The artificial family
Gonzalo Herranz, department de Bioética, Universidad de Navarra
lecture in the high school of Pedagogy and Sciences of the Education, Universidad Panamericana
Mexico D.F., March 24, 1993
1. The contraceptive-abortifacient ethos and its consequences for the family
2. Artificial production of children
Thank you for the invitation. Words of circumstance
I must begin by stating that I am not an expert in family sciences. I am a bioethicist: but I have offered to discuss with you this afternoon, among other things, the topic artificial family because I believe that the problems that fall under this degree scroll are some of the most serious challenges that secularist contemporary society has thrown at the Christian moral tradition.
I will confine myself to very simple and, I suspect, familiar things, but things that are worth reflecting on, talking about and asking tenacious questions about. These are very important matters. I am not saying that tonight, at the end of the evening, you will all go off and telephone your friends and set up a day to talk about these issues for hours on end. But, I insist, I am going to talk to you about issues that require a response, issues that must be confronted, that require us to take positions. I hope that I can convince some of you that it is urgent to shake off the indifference of so many people, and also the dullness into which the artificialisation of human procreation and the family structure has plunged some of them.
Because many people are fascinated, with little reaction, by the changes that the family has undergone and continues to undergo at an ever-increasing rate. Surveys and sociological research tell us, with the relative truth that is inherent in surveys and sociological fieldwork, that the classic family - with father and mother, married in the Church, with traditions and values, with numerous children, where everyone is loved as they are, just as God made them - is becoming less and less common, to the point where it is said to be a species threatened with extinction. There are more and more artificial families - those with only civil registration or not even that, the unions that progressive legislation calls stable, those that have come to be called uniparental, the family fragments resulting from divorce, the family nucleoli with no children - and which are entered into, not through the door of the marriage contract, but as result of a essay of cohabitation without commitments of unity, stability or fidelity; where children are not received as a gift from God, but as the product of deliberate planning.
What is more, a growing issue number of people do not find it wrong that starting a family is no longer a matter of the love that, as God is their witness, a man and a woman pledge to each other for life. For many, starting a family is a matter which, with its restrictions or permissiveness, is being increasingly decisively shaped by parliamentarians, judges, sociologists and doctors. Their laws, judgements, statistics and technology now have a tremendous influence on the family, determining and transforming it.
In fact, the family has changed: in an almost unbelievable way and in so many ways. There are countries where the same family law that applies to the classical family applies to same-sex unions; where one is no longer a parent or child because of the raw and strong biological truth, but because one simply declares to the Civil Registry the lie that he or she is the father of the child produced by artificial insemination by donor; where parents can reject their children, before or immediately after birth, because they consider them to be insufficiently acceptable, unwanted or unhealthy; where doctors are not only allowed, but can be forced, to administer contraceptives or perform abortions to anyone who asks them energetically enough, including, and without knowledge of their parents, minors. What law and sociology say about the family has changed incredibly in the last thirty years.
But, as I am neither a jurist nor a sociologist, but a medical doctor, I will limit myself to consider only a few aspects of the problem: the artificialisation of the family that has been carried out by certain doctors: in particular, those who think that the aims of medicine include the programming of society, the imposition of a scientistic model family. A few years ago, Peter Singer and Deane Wells - he the enfant terrible of ethical progressivism, she an MP in Canberra - published a book graduate "The Reproductive Revolution. New Ways of Making Children" to tell the story of how doctors have played a decisive role in making the means of making the artificial family available to people. They pay little attention to the most revolutionary element of the whole artificialisation of the family: contraception, and its programming on a mass scale in China through the "one-child" policy. But, I don't know whether understandably or paradoxically, Singer and Wells' book does not once mention the family: it only talks about couples, especially infertile ones. If fathers are mentioned at all, it is at purpose about the possibility of cloning children or their participation in the decision to apply engineering techniques Genetics. The maternity that is mentioned is surrogacy of women who rent their wombs. Probably because the simple model in vitro fertilisation might seem extremely conservative, in vitro fertilisation "beyond the simple case", gamete or embryo donation, in vitro fertilisation for single women or lesbian couples, and other possibilities of modern combinatorics are more widely discussed.
