A child: a gift or a product?
Gonzalo Herranz, department Bioethics, University of Navarra
discussion paper congress First congress for Life and the Family
Anonymous Movement for Life Corporation/Human Life International
Pontifical Catholic University, Santiago, Chile
Saturday, August 20, 1994, 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.
The Two Models: General Characterization
General Implications of Both model
The Real Answer from Parents and Doctors: Seeing Your Child as a Gift
Over the past three decades—as the lectures and discussions at this congress clearly show us—the family has undergone changes that were once unimaginable: the anti-life culture has made it its first and foremost victim. We must defend the family in this time of crisis. And we must do so with both our hearts and our minds.
That is why, in this lecture , I will try to offer you lecture reflections on an aspect that I find particularly interesting: an analysis of two polar, antithetical ways of viewing the relationship between parents and children. This is not a peripheral issue. These modes of relationship constitute the very core of the family’s structure and function, and they are also closely tied to the very heart of respect for human life.
Over the past three decades, in large segments of some human societies, the classical paradigm of the child received from God—which has been dominant in the Christian tradition and, more broadly, in cultures with a religious conception of the world and human life—has been transformed. In the new, secularist, and reductive status, it is not God who calls each human being into existence, but rather human beings themselves who create their children, who bring them into being. And, as if countering the account of Genesis, in the new paradigm, humanity once again succumbs to the original temptation of “you will be like gods”: modern men and women create their children in their own image and likeness.
The topic we are going to reflect topic is yet another facet of the complex set of changes we are witnessing—and in which we must play a leading role—through which the world is becoming divided into two civilizations. John Paul II refers to them many times, but he did so with great clarity in his Letter to Families. With keen historical insight and great compassion, the Pope speaks to us of a civilization of love and life, which is built upon an understanding of the mystery of man as revealed by Christ: the family is the heart and center of that civilization. The Pope also speaks to us of another civilization: that of rootlessness and death, born of the modern crisis of truth and the loss of the civilizing concepts of love, freedom, truth, the person, rights, and submission —which are the values upon which human dignity is founded. A destructive anti-civilization stands in opposition to the civilization of love.
In the civilization of love, although a child is conceived by its parents, it is, in reality, created by God: it is a gift that God bestows, a present that He sends. In the transmission of human life, the father and mother play a decisive, yet instrumental, role. In the father’s arms, on the mother’s lap, and later in family life, the child appears as an undeserved miracle, as a mystery of life, which cannot be explained by mere reproductive physiology or evolutionary psychology, for the imago Dei is reflected in the child.
According to the civilization of rootlessness, a child is the result Genetics programming, a purely biological function, a calculated act of domination, and the exercise of autonomous reproductive freedom. Children are the creation of humankind, a product explainable by the laws of biology and Genetics. People have children or do not have them, according to their sovereign desire and their technical mastery of reproductive processes. And, if they do have children, they have them with whomever they choose, in the manner they choose, at the issue moment they autocratically decide. To this end, there is the new science of reproductive biology.
The global spread of the new paradigm—the civilization of rootlessness—has been the result a relatively short historical process that began with the adoption, of contraception and sterilization in broad sectors of society, continued with abortion, is being carried out through the development assisted reproductive technologies, and will culminate on the day when the manipulation of the various stages of development and the enhancement applications of modern Genetics produce children à la carte. Increasing medical control over conception and gestation has created opportunities for couples to make decisions about how, when, and under what issue have children. And, it seems, there are many doctors and many people who are willing to carry forward the process that will turn men—fulfilling the Cartesian prophecy—into the absolute owners and possessors of their own children.
The Two Models: General Characterization
In the following paragraphs, I will draw in part on ideas regarding the two basic paradigms of parent-child relationships developed by Luke Gormally and Agnetta Sutton, researchers at the Linacre Center in London, the bioethics center of the lecture of England and Wales. They designed these two models—the “recipient-gift” and “producer-product” models—as a heuristic tool for studying national laws and professional association guidelines on assisted reproduction and the applications of modern Genetics currently in force within the European Community. There is no doubt that these models are partly theoretical; they are not yet fully present or have not yet become fully entrenched in the everyday lives of families. However, they contain critically divergent normative implications that are fundamental when it comes to enacting legislation or issuing professional guidelines. And their influence will be decisive in the future.
