In this chapter we look at some of the extraordinary possibilities that have developed out of the research in the two areas of abortion and in vitro fertilisation.

I - THE EFFECTS OF PRESENT RESEARCH AND PROGRESS

The spin-off from the research and progress that has been going in the programmes developed by them has opened up a simply mind-boggling range of possibilities, many of which, though they may not all have been implemented on human beings (yet!) have certainly been pursued with animals, and in that area have become fact, not fancy. It is not a long stride from successful experiments with animals to similar success with humans. And there is at present a dismal lack of legislation to guide or control the experimenters.

Two factors that are central to our understanding of what is going on are:
1. The widespread acceptance by society of easy abortion; and
2. The ability to deep-freeze human sperm and embryos so that they can later be thawed out and used.

The two things may seem to be quite unrelated, but they bear on each other to a far greater degree than we realise (or than I, at any rate, realised until I addressed myself seriously to these questions).

Once you can keep male seed and female eggs and human embryos alive outside the body, the range of experiments you can do on them enlarges to avalanche proportions.

1. The Social Conscience

You might think that experimentation with human beings, even at very early stages of their growth, is so unnatural a thing to contemplate that human nature can be trusted not to do it. There are surely barriers of decency we can trust the scientists not to breach. But the attitude to abortion has already broken those barriers down. In abortion you destroy human beings while they are still embryos or foetuses. (A growing infant is referred to as an embryo, by the way, until it is two months old, and as a foetus after that ... though the literature is not always as consistent about that as it should be.)

We are in a situation where between a third and a half of all confirmed pregnancies in the United States end in abortion. Mercifully the figure is smaller in Australia; 100,000 in 1983 is the latest of which I am aware, but the figure grows every year. That means there is a widespread mentality which is no longer shocked by the destruction of embryonic human life.

The effect on the social conscience of easy abortion is simply enormous. If you defy your conscience often enough, it weakens: we all know that in our personal experience. But the same is true in our social consciousness. The social conscience withers under the effect of repeated defiance the same way our individual consciences do.

This shrivelling of social conscience is of huge importance. It leads to statements like this for example, made by the Cambridge scientist Dr R. G. Edwards who was among the first to achieve the fertilisation of human eggs outside the woman's body: "By throwing excess embryos away, we are doing no more than any couple does who use the intra-uterine device for contraception ... In a society which sanctions the abortion of a fully formed fœtus, the discarding of such a minute, undifferentiated embryo should be acceptable to most people." (italics and underlining mine) "... should be acceptable to most people" ... as though that makes it right! But there is the nub of it. Nobody protests, so it is all right to do it. The social conscience is weak, so the barriers are down.

The argument in any case is pathetic - as though you decide what is good and what is evil by counting heads ... "acceptable to most people" indeed! And any child of mine who said, "I'll do it till you stop me," would be summarily stopped. But in effect that is what that scientist was saying. Our silence and our acquiescence in these things has - now - serious consequences for which we cannot escape some measure of responsibility.

We must look at some of those consequences. This is an area in which not only Christians but most people are quite surprisingly unaware ... as I have been myself; but the little I have learned has started all sorts of alarm bells ringing.

What are the possibilities that are being actively explored today? The techniques pioneered in In Vitro Fertilisation have opened up what can only be described as a Pandora's Box of nightmare possibilities.

2. Pandora's Box

As we have said, once you can keep sperm, ova and embryos alive outside the human body, the range of things you can do with them expands dramatically. And they are all fairly freely available today. Already sperm banks have been established in many parts of the world, where donated sperm is kept in expensive deep-freezes. The deep-freeze technique does not seem to work so well with ova (unfertilised female eggs); but it works better when they are fertilised, that is, with embryos. The first child to be born from a pre-frozen embryo fertilised with donated sperm was reported from the Queen Victoria Hospital centre in April 1984.

Let us look at the range of possibilities.