I will address just a couple of issues this afternoon. There is no time for more. But I think it will be enough to persuade us that the artificial family, which, seen from the medical point of view, is result of certain reproductive manipulations, does not give result, is a non-solution, an anti-solution.
The two points I am going to touch on may seem contradictory, but they respond, as we shall see, to a single mentality: the mentality of domination, by which man makes himself master of destiny and authorises himself to create or suppress human lives. The first of these points is the restriction of births by means of contraception and abortion. The second concerns the artificial production of children.
1. The contraceptive-abortifacient ethos and its consequences for the family
Let's start by asking ourselves a question: does the contraceptive mentality have any effect on family structure and family life? The answer is, in my view, a resounding yes. In the Encyclical Humanae vitae, Paul VI prophetically describes the devastating influence of the contraceptive mentality on married couples: it is worth reading these points of the Encyclical from time to time. One need only look at what is happening in our contemporary society to be convinced of how the contraceptive ethos has eroded relationships between parents and children, filled social relations with frivolity, and trivialised marital infidelity. It all began, as all things do, with small beginnings: when, thirty-five years ago now, some doctors began testing the anovulatory pill and the other means of modern contraception, with the idea of controlling the size of the population of certain countries - or of certain racial groups within certain advanced societies - they did not suspect that their tests would have such enormous effects on ordinary families. Today, in almost all environments, even nominally Christian ones, for people to have children is no longer a matter of receiving God's command. In a world in which many live with their backs turned to God and in which man has achieved a technical mastery of the reproductive process, children are no longer a gift or a blessing. They are something that is programmed, planned, rehearsed. You have the children you want and you have them when you want them. Contraception, as most people understand it, has nothing to do - neither technically nor psychologically - with birth regulation manager . It has a lot to do, as is shown by the issue growing number of sterilisations being practised, with selfishness, the fascination of well-being, unconditional surrender to the "neo-Malthusian orthodoxy". Today, for many people, every child has an economic counter-value. It is not the fruit of an act of love, of a conscious and willing participation in the creative power of God, but the result of solving with skill budgetary the antinomies that are posed to practically all social strata in advanced countries and to the middle classes of the peoples at development, "either child or second car, or child or pleasure trip, or child or flat on the beach". The child has become just one more product in the collection in which men and women express their prestige.
The contraceptive mentality has become so firmly entrenched in some societies that some worrying consequences are beginning to emerge. The so called nuclear family (father, mother and the little boy or, at best, the little couple) is a manifestation of the selfishness and lack of joie de vivre of contemporary society. Practically no country in Europe reaches the rate of 2 children per family. This means that issue of families (can they be called families?) that have only one child or have decided not to have children is growing. Why? Because on TV, in films and magazines we are told more or less openly that those who have decided not to have children are neither less happy, nor less mature, nor less balanced than those who are parents. And what's more, they have a much better time. It turns out, finally, that they are smarter, because they will always be able to have them, once they have enjoyed life to the full or have completed their professional degree program without the hassle of taking care of brats. They do not realise that they are setting up the instructions of a society in which, if this selfish tendency is not corrected soon, human relations will change radically. In three generations, a nightmarish picture will emerge: children will have no siblings, no first cousins. the wonderful influence of one on another and the family environment, that wonderful school of generous coexistence and maturing of character, will have disappeared. By contrast, the children will grow up in a strange world of adults: with a life expectancy of eighty years, each child, if the family is doing well and does not break up into fragments, will have, in addition to their parents, only grandparents and great-grandparents: there will be no uncles and aunts anywhere. The model is mind-boggling, because it is an inverted pyramid, in which the child is the vertex, with two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents.