According to the first model—the “recipient-giver” model—children possess the same dignity as their parents; they are their equals in rights and privileges. Parents are accountable before God and are instruments through which His creative Power and Love work. Children—whether eagerly awaited or arriving unexpectedly; whether healthy or born with a disability—must be accepted unconditionally by their parents. Logically, this unconditional nature does not preclude the use of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques that help to cure—or alleviate as much as possible—both infertility and congenital disease, while respecting nascent human life and the dignity of procreation. But fundamentally, the recipient’s attitude is one of grateful respect for the always awe-inspiring novelty of a new human life—and of recognition of the vast latent human possibilities inherent in marital infertility or in a life with a malformation.
According to the model —the producer-product model—parents must exercise maximum control over the children they produce. This attitude is determined not only by the opportunities that science has placed in the hands of humans to regulate the issue, quality, and characteristics of their offspring, but also, within the logic of production, maximum intervention comes to signify the highest degree of humanity and ethical excellence.
John Fletcher, the father of situationist ethics, in a article written in the early 1970s—when in vitro fertilization was still in its nascent experimental phase—described the purported ethical dignity of model as follows:
Man is more “faber” than “sapiens”: that is, he is more of a maker, more of a designer, more inclined toward constructions. The more rationally something is designed—that is, the more deliberately artificial it is—the more human it is. It is therefore absurd to attempt to portray natural biological reproduction, on the one hand, and artificial, programmed reproduction, on the other, as mutually exclusive. The only truly important difference is the one that generally exists between random or merely chance reproduction and reproduction that is rationally desired, chosen, and designed. In my opinion, laboratory reproduction laboratory , compared to conception resulting from an ordinary heterosexual relationship, radically more human. For the former—the artificial form—is result a choice, of control, of a deliberate pursuit: and all these traits are what distinguish Homo faber from the other members of the animal kingdom. Genital reproduction is, therefore, less human than laboratory reproduction: it is certainly more enjoyable, but when man separates the production of children from the haphazard complexities of making love, both operations—making children and making love—become more human, because they become matters not of chance, but of choice.”
General Implications of Both model
Under the terms of model , human beings are considered, at every stage of their existence, to be equal in dignity to their parents. From the very first moment of their existence, they are accepted as the human beings—the individuals—that they already are. They will never be more human than they are at the very first moment of their existence. In their development , they retrace the very same stages through which the existence of their own parents—and of every other human being—passed. They are, therefore, one of us, with whom we are fully identified. The relationship between the parents—the recipients—and the child—the gift—is one of respect, acceptance, and welcome: the child is flesh of their flesh, a true alter ego. There is a perfect symmetry of dignity and moral value between parents and children.
In the model , by contrast, human beings are not begotten but produced. They are not fully human from the outset, but rather develop into it over time. In the early stages of their development, they are regarded as relative: their fundamental dimension is not what they are or can be in and of themselves, but rather what their parents think of them; parents may demand the fulfillment of certain requirements an inescapable condition for accepting them, for recognizing them as their equals in dignity, and for granting them equal rights. From this perspective, the relationships between parent-producers and child-product imply the possibilities of choosing, accepting or rejecting, selecting, and manipulating. There is an asymmetry of power and submission between the creator and the object produced by him.
Consequently, the dynamics of production, as they play out in the economic and industrial world, are embedded in parent-child relationships and, by extension, in all human relationships.
An important aspect of this dynamic is the following: the relationship is not only exercised outwardly, vertically, in the direction from producer to product, from parent-owner to child-possession. The producer also undergoes an inward, intrinsic, and reflexive change that affects how the producer thinks of himself—and, ultimately, how humanity comes to view itself. Something similar happens, it seems to me, to what Charlie Chaplin shows us in *Modern Times*. The assembly-line worker does not merely set out to tighten nuts; rather, he becomes possessed by a nut-tightening tic that persists even outside of work.
