An Argument for the Embryonic Intactness of Marriage

The Thomist 70 (2006): 267-88 AN ARGUMENT FOR THE EMBRYONIC INTACTNESS1 OF MARRIAGE STEVEN A. LONG Ave Maria University Naples, Florida IT HAS BECOME a commonplace of the prolife movement to speak of "embryonic rescue." This is, of course, an attempt to save the lives of wrongfully discarded embryonic human beings who languish in a frozen condition. It is, in other words, on all accounts, in its intention of the end noble. However, there is in this case, as in every case of deliberate human action, also the question of the choiceworthiness of the means, of the objective goodness or otherwise of that which one's action is about relative to reason. Granted that the end one seeks is desirable, it is not impossible that the means one has before one, or that one's proposed action, still falls short of right reason. With respect to the question of a woman taking a child conceived by another man into her womb, the question thus arises whether this is not surrogacy, either as already condemned by Donum vitae2 or as deserving such condemnation. 1 I am indebted to my wife, Anna Maria Salinas Long, who earned her M.A. in moral theology from the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, for the genius of this term. 2 Cf. Donum vitae II.A.3: "Is 'Surrogate' Motherhood Morally Licit?" "No, for the same reasons which lead one to reject heterologous artificial fertilization: for it is contrary to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person. Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families." 267 268 STEVEN A. LONG The question I wish to pose is this: Is it illicit surrogacy for a woman to take a child not conceived with her husband into her womb, by reason of this being a material violation of marital intimacy, or else a violation of the chastity of the unmarried woman? To examine the question, I will follow, more or less, the pattern of an article from the Summa Theologiae.3 OBJECTIONS 1. It shouldn't matter whether surrogacy is involved in the moral proposal of embryo rescue or not. Surrogacy is merely physical, and so does not reach to the definition of the moral object. The moral species of one's action is not determined simply by the physical nature of one's action. The physical nature and teleology of one's action is irrelevant to the constitution of the moral object and to suppose it to be relevant is physicalism, a reduction of the moral to the physical. Therefore, all we need for moral assessment of "embryo rescue" is to determine what the agent proposes. Since what the agent proposes is to save innocent human beings from death by sharing natural gifts, this proposal should immediately be seen as sound, and its moral object that of 3 It is not my intention in any way to derogate the extensive discussions which already have occurred (cf. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 5 [2005]), nor to deny that elements of the contemporary exchange are in my view helpful and correct. For example, in the NCBQ issue cited above, see in particular Robert F. Onder, Jr., M.D., "Practical and Moral Caveats on Heterologous Embryo Transfer," 75-94; or Catherine Althaus, "Can One "Rescue" a Human Embryo? The Moral Object of the Acting Woman," 113-41, with both of which, and especially the latter, my conclusions below tend to concur. Likewise, the arguments of Msgr. William Smith, in "Rescue the Frozen?" Homiletic and Pastoral Review 96 (Oct. 1995): 7273 , and "Response to 'Adoption of a Frozen Embryo,'" Homiletic and Pastoral Review 96 (Aug.-Sept. 1996): 16-17, make points regarding the object of the act involved with which I strongly agree. Nonetheless, the teleological analysis requisite to...