Contemporary culture, aggressively consumerist and closed to the transcendent, fosters in us to an extent that we are not aware of, the need to immediately satisfy our desires and our needs, real or invented. The social environment is shouting at us: No! There is no future, there is no heaven! This life is the only chance, and there is no other! and it pushes us to be profoundly selfish. The demographic statistics say it clearly: the population decline in some advanced countries clearly denounces that the issue of those who seriously think that having children is a bad business, almost a slavery, which takes with it a lot of freedom, a lot of possibilities to enjoy life and also a lot of money. Children do not allow you to live freely or to travel. They burden one with responsibilities and leave one anchored to a wife or husband, because they act as a factor of marital stability, often too weak, but real. Children are, especially for women, a brake on career advancement. Bringing up children is a chore, with its routine of nightly awakenings, unexpected crying, illnesses and lack of peace and quiet at home. And, at a time when divorce is possible and easy, there is a risk that the divorced person will be left "compounded and with children". For the selfish mentality of so many of our contemporary men and women, the solution is the artificial family, that is, the one that results from replacing genuine marriage with the substitutes called stable couple or union at test, where the ideal of the large family is ridiculed, where the notion that the ideal issue of children is zero will be imposed in wide sectors, where the Education is entrusted to the omnipotent welfare state.
I would like to comment here on something that has impressed me a lot and that has to do with the family and Education. There is in Sweden a law on "Better Child Care Services". project Something very similar, it seems, will be raised at some point during President Clinton's term of office in the United States, where the discussion of a bill, the ABC Act (Act for Better Child Care Services), which has been shelved for some years, will be resumed. It is quite simple: in order to earn more money and have more dollars to buy the things advertised on TV, more and more issue women want to have a well-paid work . This would not be bad if it were compatible with raising a family. But, paradoxically, in these times of unemployment, jobs have to be more and more demanding and competitive. Today, more than ever, work means working full-time, even overtime. This is fine with the state, because it gets to keep a good chunk of the money, since higher wages mean higher taxes. But if these women have a child and want to work a normal schedule in order to earn a living wage, they have to find someone to take care of the child. This is where the law comes in: as there is enough accumulated experience that there are poorly functioning kindergartens and schools, and the well-functioning ones are often expensive, the state - the law proposes - will be in charge of setting up a network of high quality kindergartens and schools, covering the whole national territory, where all children will receive the same care and Education, meeting high minimum quality standards, equal for all: the same food for the body and for the mind. One of the essential requirements of such institutions will be the prohibition of teaching religion, as not all parents have the same faith, many do not even have any faith at all. And that is what the separation of powers mandates. Among "official" educators there is a widespread opinion that religion should be chosen by the individual later on, when he or she is an adult. To impose it on children is to condition their freedom and sow the seeds of many neuroses and frustrations, at staff, and of violent divisions and intolerant fundamentalisms, at the social level.
In reality, the new social engineers think, only the state is really qualified to be the father of all, the educator of all. The idea behind these kindergartens and schools is that we are moving towards the constitution of one big human family, in which science will dictate what is to be taught and how. The children of workers - and we are all workers - learn everything in the new school. The Education, the whole Education, including sexual education and excluding religion, is a government monopoly. At home, children go only to play.
In a way, this all smells rather old hat: more than 40 years ago, C.S. Lewis spoke of such things in his book "The Abolition of Man". But what is really new, and terrible, is that the first American law project was so cleverly drafted that it met with the approval of a large issue of family associations and religious and educational bodies. Only the Catholic Bishops' lecture protested against the project and moved energetically to get it shelved. It will reappear at the most propitious moment, disguised under another guise.
The anecdote reveals two things to me: that people seem almost willing to sell their own souls for material advantage. State officials say: "We'll keep your son. You forget about him and go to work and earn money". The terrible thing is that people accept this, because they no longer love their children deeply: they no longer love them as people to be taken completely seriously and whose Education no one can responsibly disregard.
