Sorry not to update for a while. Two recent news items, although they did not directly pass comment on the issues they were reporting on, prompted me to reflect on the way we see children in our culture today and the worrying implications of this view.
The first report was on the undercover investigation by the BBC program Panorama into two London IVF clinics run by Dr Mohamed Taranissi (summary report here). Clearly there have been abuses in at least one of his clinics, although that does not in itself impugn IVF. Rather, what intrigued me about the report were the easy assumptions made about IVF and its purposes and most importantly the view of children and parenthood which lay behind it.
- The medicalisation of infertility. Infertility is characterised as an illness, to which IVF is the appropriate treatment. The terminology is so common that in one sense it will hardly give us pause. But is there more to it than that? The adoption of the illness-treatment model tends to obscure the fact that IVF is significantly different to, say, prescribing antibiotics to get rid of an infection. It's also different from, say, surgery to correct a damaged fallopian tube (which might have the same ultimate consequence). What is being treated is, as it were, the unmet desire for children. Furthermore, this language will tend to normalise and justify uncritically whatever methods are necessary to procure the desired result, since if it is seen as a treatment, then it is taken as read that it is necessary and right.
- The functionalisation of children. It is relatively commonplace, but nonetheless valid for that, to point out that IVF here seems to make parenthood a quasi-right, and children as therefore created in order to satisfy their parents desires. Obviously, desire to have children is not wrong. But it is correct to raise the question of whether children should be specifically made in order to satisfy such desires. As Dr Taranissi puts it, he wants to "provide results for people".
- The commercialisation of children. IVF is big business. Dr Taranissi has amassed a fortune of £38 million. Wow! People are prepared to pay a lot to get children! But one wonders whether this is a relationship that ought to be commercialised. There are a lot of things, as we say, that money can't buy. One can buy bread and apples and cars and shampoo. But we don't think we should bribe a judge in order to 'buy' justice, for example. We also agree that one shouldn't be allowed to buy people, because one should not be allowed to treat people as chattels. Some things we can buy and some things we can't. And it seems pretty clear that children fall more into the latter category than the former: they are more like justice and people than apples and shampoo - they are humans, not commodities.
The second report (much more briefly) was concerned with the potential implications of the new Sexual Orientation Regulations on Catholic adoption agencies. (See here for e.g.) What interested me about these is that the regulations prohibit discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation for failing to provide "goods, facilities or services" (text here). Surely by any stretch of interpretation the adoption of a child cannot be considered a good, facility or service? Or has the commercialisation of children gone even further than we might have thought?
Whilst I'm on the subject, I might as well mention that I don't really see what all the church hoo-ha is about the SORs. It doesn't seem that they will affect most of the situations sometimes rather shrilly mentioned (see these parliamentary answers), and even if it does I wonder if it's much better to wait until we get sued rather than threatening to close down our charitable provisions such as adoption agencies. It looks like cheap emotional blackmail. The political posture of the church ought to be that of martyr, not blackmailer!
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