(a) In Vitro Fertilisation. IVF is the simplest and we have already looked at that.
(b) Insemination by a Donor

1. Artificial Insemination by a Donor

IVF, as we saw, enables you to fertilise a wife's ovum with her husband's sperm, and that may be a blessing for a wife who for one reason or another cannot conceive in the normal way. But what if the husband too has a problem? He may have a low sperm count, which means that conception will be most unlikely in the normal way. He may have tumours whose treatment will render him infertile. In that case you may deep-freeze samples of his sperm before the treatment is given and use it later to impregnate his wife; that too may be a blessing.

But if it is already too late for that, why not take another man's sperm and use it? No sex is involved. The implantation of another man's seed from a sperm bank is a purely clinical procedure. The donor of the male seed may remain anonymous, and he need never know which women are given it.

There are dangers in that alone, of course; it has been reported that sperm from a donor in the United States who was later diagnosed as having AIDS had been used to impregnate no less than nineteen women.

There are those who would condemn Artificial Insemination by a Donor as being adultery. That does not make sense to me, since no sexual coupling is involved. The male donor and the female recipient do not even meet. So you cannot call it adultery unless you change the meaning of the word 'adultery' pretty drastically.

Nevertheless the woman bears another man's child. You have to find some other word than adultery to describe it, as I say, but no way in the world can I see it to be according to the will of God.

What does the Bible say that is relevant?

Adultery is the only word the Bible has to offer, because these modern techniques were unknown when it was written. But we do need to understand the grounds on which adultery was condemned.

There was more than one ground, because in the Bible's understanding of it, God ordained sex, marriage and family to be a unity, whole and undivided. Sex, marriage and family are all bound up in the one bundle together, so that if you offend in one you offend in all. (This study would grow to unmanageable length if I referred to all the relevant Scriptures to back that statement up; I have to ask you to take that assessment of Biblical teaching as read.)

At the sexual level, coupling is referred to as a man "knowing" his wife, or alternatively, "uncovering her nakedness"; the two phrases underline both the deeply personal nature of the act, and its intimacy.

The Bible writers are saying that when sexual intercourse occurs, it happens between two persons, not merely between two bodies. "A man is a man is a man," and "a woman is a woman is a woman," and there is no way in the world they can couple except as whole persons. It is simply impossible therefore, on the Bible view, to see the sexual encounter as anything but a deeply personal engagement, regardless of the attitude either partner may bring to it. Even if they are drunk when they do it, it is as two drunk persons that they do so, and the deeply personal dynamic that inheres in the act is not undone by their inebriated state. When two people couple, an intimacy is established between them thereby which "they must forever afterwards either enjoy or endure" as C. S. Lewis so succinctly put it; you cannot undo the "relationship reality" which is established by it. That is why the only right way to engage in sex is with full, conscious recognition of the dynamic, personal responsibility the one for the other which it involves - which means you can only do it rightly within a marriage relationship.

To put it as simply as I can, sex means engagement - the engagement of two persons. Intimacy between them is unavoidable; and that intimacy so involves them with one another that there is no way in the world they can avoid responsibility for each other.

Out of that intimacy and acknowledged responsibility for one another God arranged that children should be born. He set up sex that way. It is a very fitting arrangement - for it means that God so arranged things that love turns out to be creative! He built that into the exercise of our most primal urge. That is part of what it means that we reflect His image.

Love and creativity are inseparable, in man as in God. And this creativity - the making of a new human life - is not a matter of a mere half-hour's pleasure in bed; it requires twenty years of responsible, reliable caring and nurture. You make a human being, not a blob of tissue. The "bonding" by relationship is as integral to it all as the pleasure. Sex, marriage and family in God's intention are one and indivisible. When you separate procreation from personal communion, therefore, you violate the very structure of human life as God created it. But that is what Artificial Insemination by a Donor does. It entirely eliminates from the making of a new human life the dimension of personal intimacy and involvement; and that, it seems to me, flies in the face of God's revealed will in the matter.

Those are the grounds on which I find Artificial Insemination by a Donor to be wrong: when you separate procreation from personal intimacy, mutual responsibility and deep affection you rip apart the fabric of life as God wove it.

