Technology and Child Bearing

It’s interesting to look down through the ages and look at the problem of barreness or infertility. The first instances we see of the situation in the Bible is with Abraham and Sarah– not able to conceive until they brought forth Isaac. Then Rachel has problems conceiving until Joseph was born. In the old days, the solution to this problem was to use a maidservant. Of course understanding of the whole reproductive process was different, and yet I think that part of us gaining understanding about the how the whole process works has led to us coming to think of children in different terms.

Yesterday we discussed when a baby is a baby. Today we’re looking at what technology has wrought. You see, when we as a culture come to depend upon ourselves we begin to depend less on God. Couples that want to have babies and cannot now have the option of starting hundreds of lives in test tubes and hoping that one of these babies will implant and grow in the mother (or in the case of this family, in the mother’s 52 year old grandmother).

This leaves us with the ethical problem that President Bush has to veto— embryonic stem cell research. If we didn’t know how to harvest the cells to help infertile couples, there wouldn’t be extra babies lying around frozen. This would deprive politicians of the ability to be able to say that there are “embryos” slated for destruction. Boil it down– there are babies slated for death, so why don’t we expirament on them.

This would be a atrocious if someone were to decide to expirament on a terminal infant or a terminal child, but because it’s an embryo they want to take advantage of the “opporunity.” See where technology has taken us– dependance on God to trust in self and now to doing things that make black slavery in the South look small in comparison.