The cover of Time recently featured the headline “The Childfree Life.” China has for some time enforced the “one child policy.” With this policy, children have no siblings and ancestors only exist in the direct line. Millions of girls are aborted in preference to boys.
European populations are declining and dying for lack of children. Among both married couples and the unmarried, children conceived by in vitro fertilization are common. Few orphanages exist because most “unplanned pregnancies” are aborted. As a result, countless innocent lives are destroyed in the womb before birth. Genetic testing has resulted in children with Down syndrome and other genetic abnormalities being aborted. We hear of children being produced for “spare parts” or for scientific experimentation “so that we can improve mankind.”
In the midst of all this confusion about the gift of life, is the argument for the alleged “right” of a same-sex couple to adopt a child.
How does one think about such “adoptions?” First of all, we have the corresponding phenomena of lesbians deliberately impregnating themselves either by natural means with the assistance of a willing male or by artificial means with the aid of a sperm bank. This arrangement is condoned because a single woman “has a right to a child.”
In the case of males, it is a bit more complicated. They have either to impregnate a woman with the agreement that the resulting child would be taken by the father or they use in vitro with a surrogate mother who is paid to bear the child. Again the reason for this process is that a man has a “right to a child.”
Does such a rationale make sense? Can we morally think of children from the viewpoint of only one progenitor? No male or female alone has a right to a child, but only a right to marry and to share in the marital embrace. As Donum vitae states, “The child has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage.”
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