On Marriage and Donated Gametes
Derek, Alastair, and Matt have aa conversation about the ways in which the possibility of gamete-donation by third parties to married couples has reshaped our understanding of marriage and its goods.
This week’s conversation continues through our reading of Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made? with a conversation about the ways in which the possibility of gamete-donation by third parties to married couples has reshaped our understanding of marriage and its goods.
We take as our launching point this meaty bit from O’Donovan:
For such a thesis forces the sharpest of dividing lines between the procreative and the relational goods of marriage. It invites us to think that if the relational good is fulfilled in an exclusive communion of sexual love, then the procreative good may be fulfilled in any way at all, not necessarily by an exclusive communion of procreational power.
It must follow from this, firstly, that the procreative good of marriage ceases to be the natural fulfillment of the relational good. As I argued in Chapter 2, when procreation is divorced from its context in man-woman relationship, it becomes a project of marriage rather than its intrinsic good; the means to procreation becomes the instrumental means chosen by the will, rather than themselves being of the goods of marriage.
Correspondingly, sexual union itself is deprived of the features that give it its importance in human affairs. It can no longer be the case that the mingling of life in sexual union is a mingling that has both relational and procreative implications. It is no longer the case that the gift of self in sexual communion is at the same time a gift to the other of the possibility of parenthood. The divine blessing of children is no longer a blessing conferred upon this relational union of bodies with its promise of permanent affection and affinity. Children are now to be given (if the verb is still appropriate) by quite a different route.
It would seem to me that those who insist that [artificial insemination by a donor] should be available only to married couples, do not value the direct contribution of sexual communion to procreation, but only the indirect contribution which it makes by establishing a secure and stable domestic context for a child to grow up in. That is what gives this insistence its slightly ‘moralistic’ flavour. It defends the link between married love and procreation only at the level of social order, while abandoning the underlying conception of that link as part of the ontology of marriage, the conception which originally made that form of social order seem necessary and right.
Special thanks to Christopher Hutton editing the audio.