Those, of course, are the same grounds on which fornication and adultery are condemned as well. Far from weakening the argument, of course, that only strengthens it.

On the basis of this Biblical insight, Artificial Insemination by a Donor introduces into life's format as God designed it a fundamental confusion, and I confidently predict that its continued practice will produce increasing and irremediable confusion.

It has produced enough already. An A.I.D. child has two fathers, for a start - the biological father and the mother's husband. Which of the two men's estates is the child entitled to inherit? May the biological father later claim custody and access? Should he be made responsible for the child's maintenance?

And these are only some of the legal complications.

2. Ovum Donation

Further confusion arises with ovum donation. In this case some other woman donates an ovum, which is fertilised with the husband's sperm and then implanted in his wife's womb. She bears a child, but she is not that child's biological mother.

A whole stack of similar knotty legal problems arise. But beyond the legal complications, there are endless emotional complications. How does a woman feel toward a child she has physically borne, but whom she knows is not her own? How does the child later feel?

3. Embryo Donation

Then there is a further possibility - embryo donation. This opens up another range of possibilities.

One is surrogate motherhood. A man's sperm and a woman's ovum are united in the laboratory and then implanted in some other woman's womb. This is already being practised, and the women who bear the child are sometimes paid a substantial fee for doing it. Hence the popular phrase, "Rent-a-Womb," for that is precisely what you do - rent some other woman's womb to bear your child for you.

Whose baby is it when it is born?

What if the woman who bears it wants then to keep it ... as the fruit of her own womb? Is she entitled to?

What if the child is born severely handicapped, and the biological parents won't own it, or take it back? As Gerard Wright Q.C. has observed, "The scope here for human tragedy is immense ..."

Of course, this procedure was at first contemplated only to help those married couples who for medical reasons could never have a child of their own. But it is not just medically disadvantaged couples who may want a child this way. Women can have their child borne for them now for no better reason than that a pregnancy would interfere with their careers, or that it is disfiguring. A single woman who can't stand men but wants a child of her own can bear a child this way. The way is open for some women to make a living bearing other people's children for them ... and the history of those abuses that arise when children are trafficked in for money is not pretty.

The confusions and stresses, especially for the children born of these procedures, begins to multiply alarmingly. It is real people we are talking about, remember - people who may as a result be afflicted in later life, say with severe "identity crisis" to take only one example. To the question "Who am I?" the truth about our origins is a real part of the answer. Identity crisis is an affliction which, psychologically, can be crippling.

Again it is conceivable that a woman bearing a child by this means using an embryo that has been in cold storage from the time of her own infancy, might give birth to her own twin sister.

4. Cloning

A further possibility is cloning.

Cloning is the production of a number of individuals all having the same genetic code - if you like, it is the production of identical twins, but in packs of ten or twenty or more - not just two.

At a certain stage of an embryo's development, you can separate the cells manually, and from these grow two individuals ... and from each of them two more, and so on. Having all originated in the same cell, they will have identical genetic codes. When you have, say, half a dozen identical little infants "up and running" this way in the laboratory, you can then find half a dozen women to host them, so you end up with six identical children all having different mothers.

Or you can deep-freeze a few of them and keep them in cold storage ... and then thaw them out and do whatever you like with them.

That opens up some horrendous possibilities. It is possible to replace genes in a living embryo with genes from another cell. Before long it may be possible to do that using cells of all sorts from a grown person's body. It will be quite possible then for someone with enough influence and money to arrange to have half a dozen clones of himself kept in cold storage as foetuses, so that should his kidneys fail, say, he can take a kidney from his private foetus bank, grow it to adult size and use it for a kidney transplant without fear that his body will reject it. In the process, he would destroy the little thawed-out human being whose body he pirated, of course; all the little clones in his foetus bank would be expendable.