Let me try to explain: Exercising the ability to choose in fundamental matters not only has consequences for those affected by our choice (the aborted fetus, the child result gamete donation, for example), but also strongly shapes the attitudes and dispositions of the person who has made the choice. Parents who decide what to do with their in vitro embryos (whether to preserve them, donate them, give them to a researcher destroy them), or those who consider whether or not to have an abortion, that is, those who treat their embryonic or fetal children as if they were things, mere objects, like a product, rather than as human beings, are marked for the rest of their lives by contradictory attitudes and dispositions. The love they may feel for their children may be possessive, even obsessive. But it will always be a selfish, conditional, narcissistic love. A parent like this does not love their children for who they are in and of themselves, but for what they represent to him or her.
It can be argued that, in the model , there comes a point in development once, for example, the legal deadlines for abortion have passed—the parents decide to accept the child, granting it the recognition of full humanity and staff dignity that is proper to human beings welcomed into society. But one thing is clear: the mere possibility that they once had the choice to decide between life and death, between bringing a child into the world or not, between accepting a defect or demanding a minimum standard of quality, remains forever etched in their souls. They will never cease to feel that they are the masters of their children’s lives.
In this context of a civilization of rootlessness, it is not merely—though this is the most serious aspect—that God has disappeared from the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” since there is reference letter transcendent reference letter for the human act of transmitting life. The model impoverishes parent-child relationships in ways that are difficult to quantify. When studying published articles on the relational psychology of parents and test-tube children, one can observe how the model is very difficult to tolerate. For many parents, it is short-lived, as it is incompatible with the authentic love parents have for their children. Over time, parents tend to develop a kind of compromise that pushes the producer-product relationship into the blind spot of their moral consciousness and replaces it with the psychological framework of model . For many others, however, the child appears as an unwanted child, with all the inherent family pathology—including lack of love, mistreatment, and child abuse.
Many parents thus follow a kind of psychological law of timing: the phase in which the unborn child lacks legal protection—a phase marked by uncertainty and the parents’ doubts about whether to accept or reject the child—corresponds to a “producer-product” attitude that deprives the child of moral significance. After this initial, indeterminate phase—once the parents, as the masters of their child’s destiny, have chosen to accept the child—the relationship shifts to one of recipient and gift, and the child is received as a gift, depending on the circumstances, from reproductive technology or from the capacity to choose.
Although our society constantly speaks of non-discrimination, equal rights, and the abolition of abuses, there are laws—such as Spain’s law on assisted reproduction—that, by conferring legal status on the fanciful notion of a “pre-embryo,” confine a subgroup of human beings to a state of “non-human” apartheid. Lawmakers have determined that simply calling them “pre-embryos” is enough to make their profound human nature vanish from society’s view.
It is serious that the legislators themselves—who, in agreement constitutional norms, are obligated to recognize and publicly proclaim that we are all equal before the law—have deliberately chosen to make this error. They have had no qualms about resorting to this terminology so that relationships between human beings in our society can exist that fall into the categories of producer-product or owner-owned object.
But it pains me far more to see that, in the field of human embryology, some renowned authors have succumbed to the temptation to appear modern and progressive and have introduced this terminology , artificial terminology into their excellent textbooks. Dianne N. Irving recently published a article critical article in the Linacre Quarterly graduate “Embryology Texts for the New Era: Implications for research .”
The producer-product mentality is not confined to legal texts or embryology textbooks. The producer-product mentality is as widespread among doctors as it is among ordinary people: it is evident in the behavior of doctors who recommend contraception and perform sterilizations and abortions to allow their patients to have only the children they desire. The producer-product mentality reaches its peak efficiency in neo-Malthusian population control programs, which rely on physician-officials willing to exercise reproductive coercion, or on medical school professors who include, among the requirements for granting academic and professional certification, the science and internship contraception and abortion. The neo-Malthusian frenzy does not recognize the right to conscientious objection: prescribing contraceptives, inserting IUDs, and internship are all part of the initiation rite for physicians serving the producer-product paradigm. The physician—as we shall see during the lecture next September—will be subserviently at the disposal of health authorities to impose on parents the issue children (one? two? none?) decreed for each status . All of this is happening, to the applause of the WHO and many population experts, on the Chinese subcontinent. The unstoppable logic of the producer-product mentality has culminated there in the legal prescription of neonatal euthanasia for malformed infants. Congenital defects are not tolerated there. The logic of quality and production control—discarding the defective unit—has made its way into human life: every defective newborn will be destroyed by legal mandate.