I am going to offer a rather bold hypothesis to explain this phenomenon. It seems to me that at the root of all this tremendous abdication of the educational function of parents is the contraceptive mentality. The fundamental harm of contraception does not lie in the biological risks, nor in the psychological counterfeit that is contraceptive love. It is for God alone to judge those who practise it. But we are already seeing its effects on the family and on human coexistence. Contraception has replaced in the minds of many the notion of the child as a gift received from God and destined for the freedom of being a child of God, with the notion of the child as a programmed product, entering into the economic game of profit, taxation and permissible expenditure. Just as the state, through its health policy and annual budgets, takes care of our health, it will take care, through the budgets of teaching, of giving the Education to our children. The state leviathan is on its way to achieving monopolistic domination of the Education, just as it is on its way to taking over the exclusive right to health care.
Before moving on, a word of caution: if this can be a reality within four years in the United States, we will have it within fifteen years, in a more or less disguised form, in the legislation of many other countries.
Let us now return to where we left off. There is one aspect of contraception that deserves comment: the inevitable continuity between contraception and abortion. Although morally distinct actions, it is true, psychologically they have a common root: they are both ways of disregarding the weak human being, of declaring it unwanted and preventing it from being conceived or, if it was conceived through failure or unforeseen circumstances, preventing it from being born and continuing to live. Moreover, in the harsh reality of biological processes, there is a close connection between the two procedures. It takes a very clueless or very cynical person to ignore today that some procedures are abortifacients which, tactically, in order to anaesthetise the moral sensibilities of the public, the pharmaceutical industry and the big family planning agencies simply call contraceptives: some hormonal products, IUDs, mifepristone. There has been a deliberate erasure in social consciousness of the morally significant barrier separating contraception and early abortion. Many people have been convinced that if it is normal that a child can be unwanted, it can be so strongly unwanted that, if contraception fails, abortion must be used as the last contraceptive barrier. E. E. Baulieu, the promoter of the abortion pill, has created the notion of contragestation, a skilful contraction of the term contragestation, to encompass, under a new and non-traumatic name, easily accepted by all, the whole range of abortifacient contraception and pharmacological abortion procedures. With this new word, he hopes that the tense ideological war over abortion will disappear from our midst and that social peace will be achieved for all.
In an ethical environment infiltrated by a counter-gestative ideology, the child is only worth as much as he or she is wanted and for what he or she is wanted. Love for children is in deep crisis: there will be many occasions when parents, faced with the lack of work, the need to renounce a long-cherished material project , will not be able to avoid the thought that this or that child is, above all other considerations, a miscalculation, a programming error, which forces them to renounce certain material aspirations or to postpone a certain project . Worse, a child may be perceived by other members of society as a discredit: it is foolish to have children when there is every reason, or simply some reason, not to have them. At other times, the child is programmed to solve a problem. deadline It is designed as a spare part: to take the place of the child who is dead or who is going to die soon from an incurable disease, or to be used as a bone marrow donor for the little sister who suffers from leukaemia.
In a social climate where children are calculated and decided, it is particularly painful or humiliating when a child comes out awkward, or ugly, or just plain whiny, psychologically uncharming. Why is there an epidemic of child abuse, bullying and even sexual abuse in the Western world? The dominance mentality tends to depersonalise children. Their parents themselves may no longer regard them as human beings to be accorded unlimited respect, but as pets or objects to be disposed of capriciously. Parents tend to exercise with increasing intensity a right of ownership and use over their children: the progress in the dignification of human relations in general and intra-family relations in particular, which had been brought about by economic progress, has come to a halt or collapsed in the neo-Malthusian welfare society. The ideology of the child as a programmed product tends to reify the child.