This is so far from being a ridiculous fantasy that a local paper, "The Suburban Express", carried a report on Nov. 12, 1985 p.7 that Senator Harradine had introduced a Human Embryo Experimentation Bill into Federal Parliament with the express purpose of trying to prevent just this sort of thing happening. I quote: "Among other proposals for ... experimentation are the creation of laboratory human embryos ... for use as spare parts and compatible tissue transplants for those from whom they have been cloned." Says Professor Bede Morris of the ANU's Department of Immunology, "The technology for doing this in animals is already with us, and this technology can certainly be transferred to human medicine." Then he added, "Self-cannibalism could become the ultimate expression of self-indulgence."

Do not imagine it won't happen. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that if a thing is remotely possible, someone will be found to do it ... and probably already has.

Cloning (the "xeroxing of people" Robert T. Francœur has called it) is seriously proposed today because ...

1. It is a great way to perpetuate genius.
2. It can provide soldier and servant classes of people. (Battle Cattle and Clone Drones)
3. It can improve the human race.
4. It can prevent genetic disease in selected progeny.
5. It can exchange body parts.
6. It can replicate someone you deeply loved.
7. It offers a form of immortality for donors.
8. It can determine the sex of future children.
9. It can expand our knowledge of human reproduction. (Lane P. Lester & James C. Hefley: Cloning, Miracle or Menace? 1980, p. 45-6)

5. Embryo Experimentation and Genetic Engineering

Finally there is genetic engineering, the object of which is to change people's inherited characteristics. You can do all sorts of things with the genetic code inside the cell - take bits out and put bits in. "Nowadays", says Dr David White, a Cambridge Immunologist, "there are even machines which will synthesise genes for you automatically." ("Future Possible Uses of and Abuses of IVF", Test Tube Babies, Unity Press, p. 20)

What is more, you can mix the contents of animal and human cells so you produce a hybrid creature part-animal, part-human.

In laboratories all round the world there are faceless men and women sitting in disinfected uniforms at hygienic benches in filtered atmospheres working away with sterilised instruments doing unpublicised experiments with human embryos funded by research grants from ignorant governments, and resisting any suggestion that they should be answerable for what they are doing. It is pure science, we are given to understand - research for research's sake; what could be more noble and unchallengeable? But it is human embryos they are doing it with.

I listened to Dr Carl Wood of the Monash University Team in Melbourne defending the work his team is doing with human embryos. I cannot quote him exactly because I was listening to him on the car radio in peak hour traffic, but his argument was along the lines: "Pious protesters like theologians and parliamentary senators are forever issuing grave warnings and pouring out vitriolic condemnations of what the biological researchers are attempting, but they are laughably incapable of speaking with a united voice on any issue. If they are so obviously confused they can't make a clear case against what scientists are doing, who are the poor innocent scientists to be held answerable?"

It was discomforting to have him point out our bumbling ecclesiastical incompetence, and I do not deny my embarrassment. But what appalled me was the conclusion he drew that the scientists themselves, who are actually doing whatever it is they are doing, may therefore regard themselves as totally free of responsibility for it ... as though the failure of critics to agree conferred immunity from responsibility on the perpetrators. The one feature above all others that makes us human, surely, is that we bear responsibility for our actions. It is the doers of deeds who carry responsibility for them, not their critics.

What are they doing, some of these biological innovators? ... and why? We don't really know. Where are they taking us?

II - THE PATH MODERN RESEARCH IS TAKING

The arguments they offer in defence of their entitlement to government funding are high-sounding, to be sure. It is all with a view to "improving" the human race, we are told. Who would not wish to choose their children's sex, and eliminate congenital defects, and heighten intelligence, and enhance artistic capacities and sporting prowess, and reduce our vulnerability to anxiety, and ...?

But concealed within these plausible aims is a fundamental wickedness.

When some men and/or women take it into their own hands to "improve the human race," what is it they are really doing?