The producer-product mindset has taken root among couples who turn to assisted reproduction programs in any of their countless forms. The producer-product mentality reaches another peak in the minds of clinical embryologists who refine highly sophisticated techniques for preimplantation diagnosis, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or logistical plans for motherhood using donated gametes or embryos, surrogacy, or postmenopausal motherhood for lesbian couples. The bottom line is to give children to those who desire them with sufficient tenacity.
The "producer-product" mentality is evident in the efforts of many geneticists and obstetricians to achieve a high level of Genetics quality Genetics children through prenatal diagnosis; they do not seek to cure or care for the sick embryo or fetus, but rather to systematically destroy it, drawing on a wide array of techniques ranging from preimplantation embryo diagnosis to neonatal euthanasia procedures.
The doctor’s comfortable adaptation to the producer-product mindset is very clearly illustrated by a true story. I will always remember the case tried in Leicester, England, against a doctor who allowed a child with Down syndrome—who had no internal malformations—to die of starvation. This child could have led the happy, innocent life that children with Down syndrome lead when they are welcomed, loved, and properly cared for, but he had the misfortune of being rejected by his parents: Dr. Arthur let him die.
During that trial, instructions was, in a sense, laid instructions the pragmatic justification of withdrawal death of malformed newborns. I followed that trial very closely—I had recently decided to leave Pathology to devote myself to medical ethics—and I will always remember how one of the witnesses compared the preventive aspect of prenatal medicine to the quality control system employee industry. “When, in a production process,” he explained, “a part is detected as defective through quality control procedures, that part is discarded. And this happens regardless of whether the defect was discovered at the beginning or the end of the industrial assembly process: you cannot sell a car or a computer in which structural defects have been detected.”
The same witness noted that, in his department of pediatrics and when parents requested it, the practice was to let nature take its course—a euphemism to conceal the withdrawal symptoms; the child was not being fed but was sedated so that he would not feel hungry or cry. To justify his conduct, he very precisely articulated the medical version of the producer-product mentality: he said that the modern pediatrician is not, in reality, a doctor of children, but a family doctor. When a family decides not to care for a disabled newborn, the doctor cannot impose his obsolete Hippocratic ethics and force them to bear the unbearable burden of an unwanted child. The pediatrician is, above all, a Good Samaritan of biological perfection, who cannot remain indifferent—as the Levite and the lawyer did in the Gospel parable—to the pain experienced by parents distressed by the permanent disability of the child they have just brought into the world. As a Good Samaritan, he is obligated to alleviate that pain and administer merciful euthanasia to the child.
It is very difficult to imagine what goes on in the mind of a doctor who thinks and acts like the pediatrician in this story. Someday, we will have to document the moral decline of so many of our contemporary colleagues who have abandoned the ethics of respect in favor of the ethics of efficiency. The transfer of the producer-product mentality to the realm of human relationships—and to the purest and most delicate of them all, the relationship between parents and children—is perhaps the result the slow, gradual, almost imperceptible accumulation of numerous instances of moral violence, small but always significant.
When doctors—driven by a producer’s mindset and obsessed with product quality—describe the status want to solve, they paint a grim picture of congenital disease. They tell us that serious birth defects affect 3% of newborns; that 20% of neonatal deaths are caused by them. And that of the children who survive, many—25%—live as slaves to a permanent disability, tragic victims of medical progress.
For many, the cost of curative medicine for embryos, fetuses, and newborns—largely the work of pro-life doctors—is too high, yields few result, requires extensive rehabilitation and Education , and leads to permanent health impairments. They are convinced, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that permanent disabilities create unbearable family tragedies. They hold as a dogma that, in today’s nuclear families with one or two children, parents want their children to be strong, healthy, and attractive—not chronically disabled. The ideal would be to “program” children to have the desired physical and intellectual qualities: some parents no longer accept sons born without fingers or daughters born with a cleft lip.