And since the family is of a piece, there is also an inevitable connection between the contraceptive-abortion mentality and euthanasia. When many in a society believe that having children is a naïve mistake, the socio-economic consequences take a few years to arrive, but they inexorably reach the heart of families and the entire social fabric. Some economists and experts in the sociology of the family have started to think about what will happen if current demographic trends do not change in time. The birth dearth, they tell us, will cause serious disruption at all levels of our Economics. The first victims will be parents with no or very few children. Tens of millions of adults will be unfortunate enough to end their days with no one who truly loves them, with no children or grandchildren. Some have suggested that, given the lack of family support for such a large fraction of society, an effective solution should be instituted, from the subject of euthanasia, which could be applied voluntarily to those who request it or even involuntarily when they reach a certain age. This would not be for the simple economic reason that the working population, then few in number, would be reluctant to sacrifice and give up their leisure and welfare expenses to meet the needs of the elderly and the unproductive. In a selfish society, the chronically ill elderly person, living alone, who has no close relatives to care for him, is, as the emerging Dutch experience shows, one of the natural candidates for compassionate death.
The lack of appreciation for the human life of old relatives is the simple extension and consequence of the lack of appreciation for nascent human life that is abortion. It is now 20 years since the decriminalisation of abortion in some European countries. The effects of these 20 years of legal disregard for life are already very marked in society and in the family. As many people - political parties, public opinion makers, some very influential thinkers - have coolly accepted that abortion is something morally irrelevant, something commonplace that has become part of accepted custom, society has become "officially" indifferent or agnostic to the sacred value of human life, of any human life. Society is prepared to be told that there is one thing left to do: to determine which human lives are worth little or much less than they cost, so that their elimination is legally authorised. They then go into the same bag of lives to dispose of those that are calculated to be inconvenient, costly or simply unwanted. An English friend of mine, an excellent philosopher, told me that abortion and euthanasia have unified their battle cry: to the already classic "Every child, a wanted child" has now been added "Every old person, a wanted old person".
This concludes the first part of my speech. The truth is that result has been somewhat apocalyptic. There are days when it seems that one does not have much inspiration. What can you do!
In the second part, I want to give data and arguments to show that artificial production of children is not the solution to family problems.
2. Artificial production of children
As we have seen, there are many people in the world who, although they could have children, do not want them: they avoid them or destroy them. And, paradoxically, there are many others who want to have them but cannot. And if the former trust in the efficacy of drugs and mechanical contraceptive devices and in the human catastrophe of abortion, the latter place their hopes in assisted reproduction techniques in order to receive relief from their sterility. Assisted reproduction techniques are doing much to artificialise the family, and they are doing it in a subtle but efficient way.
Assisted reproduction, in particular in vitro fertilisation, shocked world public opinion a few years ago. It is less talked about today. But, as we all remember, the achievements of medicine that have received so much good press can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The heady mixture of scientific triumph and family happiness with which journalists presented test-tube babies to society has left a deep impression. When the Vatican Instruction Donum vitae was published, there was an outcry of protest against what was seen as a rigidly moralistic document insensitive to one of the most profound human problems, marital sterility. Today things have calmed down: the announced triumph of assisted reproduction over human sterility has not taken place. But few voices are being raised to evaluate procedure itself and the effects it is insidiously creating as a driver of the artificial family.
This is possible because there is a kind of pact of silence around certain aspects of assisted reproduction, a pact not to damage the social prestige of this technology. News stories (the menopausal woman turned by science into a happy 50-year-old mother, the harsh crackdown on Dr. Jacobson for inseminating 75 women with his own sperm, etc.) are filtered to pay tribute to the inexhaustible resources of reproductive technology or to show that the ethical commitments of specialization program are taken seriously. There is hardly any talk of artificial children any more. Only a few moralists, psychiatrists and feminist groups continue to pay attention to the ethical, legal and psychological problems of assisted reproduction. Society in general seems to have digested the problem.
