Like Prof. Blanchard, I am glad to have Todd Epp back in the blogging game. So now let me welcome Todd back by critiquing this post where Todd argues that certain members of the South Dakota pro-life community believe "that wombs, eggs, and babies are commodities." Todd is careful in his language. He states that most pro-lifers believe otherwise. I don't know the people discussed by Todd's post, so I will not comment on their opinions, but if seeing human reproduction as a means of making money is problematic, I suggest Todd look into the attitudes of the reproductive industry, namely those in favor of easy abortion, fetal stem-cell research, and in vitro fertilization. Please note this post by Lucas Morel over at No Left Turns. Here a doctor, in the name of reproductive freedom, is wantonly killing a healthy growing human being so that two other laboratory created children can live. Stanley Kurtz comments (here and here) on the phenomena of "assisted reproduction" and how it alters how we think of both family and, in my opinion, humanity. Both Morel and Kurtz are commenting on this book, which I have not read but certainly will. It is indeed a brave new world.
Prof. Morel more directly connects the manipulation of human life to abortion. If people are indeed completely free to use their reproduction as they see fit and if the unborn have no moral status of note, then there is nothing wrong with turning reproduction into a commodity, with our parts and the babies they can make ready for sale. We can make money off of harvesting babies, just as we make money off of harvesting corn or cows. C.S. Lewis warned about this 60 years ago:
One of the questions before [the Conditioners] is whether this feeling for posterity (they know well how it is produced) shall be continued or not. However far they go back, or down, they can find no ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes at once petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man. (snip)
We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all `rational' or `spiritual' motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.
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