This tends to foster a fanatical mindset that leads to the conviction that research be used not to repair the damage caused by congenital diseases, but to prevent them—and, if that is not possible, to eradicate them—even at the cost of eliminating those who suffer from them or sterilizing those who transmit them. From their perspective, research be put to work to refine eugenic abortion as a means of selection, one that is far more efficient than embryofetal medicine and neonatology.
This is on the agenda. In France, for example, where the routine abortion of children born to HIV-positive women has gained widespread acceptance, well-known and accurate data on the relatively leave rate of vertical transmission of the disease and on the highly effective role of zidovudine in preventing mother-to-child transmission are struggling to gain traction.
Five years ago in the United Kingdom, the Royal College of Physicians in London—an institution well known for the professional maturity and sound judgment of its guidelines—published a misguided pamphlet titled *Prenatal Diagnosis & Genetic Screening: Community and Service Implications*, a pamphlet that ardently advocated for eugenic abortion. It stated, for example, that children with Down syndrome are too costly for society and that the use of cytogenetic testing in conjunction with abortion offers an incomparably favorable economic ratio.
Just how far the blindness of quality control officials can go sample story of a technique, developed in England, for the prenatal detection of certain forms of albinism. In developed countries, people with albinism live perfectly adapted lives. In fact, they appear to have an IQ somewhat higher than that of their peers with normal pigmentation. Prenatal detection and the resulting eugenic abortion of albinos in those countries is therefore of no interest whatsoever. Disheartened by the lack of application of the technique in the First World, the authors of the technique believed that there were many cultural and environmental reasons that made it advisable for Third World countries. The developers requested financial aid to extend the benefits of their technique to development countries— financial aid , fortunately, was denied. The researchers bitterly complained about the bureaucrats’ insensitivity, failing to realize that poor countries lacked the advanced technology needed to perform the tests but possessed sufficient solidarity not to feel the need to eliminate albinos—since it was enough for them to care for these individuals by providing them with work from the sun’s rays. There is, clearly, an anti-therapeutic fanaticism that says “No” to embryo-fetal medicine, that prefers to eliminate the disabled through neonatal euthanasia or abortion, and that advises parents to try again to see if, with a little luck, their next child will be free of congenital defects.
I do not wish to dwell on listing the techniques developed by scientists with a reductionist mindset obsessed with quality. I do not wish, however, to fail to mention two of their “achievements” that have as much—if not more—to do with quantity as with quality. These are two procedures with opposite aims: one—the selective reduction of malformed fetuses or simply issue cases issue twin pregnancies—tends to eliminate the one considered surplus; the other—so-called twin fission, popularly referred to by the press as cloning—seeks to multiply them.
Selective reduction arose from a curious agreement. A woman pregnant with twins was found to be carrying one fetus with trisomy 21. The doctor agreed to terminate the affected fetus and save the healthy one. Using guide , he managed to cause the affected fetus to bleed to death. Although retaining the dead fetus can pose risks to the mother, the “producer-product” mindset of doctors and parents found in selective reduction a procedure eliminating unwanted embryos.
These are usually the result ill-considered interventions to treat female infertility, such as those used in certain forms of ovarian insufficiency or in vitro fertilization. When many follicles mature simultaneously and multiple ovulation occurs, or when a issue of in vitro-fertilized embryos are implanted in the uterus, a Degree pregnancy may result, which is dangerous for both the mother and the children due to the risk of prematurity or spontaneous abortion.