It has been said that in vitro fertilisation has given many couples, together with the desired child, the stability that had been on the verge of breaking down. But the truth is that at least eight out of ten couples who undergo IVFET fail. With their illusions dashed, it becomes very difficult to endure a marital future closed to procreation. Once the illusion of the desired child is lost, very often the marriage breaks up or is severely traumatised by the social stigma of infertility.
That such a failure should cause great moral suffering is logical: the reproduction of laboratory was born and developed in a biotechnological context. Those who have designed and applied them pay little attention to the somatopsychic and spiritual nature of man. Their lack of sensitivity to human values is most clearly manifested in their deliberate ignorance of the most fundamental aspects of their work, of the reality on which the in vitro fertiliser is acting. The in vitro fertiliser usually works without realising that he is playing God, without realising that he has taken on the role of Destiny. It is he who makes the family, not the spouses. He artificialises the family: he decides who is born and who is not. He produces zygotes on issue in excess, to guard against a possible lack of embryos. But he has to select, among the zygotes produced, which ones will be re-implanted in the uterus and which ones will become surplus embryos; he decides, when he immediately transfers some embryos into the uterus and assigns others to cryopreservation, who gets the chance to be born now, and who later or never. It determines which couples are worthy of having a child and, for economic, genetic, socio-cultural, or simply random reasons, which others are denied the opportunity to have a child. The in vitro fertiliser is, in fact, the one who establishes the criteria for selecting the couples to whom he provides financial aid technology: he determines what marital status, what Degree of mental health or what level of economic stability the candidates must have, with what intensity they must wish to have a child, what age of the mother is appropriate or not. The technician of human reproduction works, often forgetting that he has taken on the role of destiny for some people. He decides that the life of a child whose parents do not have much money is less valuable and full than that of a child whose parents are well off, and he consents to create one and deny the other. Because he may think that a child born to parents who are somewhat unbalanced will not be able to have a meaningful biography, he will refuse to father him, to the benefit of those who conform to his own notion of normality.
This is an enormous but transitory responsibility. Once the child is created, the artificial fertiliser refuses any responsibility for it. From an anthropological point of view, the doctor plays a much more active role than the parents in the process of generating certain human lives. After all, the parents function, and not always, as simple, even distant, providers of gametes: the in vitro fertiliser is the immediate concretiser, the architect of the new life. What is his anthropological responsibility? None of them wanted to answer this question.
It is curious that, at the beginning of the internship of in vitro fertilisation, its promoters assumed a humble attitude: they said that they were there to help nature, to save the blocked tube in vitro, but that the real actors were the members of the infertile couple, with their gametes and their parental potential. This did not last. internship It didn't take long for resource to be put at the disposal of donors to provide their gametes, to the production of heterologous embryos, to the use of surrogate wombs, to the selective reduction of cases of high twins, etc. The role assumed by the artificial fertiliser has become increasingly dominant. In the early days, enthusiastic journalists gave the honorary degree scroll "father of the first test-tube baby girl" to those who developed the rudimentary procedure at the time. Now that everything seems more banal and less glorious, it is when, in reality, artificial fertilisers make life and death decisions about the creatures they create on their laboratory.
One example. I have sometimes tried to imagine how it is possible for a doctor to so reify the human embryo Degree that he feels authorised to combine in vitro fertilisation with so-called selective reduction. issue Years ago, in order to increase the efficiency of IVFET to the extreme or to overcome certain problems of ovarian sterility, an intense ovarian stimulation was provoked with which, in vitro or in vivo, an excessive number of embryos (sometimes up to twelve) was obtained. Today, firm guidelines have been issued to avoid this. After a few weeks, an ultrasound scan determines how many embryos have implanted and are developing normally. The mother is then asked how many children she wishes to have. And by means of guide ultrasound, the in vitro fertiliser reduces the number of embryos present to the desired issue and eliminates the surplus. This, for me, represents the height of the artificialisation of the family. Because the combination of mass fertilisation with the reduction of issue of the embryos (I don't want to call it selective, because what does it select? Deaths? Lives?) means that it is a game of chance which of the siblings will live. It is a kind of Russian roulette, a lottery like the one used to decimate a rebellious contingent, whereby siblings (boys, girls) are eliminated to adjust their issue to the preferences of the parents or, what seems more likely, to the desire of the fertiliser to avoid the risks of multiple gestation and to ensure the maximum efficiency of the procedure.