By what standard, to begin with, do they define what they mean by "improve"? Improve what? - our behavioural characteristics, our powers of comprehension, our moral capacities? And improve them by what criteria? The moment you use a word like "improve" about human beings you make a value judgment. What values do these self-appointed "Conditioners" of the human race themselves espouse? Are all future generations to be made in their image now? And what image will that be? If the secret of racial manipulation is in their hands alone, future generations are, without remedy, their victims. Do we not have the wit to see that what they are pleased to describe as "our control over nature" means nothing more than the control by those few over others? ... and if their techniques should become common practise, the power of their generation over succeeding generations? The Conditioners are "playing God" in a far more sinister way than the abortionists.

C. S. Lewis alerted us all to this menace years ago in his essay entitled "The Abolition of Man." He foresaw where the road will end that our biological meddlers are treading. I quote: (See Note 1 below)

"If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power ... the power won by men turns out to be a power over other men."

So the power of succeeding generations, far from increasing, diminishes. You don't "improve" them, you weaken them. And then C. S. Lewis says goes on:

"I am not yet considering whether the end result is a good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man's conquest of Nature really means, and especially the final stage of the conquest, which perhaps is not far off. The final stage is when Man by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human Nature will be the last part of "Nature" to surrender to man. The battle will then be won. We shall henceforth be free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won.

"But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, inevitably, the power of a few men to make the rest of men what they please."

And because the dominating generation of Conditioners will have attained the power to inculcate values,

"... it is they who will produce conscience, and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. They are the motivators, the creators of motives. But how will they themselves be motivated? They may for a time be ruled by" ... surviving remnants of traditional morality in their own consciousness, and ... "be persuaded that what they are doing is for humanity's 'good'."

But the power to determine what is 'good' for the rest of us has passed into their control. They will be the Masters, in the most awesome and final sense.

What will motivate them? Having the power to redefine morality itself, they will regard themselves as outside any morality; they will not themselves feel bound by any former moral imperatives. They will be free to create new ones. What new ones will they create? What will motivate them when they do?

"All they will have left to motivate them is their own pleasure."

And what that boils down to is that in the final, masterful act of conditioning Nature, human nature included, they will be ruled by nothing but that "Nature" in themselves.

"At the moment then of "Man's Triumph over Nature," we find the whole human race subject to some few individual men, and those individual men themselves subject to that within themselves which is pure Nature. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners, and through them, all humanity.

"Man's conquest of Nature, turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's Conquest of Man. What look to us like hands held up in surrender will really be the opening of those arms to enfold us forever. No-one will be vexed any longer by chatter about truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. For if the eugenics have been efficient, there will be no second revolt, but all will be snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners themselves beneath "nature" till the moon falls or the sun grows cold."

That is the course upon which the Genetic Engineers among us today are already launched.

What C. S. Lewis did not say in that essay, but which he did say in other writings, is that behind the "nature" which he warns will master us the more surely we fancy ourselves to be mastering it, stands the Ruler of this World, the Prince of Darkness. Paul in his first letter to the Thessalonians speaks of "The Man of Lawlessness, the Son of Perdition who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the Temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God." He is the very one into whose hands our experimenting scientists are ignorantly playing.

If we did not have the promise of the return to this world in power and great glory of the Son of God to take the reigns of government finally into His royal hands and "slay the Evil One by the breath of His mouth," there would be no prospect before us but one of total despair. It is because that is the end of the journey upon which the modern pursuit of biological endeavour is proceeding, I find myself in whole-hearted agreement with Gerard Wright Q.C. when he ended an essay entitled, "The Legal Implications of IVF" by saying,

"What we need" (to govern the course of present research) is legislation - and legislation now. I would suggest a very simple Act making it unlawful to fertilise an ovum taken from a woman save for the purpose of implanting that ovum in the woman from whom it was taken so as to enable her to bear a child." (Gerard Wright, "Test Tube Babies" Unity Press, Beckett Publications, p. 44)

If he added the words "to her husband," that would accord very well with the Will of God, I believe ... as far, at any rate, as I am able to discern it.

Note 1:
"The Abolition of Man", C. S. Lewis, Oxford University Press p. 28 ff. I quote him with a few paraphrases and insertions of my own here and there to bridge connections in the argument rather than quote it in full.)

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Ch. 4

Ch. 5

Ch. 6

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