Years ago, some doctors, in an effort to ensure a high pregnancy rate for their patients, had the outlandish idea of combining multiple pregnancies with selective reduction. Today, that is no longer part of standard medical practice, and many countries have passed laws prohibiting the implantation of more than three embryos per cycle. But that internship rise to some brutal anecdotes, typical of a civilization of rootlessness. I recall an article, published in a French magazine, which, so to speak, described the possibility of repeating internship selective internship several times: a woman with a long history of infertility due to ovarian insufficiency underwent treatment and resulted in a quadruplet pregnancy. The woman demanded an abortion. The doctor offered her the option of selective reduction. The woman accepted, on the condition that she could continue the pregnancy of a single fetus. After performing the procedure, it was found that, of the three fetuses treated, two had died, but the third was still alive and apparently unharmed, although its size seemed proportionally small. The woman demanded the immediate destruction of the surviving fetus in an attempt at fetalicide. The second attempt to “reduce” it failed again. Faced with the mother’s insistence, the doctor described as a minor scientific feat the fact that, on the third attempt—and by varying the technique—he had succeeded in destroying that fetus, which had proven resistant to death.
Selective reduction—a game focused solely on numbers—is a prime example of the producer-product mindset.
That a researcher, eager for fame, would decide to experiment on human embryos as if they were mere objects and perform twin fission on very young embryos was something that could be taken for granted, once Bill Clinton, in a symbolic gesture on the first day of his presidential term, repealed the moratorium that his predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, had imposed on research on human embryos.
The news broke. Jerry Hall and Robert Stillman, using techniques that had long been employed on farm animal embryos, managed to create two, three, or at most four identical copies from a single human embryo. Although theoretically they could have made a few more, they didn’t go any further than that. But with their bold experiment, they opened up the possibility of producing a few sets of identical twins at will.
The producer-product mindset is on full display here. In veterinary medicine, embryo splitting has its advantages: obtaining two or three embryos from highly selected animals for the price of one is a risky but highly profitable venture. But that makes no sense in the human species: the researchers’ motives remained unclear, despite the stir caused by the news. It seems that what drove them to conduct the experiment was the producer-product mentality, so characteristic of many modern researchers, dominated by the technological imperative and the desire to prove that it could be done and that someone would have to be the first to do it.
research and research was moreguide aguide exercise than a work that opens up new perspectives for science. They used abnormal, triploid embryos with development poor development , doomed to die in the short term, and from which it is impossible to draw conclusions applicable to normal embryos.
The human embryo is very delicate: it cannot withstand the traumatic procedures of “microsurgery.” It also appears that, in humans, the blastomeres—the remarkable cells that make up the human embryo in its earliest stage—very quickly lose their totipotency. It is still claimed, however, that any one of these cells could give rise to an entire embryo. Thus, setting aside the morally reprehensible nature of creating copies of human beings, it does not appear that the splitting of young embryos allows for more than one or two copies of the original embryo. Embryo splitting does not seem to be a promising procedure that could help improve the effectiveness of in vitro fertilization. There has also been speculation about using copies of the cloned embryo—preserved at very leave —to develop them in the uterus of the embryo’s mother or another woman, days, months, or years later, so that children can be born who are exact copies, albeit younger, of the child who proved to be result, resultor to obtain tissues or organs for transplantation into the older twin.
It is clear that conducting these fringe experiments does not appear to be legally permissible. Embryonic cloning is prohibited by resolutions of committee Europe, recommendations of the European Parliament, and current laws in Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, and Norway, for example. In other countries, the matter is either unregulated or regulated only ambiguously. It does not appear that the United States will ban it.
The Vatican instruction *Donum vitae* condemns human cloning and explains why: it points out that cloning is ethically repugnant because it is yet another attempt to produce human beings without any connection to the sexual act. It therefore constitutes a violation of the respect due to the embryonic human being and a disregard for the dignity of the transmission of human life within the conjugal union.
Cloning seriously erodes the idea that individual uniqueness and irreplaceability are part of our personality: in a way, they are the trademark with which God marks each of us when He creates our soul and calls us into existence by our own name, in the singular, one by one. He creates each of us different from the others. And although He occasionally indulges in the playful experiment of creating monozygotic twins—identical to one another—He does so as a sample divine humor that beautifies everything, whereas laboratory cloning laboratory with it something sinister and brutal.
Uniqueness is a psychological asset. We are all repulsed by the idea that there are average people out there who are indistinguishable from me, who share my exact identity, and who deprive us of the right to be the unique and original beings that each of us is. That repulsion is part of human nature.
