking.
Moreover, most contraceptive pills now sold have a back-up abortifacient effect. If an egg is produced and fertilized, they prevent its implantation in the uterus and cause a very early abortion. On these grounds alone their use is gravely immoral.

The human embryo has the right to be respected as a person from the moment of fertilisation. It must not be murdered, nor experimented on for the progress of medicine. How would you like Dr Mengele and his Gestapo friends to knock on your front door? “Good morning, we’ve just come to perform a few experiments upon you in the interests of science. We might kill or mutilate you, but just think how many other people may benefit from the results.”

The child has the right to be conceived not in a teat tube or laboratory, but as the fruit of an act of love (and not merely lust) between his parents. He should not be the “product” of a scientific technique. Nor carried in an artificial uterus. Nor poured down the laboratory sink plughole as surplus to requirements. Nor stuck in a deep freeze for years, sealed in plastic with a supermarket label (hair colour, eye colour, height, IQ) and sold to a new buyer. A child has the right to know his parents, not to be told his “father” ‘was an anonymous. Nobel prizewinner who sold samples to a sperm-bank for spare cash.

Even in the painful case of an infertile couple, the document notes that they cannot claim the “right to a child”. Certainly they have the right to “perform those natural acts which are per se ordered to procreation”, but a child is not an object to which one can have a right, not a thing which can be owned.

A child is a gift, the “supreme gift” of marriage, and a living testimony to the mutual gift of his parents. The document shows sympathy for childless couples, and encourages them to serve humanity in other ways - by adoption, educational work, or helping poor and handicapped children.

It warns against artificial insemination by donor (adultery by a syringe) or even by husband. Conception must result only from the conjugal act. Nothing else accords with human and marital dignity. The link between sexual intercourse and procreation cannot morally be severed. We are human beings, not cattle or horses on a stud farm.

The coming-to-be of a new human person is too sacred and precious a realm to be made the experimental playground of ambitious or avaricious scientists. Nevertheless, the document does permit fertility treatments, which help the conjugal act to attain its objective of procreation e.g. G.I.F.T. and others. Cardinal Ratzinger quotes the Lord’s own words: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me.”