MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SEX, PROCREATION, AND MARRIAGE

by Patrick Lee

 

            Carl Djerassi’s two-act play entitled “An Immaculate Misconception” was recently produced in theaters in London and San Francisco.  Djerassi is the chemist who first synthesized the oral contraceptive pill in 1951, for which he is (ironically) known as “the father of birth control.”  Now seventy-five, in the last ten years he has turned his energy toward fiction, writing novels and plays.  “An Immaculate Misconception” tells the story of Dr. Melanie Laidlaw, a 38-year old American reproductive biologist and (fictitious) inventor of a technique whereby a single sperm can be injected into an ovum producing fertilization.  Melanie has a short-lived adulterous affair with Israeli nuclear engineer Menachem Dvir, who had been rendered infertile in an earlier radiation accident.  Melanie “misappropriates” sperm from this affair and fertilizes her own egg.  The relationships between Melanie, Menachem, and Dr. Felix Frankenthaler, Melanie’s coworker, are the vehicle by which this play explores some of the psychological and social consequences of making babies outside marital sex. 

            It is clear from Djerassi’s interviews with journalists that he favors the radical separation of procreation from marriage and sex now possible.  Unlike most separationists, however, he wishes to explore the implications of this change. 

            By condoning contraception, our culture said that sex could genuinely express marital love (for it did not at first condone extra-marital sex) without this act being open to procreation.  But of course, as Pope Paul VI predicted in his prophetic encyclical, Humanae Vitae, people eventually drew the logical consequences of this first separation. 

            To say that sex can expres love without any intrinsic orientation to procreation implies that sex is basically an extrinsic symbol--external to that which it signifies.  And what it signifies (on this view) is merely a close, emotional relationship.  Sex becomes, at best, only a gift of pleasure or a sign of unity.  But if that is so, there can be no reason why the relationship symbolized must be permanent or heterosexual.   As a consequence, marriage becomes viewed simply as a more or less stable emotional union, accompanied by regular sex, and perhaps by children.  Thus, separating sex from procreation also separated marriage from procreation.

            Still, one might object that condoning contraception does not entail condoning manufacturing babies in laboratories.  One might object, in other words, that the slope towards Brave New World is not that slippery.  But Djerassi’s play helps us to see the definite view of the human person underlying all of these separations.  For to separate sex from procreation is to separate the personal relationship, and by implication the person, from the bodily and the natural.  One implies that sex is one thing, and the structure of the personal relationship quite another.

            It is only applying this same pattern of thinking to conclude that having babies--a bodily reality--need be a only mere means toward some personal fulfillment, such as the desire to possess a child. The bodily having been robbed of any intrinsic and objective significance, what can it matter whether one’s child is conceived through sexual intercourse, conceived with one’s spouse, or even with someone one knows? 

            At one point in Djerassi’s play, Melanie’s coworker urges her to tell Menachem that he is now a father, and suggests that she is guilty of theft.  Agitated, Melanie replies:  “Felix!  You sound so judgmental . . . and unforgiving.  How can I steal something that the owner considers worthless?  A used condom, for God’s sake!  It was garbage.  Taking someone else’s garbage or junk is not theft.”  Having separated as totally as possible the personal from the bodily, people can view the bodily even as mere junk or garbage. 

            The Catholic view is quite different.  Genuine marriage exists only as a community naturally fulfilled by procreation, and marriage is the necessary environment for preserving the personalism and sanctity of sex and procreation.

            First, marriage is inherently connected to procreation.  In marriage a man and a woman commit to one another to form a specific kind of community, namely, a community that finds its fulfillment in the bearing and raising of children together.  To form that kind of community is to enter a genuine marriage.  There are, of course, various types of sexual liaisons, and some friendships accompanied by sexual acts.  But only if it is the sort of community which would be completed by bearing and raising children--even if de facto the spouses’ union remains childless--is it a genuine marriage.  Sexual acts within marriage, if done with respect and open to procreation, express and actualize their marriage.  The traditional doctrine that sexual intercourse consummates marriage means that marriage is a bodily, as well as an emotional and spiritual, unity.  In such a community the bearing and raising of children is not an after-thought or coincidental burden.  Nor is marriage a mere means toward procreation as an extrinsic end.  Rather, the bearing and raising of children is the intrinsic fulfillment and the concrete prolongation of the marital communion itself.

            Vatican II teaches as follows: 

By its very nature the institution of marriage and married love is ordered to the procreation and education of the offspring and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory.  Thus the man and woman, who ‘are no longer two but one ‘ (Mt. 19:6), help and serve each other by their marriage partnership; they become conscious of their unity and experience it more deeply from day to day.[i]

            Secondly, sexual acts are inherently connected to marriage.  In sexual intercourse the man and the woman become one body, literally one organism.  If they have consented to marriage, this bodily unity initiates or actualizes the multi-leveled unity which is their marriage.  Outside marriage, sex can be pleasant, can lead to procreation, alienate, cause doubts, and many other things.  Yet outside marriage, a sexual act cannot actualize or concretize a personal communion.  And so sexual acts outside marriage involve a using of each others’ bodies, a treatment of bodily persons as extrinsic tools either for gratification or for an illusory experience of communion.  Thus, sex belongs within marriage.  

            Thirdly, procreation is inherently connected to marriage and marital sexual intercourse.   That is, procreation requires marriage and the bodily expression of marriage for its proper context.  Within marriage, and as fruit of marital intercourse, children come to be as gifts of their parents’ two-in-one flesh union.  Outside that context, made in a laboratory, the child comes to be as a product.  Moreover, within marriage the child comes to be as connected to his parents naturally, bodily, and personally.  Coming to be as the fruit of marriage and the marital act, the child comes to be as a concrete prolongation of who the parents are, and a concrete prolongation of their love.

            There is a popular argument for abortion that compares aborting one’s unborn child with choosing not to donate one’s kidney to a stranger.  The argument assumes that the only specific obligations one has are those one has voluntarily assumed.  Since one has not voluntarily assumed any specific responsibilities to the child one has just conceived (the argument continues), then one has no obligation to make any great sacrifices for him.  This argument ignores that abortion does more than not-give-aid, but actively causes the child’s death.  But what is important for our purposes is that the argument views one’s obligations to the child in one’s womb, the child that is one’s own flesh and blood, as no greater than those to a complete stranger.  Once again, bodily connections count for nothing.  In the end, all of one’s obligations, the structure of all one’s relationships, indeed the structure of one’s whole personal world, is entirely constructed by one’s own arbitrary projects.          

            Our culture is tending toward a complete separation of the bodily from the moral.  Relationships are never given, never have an objective structure.  On the contrary, our culture tends to view relationships as arising only from our own consent or arbitrary fiat, and as having only what structure we arbitrarily deem to bestow on them. 

            However, what God has joined together man must not put asunder. In truth, each human person exists as embedded within definite structures and with definite connections, and thus real duties, to other people.  What my responsibilities, opportunities and privileges are cannot be entirely constructed by my own, isolated will.  Since human persons are bodily beings, rather than just having and managing bodies, their personal relationships are significantly shaped by their bodily and concrete, factual connections to other people.  And from this it follows that their moral obligations are shaped by their bodily and concrete connections to others as well.  This is why one’s obligations to one’s child are different from one’s obligations to a stranger (although those are by no means non-existent).  And this is why we have an obligation to ensure that children come to be in an environment in which they have those bodily and concrete connections and therefore personal entitlements.  Severed from each other, sex, procreation, and marriage are thereby cheapened.  They can be preserved as wholesome and sacred realities only if the inherent bond among them also is preserved and appreciated.