Uniqueness and irreplaceability are also invaluable legal rights. They are, at their core, a human right: each of us has the right to our own unique genetic heritage and to express it without interference that could harm its integrity or diminish its originality.
In short, Hall and Stillman’s experiment was not the result of a project research project , but rather a mere display of laboratory virtuosity—a whim born of the desire to say, “I was the first to do it.” The experiment was a clear manifestation of a producer-product mentality, insensitive to the individualizing and dignifying value of each person being wonderfully different from others.
Today, medicine is laying the instructions the development embryofetal medicine and surgery.
We are learning how to treat congenital metabolic disorders so that the fetus does not suffer the toxic effects of certain abnormal metabolites or the intracellular accumulation of substances that can impair organ function. We have learned how to treat and cure the fetus of a diabetic mother, which might otherwise suffer from phenylpyruvic oligophrenia. And we are seeking solutions for many other diseases.
Some groups have begun performing surgery to correct malformations while the fetus is still in the uterus: through direct surgery, involving a uterostomy and externalization of the fetus, with or without opening the amniotic sac; or through videofetoscopy, guide . There are some challenges: preventing postoperative preterm labor and ensuring adequate anesthesia for both the mother and the fetus. These procedures are still experimental, but that does not prevent the ingenuity of the recipient-donor mindset from finding ways to remedy or alleviate the damage caused by development . The physician works with the financial aid the fetus’s incredible healing capacity.
The list of medical and surgical interventions to treat prenatal conditions is growing year by year. Today, it is possible to prevent the deterioration caused by certain malformations during the intrauterine period, so that, after birth, they can be final repaired. This is the case with obstruction of the urinary tract or the aqueduct of Sylvius, through the creation of vesico-amniotic or ventriculo-amniotic shunts. Lung damage caused by cystic-adenomatoid malformation of the lung can be prevented through intrauterine pulmonary lobectomy; similarly, damage resulting from diaphragmatic hernia can be prevented through open repair or temporary tracheal plugging. Open surgery is also used to treat sacrococcygeal teratomas or to remove acardic parasites. Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome is prevented by dividing the placenta with the financial aid videofetoscopy. And much more, including the treatment of certain congenital metabolic disorders in the fetus through dietary or pharmacological treatment of the mother.
The fetus is a grateful patient who, so to speak, more than repays medicine for the benefits it receives. It will teach us how to heal wounds without leaving disfiguring scars; it is forcing us to discover new techniques for opening and suturing the uterus and to prevent premature birth with new tocolysis techniques. It is opening up new perspectives for us in the field of immunology, since the fetus is the true master of immune tolerance and the learning of biological uniqueness.
We would do well to learn as much as possible about the fetus. This will lead, in the future, to specialization program new specialization program fetology, as it will become clear that the prenatal period is a crucial time for treating many existing diseases and preventing the development future ones. Learn more about the fetus. Fetology as specialization program.
The Real Answer from Parents and Doctors: Seeing Your Child as a Gift
The producer-product relationship is closed off to the future, as it is on a dead-end track: it cannot address any core topic the planned destruction of diseased fetuses. The recipient-gift relationship, on the other hand, has the promising future of embryo-fetal medicine ahead of it. Children have always been the future. And curiously, here too we must learn from the little ones. As I have just pointed out, the field of medicine that treats fetuses will learn a great deal from the properties of their marvelous cells. For as the physician approaches the fetus as a patient—as a person worthy of unlimited respect—he will reveal to us its healing capabilities and the secrets of its astonishing cells. Some view the embryo as an object to be exploited, a archive stem cells endowed with the prodigious ability to multiply and differentiate. But it is that and much more: it is a human being whom we must respect for its own sake.
The idea of the embryo as a manufactured object and the idea of the embryo as a gift—our youngest sibling—not only clash in the hearts of parents, but also confront each other in the realm internship science and internship the internship medicine. In the field of medicine, too, there exists a culture of love and respect alongside a culture of alienation and domination.
I would like to conclude by sharing a story that presents, in a very eloquent, almost dramatic way, the human values inherent in the concept of the child as a gift. It is a true story in which a woman—a psychiatrist—tells us with great simplicity how respect for life with disabilities is lived out in the context of the civilization of love. The story contains not a trace of sentimentality. It is told with the objectivity that comes from the official document medical knowledge.
