The Gift of Children

When in 1994, Pope John Paul II wrote his Letter to Families, Gratissimam Sane, he said that every child “becomes a gift to its brothers and sisters, parents and entire family. He continues: “The child’s life becomes a gift for the very people who were givers of life and who cannot help but feel the child’s presence, the child’s sharing in their life, and the child’s contribution to their common good and to that of the community of the family.”

This aspect of a child as a sheer gift from God to his or her parents, family, and society in general stands in sharp contrast with the great amount of pain which couples suffer when it becomes apparent, that much against to their wishes and hopes, they were unable to have children.

Sacred Scripture describes the joy of Elizabeth when she had John, and of Samson’s parents, because Samson’s mother was sterile and unable to have children. This brings out the untold suffering of couples who could not have children.

As Christians, we are all invited to discern what God wants us to do and then do it. Discerning and then obeying God’s will are so fundamental to following Christ. The whole issue of listening to God when it comes to having or not having children can be seen in the light of further comments made by Pope John Paul.

He made two other points (among many other) in his letter to families Gratissimam Sane. He said that “Human fatherhood and motherhood, while remaining biologically similar to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a ‘likeness’ to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love.”

Parents, the “ministers of life” are called to share in the Fatherhood and Motherhood of God. The feminine side of God, as Mother as well as Father was a favourite theme of Pope John Paul the First, Albino Luciani, who was Pope only for a month in 1978, before Pope John Paul II was elected.

The other point made by Pope John Paul II was that “Fatherhood and Motherhood represent a responsibility which is not simply physical but spiritual in nature; indeed through these realities there passes the genealogy of the person, which has its eternal beginning in God and which must lead back to Him.”

Within this context, the Church teaches that no parents actually have a ‘right’ to have children, because no one has a right to any ‘gift’. In today’s society, a lot of people find this teaching very hard to swallow. It needs to be pointed out that the Church does not use the word “parents” here but “spouses” because the family, within the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, is considered to be the “Sanctuary of Life” and the best place for children to be conceived and brought up.

Having said that, the Church teaches that the judgement concerning the interval between births, and that regarding the number of children, belongs to the spouses alone. The Compendium of the Social teaching of the Church quoting the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI’s Encyclical Letter Popolorum Progressio and the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes this very clear.

It says: “This is one of their inalienable rights, to be exercised before God with due consideration of their obligations towards themselves, their children already born, the family and society.”

Here again the concept of listening to God comes into play, and of discerning and reading the signs of the times, and taking decisions accordingly. This is a lifelong process, and only part of the active listening to God which involves all the other areas of life and of our relationship with God.

It cannot be forgotten that a basic assumption in the church’s teaching about is the other great ideal placed in front of Catholic families, namely that of natural family planning.

This is made clear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: ”Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality. These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favour the education of an authentic freedom. In contrast, ‘every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil.’”

But what should spouses do if they are unable to have children naturally? The broad answer is that conception outside normal sexual intercourse is considered immoral. Children are a gift from God, and not an absolute right. Children, as gifts from God are to be received in the way that God meant them to be received: within the love of a husband and wife and within the sexual act of making love between husband and wife.

The Church teaches that the unitive act and the procreative act cannot be separated by making use of laboratory techniques, such as homologous artificial insemination or fertilization. This would mean that the child would come about more as the result of an act of technology than as the natural fruit of a human act in which there is a full and total giving of the couple.

So artificial insemination is considered immoral. This is when the husband’s sperm is inserted into the wife using a device. There are occasions when, because the man’s sperm count is low, some of the husband’s sperm is mixed with donor sperm. The mixture is used, but it only takes one sperm to fertilise the egg. So it is possible that someone else is going to be the genetic father of the child.

With IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation), several eggs are fertilised with plenty of sperm in a test tube or Petri dish. Every fertilised egg becomes a human being, an embryo. The best looking embryo or embryo are picked and placed in the mother’s womb. The rest are discarded. Another word for this is “aborted”. That cannot be right. In the same way freezing of embryos cannot be right. That embryo is a human being, and we do not freeze human beings.

Furthermore, it is not OK to find a surrogate mother, and  “hire- a – womb” or “borrow – a - womb”. It is not morally right to use gametes of persons other than the married couple. It is not right to go to sperm banks and make use of donated sperm or ova. The husband and wife are separated and one of them is excluded in the very act of procreating. When one makes use of donor eggs or donor sperm, the use of another person’s egg or sperm involves a third party into the birth. The donor is not married to the husband or wife, and yet, he or she is going to genetically create  a new human person with one of them.

The Church teaches that this “injures the right of a child to be born of one father and one mother who are father and mother both from a biological and from a legal point of view.”

Then there is the issue of human cloning. This is an attempt  to “replicate” instead of to “procreate”. Cloning in the strictest use of the term refers to “the reproduction of a biological entity that is genetically identical to the originating organism.”

The Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church teaches: “From an ethical point of view, the simple replication of normal cells or of a portion of DNA presents no particular ethical problem.

“Very different, however, is the Magisterium’s judgement on cloning understood in the proper sense. Such cloning is contrary to the dignity of human procreation because it takes place in total absence of an act of personal love between spouses.”

It continues that cloning, in the strict sense of the word, represents a form of total domination over the reproduces individual on the part of the one reproducing it. In other words, human cloning is an attempt to “play God”, as if a mere human being can create life.

When cloning is used to create embryos from which cells can be removed for therapeutic use, the Church teaches that this   does not reduce its moral gravity, because in order that such cells may be removed the embryo must first be created and then destroyed.