The artificialisation of the family has other manifestations linked to assisted reproduction. Laws can become blind to reality and even authorise the falsification of reality. But reality does not allow itself to be falsified. This is the case with gamete or embryo donation. As the Instruction Donum vitae says, "Respect for the unity of marriage and conjugal fidelity requires that the child be conceived in marriage; the bond existing between the spouses attributes to the spouses, in an inalienable manner, goal , the exclusive right to become father and mother only through each other.... Heterologous artificial fertilisation harms the rights of the child, deprives it of the filial relationship with its origins... works and manifests a rupture between parentality Genetics, gestational parentality and educational responsibility". And as Sir Immanuel Iakobovits, an authority on Judaism, says with great force, artificial insemination by donor "is morally objectionable because it constitutes a counterfeit and a desecration of marriage; because it is a deception of the public, since the paternity of the child is fraudulently registered in the name of the sterile father; because of the clandestine manner in which it is practised, since it conceals or makes the identity of the donor disappear; because of the possibility of incestuous unions between close relatives of the donor and their artificial offspring; because of the arbitrariness of allowing a doctor or a teaching assistant of laboratory to decide who is to be the father of a woman's child,....... and, above all, by the execration of human generation which is equated with animal reproduction techniques".
The artificialisation of the family through assisted reproduction turns the child into a product, not a gift. There are already indications that both doctors and parents demand or require an adequate level of quality of the product. By means of in vitro abortions, genetic or prenatal diagnostic techniques, the elimination of retarded or malformed children is stubbornly pursued. Doctors do this in order to be free from possible malpractice claims and to maintain the high quality standards required of advanced technology. Parents because their desire for children is not blind: the artificial child cannot in itself be a failure. Something that has cost so much money and effort must be reasonably normal or, in any case, supra-normal.
This tends to create in society a diffuse aspiration to have only perfect children, to popularise prenatal diagnosis as an instrument of selection, to establish a social intolerance towards deficiency, weakness, biological imperfection, to fall into the tyranny of normality.
All these things, and this is my final consideration, cannot be introduced into society and into people's consciousness except through an artificialisation of language. This artificialisation operates on several levels. One of them is the reduction of an individual human being to a sociological or medical-diagnostic label . This carries the risk of expropriating them of their human condition. The right to have one's own name is one of the fundamental rights of a person. When the doctor refers to a foetus or a neonate suffering from some alteration Genetics not as a concrete and real human being, but as a diagnostic label , an abstract morbid species, he depersonalises them, he reduces them to something non-human and unreal. The doctor says: this morning I aborted a Down's and a haemophilia. And, it is clear, in his accounts there is no place for the human significance of lives, thirty or forty years old, full and suffering or innocent and happy. His artificial language dispenses him from having a conscience.
The same thing happens on another level when one speaks of the pre-embryo, as a scam, by which many intelligent people accept the ethical neutralisation of the newly conceived human being. Or when abortion is referred to as microsuction, microaspiration, menstrual regulation, or IVG.
Chesterton said that the rich sometimes invent long words to clothe with dignity things which, when said in common language, cannot hide the wickedness of their conduct. He said that when a poor man commits a certain action he is accused of theft. But when the rich man commits the same misdeed, he is diagnosed with kleptomania. This is what has happened with the cooperation that medicine has given to the powerful of population control or assisted reproduction: it has created long words to hide the perversity of certain actions. The artificial family needs an artificial vocabulary: without it, ordinary people would not have swallowed the bait.
I expect academics to be, as is their duty, sharply critical.