In a staff titled “Peace and Sorrow,” published in the British Medical Journal on July 23, Karen Palmer recounts her joy at becoming pregnant shortly before Christmas 1992. She describes the joy with which the news was received by her and her husband—also a doctor—and by the proud-to-be grandparents; and the weeks that followed, filled with anticipation and hope. She describes the joy of feeling the first fetal movements at 18 weeks. But a problem arises: Karen’s belly is not growing as much as expected. She sees an obstetrician who performs an ultrasound and delivers the terrible news that she has oligohydramnios and that the fetus has multiple malformations, so severe that it is very likely the pregnancy will not reach full term.
Naturally, the news was devastating: Karen felt for a few days as if she had lost her son and cried a lot for him, as if he had died. She says: "The lifeline my husband and I clung to was this: that this tiny, damaged life we had been given was precious and we could not abandon it. In those early days of anxiety, as if aware of the need to remind us of its importance, the child moved inside me much more than it had before. We came to the conclusion that we were not going to do anything that was not in the child's best interest. We told the doctor so, and he understood.
The months that followed were very difficult. We gradually learned to love that very special and unexpected child, and to dread the moment when he might die. Our family, friends, and colleagues helped us a great deal. They gave us so much encouragement, and the truth is, we needed every bit of it. An ultrasound at 25 weeks showed that there was very little lung tissue, so the prognosis grew even bleaker. It was heartbreaking to feel him so full of life and know that he would never be able to live outside of me. People would congratulate me when they saw me on the street or at the hospital, and they’d ask me about it. Thankfully, little by little, everyone began to understand what was happening.
There were doubts about how to prepare for the birth: whether a C-section might be necessary, since it presentation breech presentation ; whether it would be best to monitor the labor or perform an emergency procedure in case the umbilical cord became compressed. My head was spinning. At times I wanted it all to be over soon, and at others I wished it were possible to keep him inside me forever, alive and moving. But one thing was always clear: we weren’t going to abandon her.
On August 3, 1993, the obstetrician performed my C-section. He brought Jennifer Grace—that’s what we named her—into the world: a rosy-cheeked, beautiful baby girl, a little small, to be honest. I held her in my arms for a moment, but the pediatricians took her away. My husband and I felt true joy. He went with her to the pediatric ward and there introduced the baby to her grandparents as a “very brave fighter.” I saw her again when she was average three hours average . An ultrasound had confirmed that she had no kidneys and that she could not possibly survive. She also had pulmonary hypoplasia, but mechanical ventilation would have been of no use to her. During the last five minutes of her life, we cradled her in our arms and said goodbye. My mother helped me dress her and took some photographs of her.
Why am I telling this story? Simply so that people know what happened. Perhaps this will help some people seriously consider whether abortion is the best thing to do for the parents of a severely malformed fetus—and also for the child itself. After Jennifer’s death, we’ve thought a lot about those months of pregnancy. It was a very special time, precisely because she was with us. Now, we can give thanks for her and mourn her as a member of our family whom we loved dearly and whom we have lost.
“We held a funeral to celebrate her short life and pay tribute to her for the immense good she did for us. We can visit her grave and bring her flowers. We can talk about her. And if we have other children, we’ll be able to tell them stories about their older little sister. We can do all of that. And that financial aid us financial aid the pain of losing her. If we had had an abortion, we wouldn’t be able to do any of that.”
This concludes Karen Palmer’s account. I believe her story is a test the immense human richness found in the “recipient-gift” paradigm, which is sorely lacking in the “producer-product” paradigm.
Let us go out into the world, joyfully spreading this deeply human and true doctrine, giving thanks to God for enabling us to move beyond the misconception that a fetus is not a person and to show reverence for the person of the fetus.
I usually say—whenever I’m given the chance—that the ethic of respect, the ethic at the heart topic our topic model and the civilization of love, holds far greater scientific and practical potential than the mindset of rootlessness. I believe I have demonstrated this.