Fertility and Gender: Issues in Reproductive and Sexual Ethics ed. by Helen Watt (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 295 hopes on a “positive idea of laicity,” something much like de Tocqueville’s vision of a symbiosis of the Church and the liberal political order or else Pope Benedict XVI’s notion of “healthy secularity.” Perreau-Saussine believes that the Catholic Church, now committed to religious freedom, has much to contribute to liberal democracy, including a sense of the limits of politics, a critique of the radical individualism that erodes civic virtue, and a philosophical and theological foundation for the dignity and rights of the person. He also observes in contemporary democracy strains of a more hostile laicity, reminiscent of republican anti-clericalism, which is rooted in a political theology that asserts autonomy and relativism as a public philosophy and is manifested in attacks on the Church for its repressiveness in matters of sexuality. It is anyone’s guess which version of laicity will win out. What is most lamentable is that Perreau-Saussine will not be here to interpret events for us as history unfolds. Both the Church and modern liberal democracy have lost a great mind. DANIEL PHILPOTT University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana Fertility and Gender: Issues in Reproductive and Sexual Ethics. Edited by HELEN WATT. Oxford: The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, 2011. Pp. 220 $20.00 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-906561-12-6. In 2010 the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics sponsored an international conference in Maynooth, Ireland on the topic of “Fertility, Infertility and Gender.” This conference was the last of the Linacre Centre and the first offered by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, the name adopted by Linacre after its move from London to Oxford. This volume is the fruit of that exchange with a few additions. The introduction to the conference and to the book is provided by Most Rev. Anthony Fisher, O.P., then bishop of Parramatta, Australia (now archbishop of Sydney, Australia). Surveying the landscape of contemporary medicine and our cultural disarray, he offers a rebuttal born of a sound anthropology—of the kind found in this volume. Paul Mankowski, S.J., opens the volume with an elegantly compact and almost poetic overview of the biblical ethics of marriage in light of its soteriology. East of Eden, “Man is an exile and he has blood on his hands” (10). Yet the blessing of marriage is retained and the various Old Testament 296 BOOK REVIEWS laws regarding sexual activity provide the people of Israel a kind of “curriculum of fecundity,” which replaces the abhorrent practices of its neighbors with an imperfect version of “a culture of life.” With the advent of Jesus and the Christian era, the fecundity of the natural sacrament of marriage “has been transfigured into a sacrament of universal salvation” (16). Alexander Pruss offers a rather unembellished but insightful philosophical framework for sexual ethics by tracing the three dimensions common to all forms of love: appreciation, benevolence, and desire for union. Drawing on Aquinas, Pruss distinguishes between formal and real union, and argues that lovers seek a real union with one another expressive of the form of love appropriate to the relationship. When love takes a romantic form, the yearning of the lovers is for sexual union. Such union finds its full expression in the union of matched and cooperating organs working together for the common purpose of reproduction. However, erotic love does not just aim at biological union; as embodied persons the lovers aim for an interpersonal union over the course of time—in other words erotic love aims at the interpersonal commitment of marriage. Luke Gormally turns the focus to social ethics by arguing that “chastity is a social virtue” ordered not just to the welfare of marriage but to the whole of society (28). To contemporary reductionism, which sees sex as a matter of private choice pursued for personal fulfillment, he juxtaposes Aristotle’s view of the child as “the common good” of conjugal union and as integral to the well-being of the polis. Aquinas provides a further anthropological grounding for this position in his account of the human inclinations by which spouses in the community of marriage “are naturally ordered to the common good of the child” (36). This leads Gormally to...