Two and a half thousand years of Western philosophy have not yet contributed much to
the education of humanity. Philosophy has always been the almost exclusive domain of a
small group of men, conversing in esoteric language on the most abstract of subjects,
without being much concerned about the needs of the ordinary people around them. This
elitism undermines the assumption that philosophy could contribute to the education of
humanity as a whole, and it makes the assumption that it could contribute to the education
of human beings towards humanity — a humanity of human rights — entirely
improbable.
If we want to educate human beings towards humanity we will first have to teach
them a sense of responsibility: the awareness that each is responsible for his or her own
actions and the consequences which can be expected to ensue, together with the awareness
that a person’s rights and freedoms may not encroach upon the corresponding rights
and freedoms of another. The power of persuasion needed in order to teach such a sense of
responsibility requires that we demonstrate our involvement in and co-responsibility for
their concrete problems, by presenting clear analyses of these problems and by setting a
good example wherever possible.
One of the most universal and concrete problems with which every sexually mature
person, male or female, is continually and inevitably confronted over several decades is
the decision whether or not to cooperate in the creation of a new human being. This is not
some irrelevant private choice. It is always an interactive decision, involving not only
the existence, needs and rights of a new human being, but also profoundly and protractedly
influencing the existence and duties of those directly responsible and eventually of the
whole community.
One might therefore have expected philosophers to have analyzed and dealt with these
complex problems and to have set good examples in their own behaviour. As regards this
issue, however, they have failed miserably: only recently have they even begun to consider
procreation (1) as a subject for philosophy at all. Worse,
they themselves have often given examples of irresponsible procreation.
To give you one example (2): Socrates, famous for his
appeal to reasonableness and justice, acted irresponsibly when, very old and poor, he had
children with Xanthippe, without being willing to provide any material care for them.
Xanthippe, notorious for the ways in which she expressed her protest, had to bear the full
burden of their common responsibility with regard to their children. If only this
caricature of a marriage between Socrates and Xanthippe were an isolated fact! If we look,
however, to the extent to which philosophers have so far considered the problems of their
own responsibilities with regard to the procreation of humankind, we are justified in
concluding that Socrates’ and Xantippes’s marital problems seem to have
increased in scale rather than having been solved.
Men have always determined and continue to determine the patriarchal thought structures
of religious dogmas, political ideologies, economic power structures and technological
developments, in which they make decisions about the lives of women and children without
being aware of their own responsibilities. It is high time that a philosophy of
responsibility bends its theoretical reflections towards the care for actual life, and
strives for the realization of human rights for existing and future generations of all
human beings, children, women and men.
The basic dilemma
Let us turn to the fundamental question: the dilemma of whether or not a person should
or should not cooperate in the creation of a new human being. I propose that the decision
be tested against our concept of human rights, as laid down in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Even if these
declarations are more explicit in their definitions of rights than of duties, the rights
do imply duties. After all, the complement of the pursuit of human rights is the
obligation to avoid any action that would result in a violation of the human rights of
others. The limit to one human being’s rights is where those of others begin.
‘All human beings…are endowed with reason and conscience’ (art.1 UDHR).
It therefore seems a ‘just requirement of morality’ (art.29 UDHR) to hold every
adult individual endowed with reason and conscience responsible for his or her actions and
the consequences which can be expected to ensue from those actions. If a person makes an
essential contribution to the production of a child, that person is also responsible for
that child. It is also primarily the parent’s responsibility to raise their children
(art.7, 9,18 CRC). This responsibility must be taken into consideration if a morally
justified decision about procreation is to be taken.
The first condition for such a morally justified decision is, therefore, connected to
the individual’s own opinion of his or her ability and willingness to be responsible
for the child. That responsibility implies a reasonable guarantee, that is, as certain a
guarantee as is possible under the circumstances, of the human rights of the future child
and his or her protection against any infringement of those rights. However, as one person
alone cannot produce a child, those concerned should each make a separate positive
assessment of their own willingness and ability to be responsible for the child —
they should also make a positive assessment of the other’s willingness and ability,
and of their ability to cooperate to this end, if they are to make a morally justified
decision to make a child.
The principle of equal rights in a marriage between the partners (art.16 UDHR and art.
16 CEDAW) need not result in an impasse concerning the decision. Simply because women
exert greater efforts in the process of pregnancy and bearing children, the principle of
equal rights under equal circumstances leads to the specification that every woman has the
right to decide whether she wants to become pregnant and to bear children. Logically, this
means that she has a right of veto over her pregnancy, but, in the case that she
positively decides that she wants to become pregnant, the fulfillment of her wish depends
on the cooperation of her partner, who has to make his own morally justified decision.
Abortion
The declarations of human and children’s rights seem to lead to relatively simple
moral standpoints. A combination of article 3 of the UDHR: ‘Everyone has the right to
life, liberty and security of person’ , and the principle of legal protection of the
child before birth from the preamble of the CRC, apparently leads to the simple conclusion
that abortion is not compatible with human and children’s rights under any
circumstances. However, things are not so simple.
A quite common case in practice is that of a woman who has become pregnant against her
will and who has very negative expectations about the needs and the realization of the
rights of the future child, and / or she may fear that the realization of these rights
will harm the needs and rights of existing persons: her own, for instance, or those of
other children. She may then, having weighed all needs, rights and responsibilities, come
the the morally justified conclusion that she will have an abortion, preferring to commit
the lesser evil (killing the embryo or foetus, that may be assumed to be incapable of
suffering pain during the first 25 weeks, although the termination of her pregnancy does
imply a certain violation of her own integrity), than the greater evil of violations of
rights which would imply a disproportionate amount of suffering.
In my view, then, abortion can without doubt be morally justified under certain
circumstances. It is, however, often the circumstances which are at fault. Women should
never be forced to have sexual intercourse and they should have information about and
access to contraceptives. Everything possible must be done to prevent unwanted pregnancies
and thus also to guarantee the rights of women, so that they are not tragically forced to
choose the lesser of two evils, but can decide freely and responsibly whether they want to
get pregnant.
In vitro fertilization
In recent decades a whole new problem area has arisen, and it is one which demands
special attention. Although developments in genetic engineering have led to unprecedented
achievements, we now find ourselves confronted with unprecedented moral problems. You and
I grew up in an age in which we were all convinced that every child could be the product
of only one biological father and one biological mother — and we knew that tragical
circumstances could lead to situations in which the guardians or legal parents of a child
might not be his or her biological parents.
Today we are increasingly being forced to apply a technological, function-focused,
analytical thought structure to the production of children. Within this structure the
child might be the product of:
A. the ovum of Ms. A
B. the sperm of Mr. B
C. the gestation and childbearing of Ms. C
D. the medicotechnological interventions of various persons (docters and laboratory
technicians)
E. the client(s), guardian(s) or legal parent(s) E and perhaps F.
This procreative manipulation leaves us with a large number of possible combinations of
functions, not all of which are morally unproblematic, to say the least.
A relatively simple case of in vitro fertilization, in which the functions of A, C and
E are combined in one female person and those of B and F in one male person, seems to
entail few fundamental moral problems. D’s function is restricted to medical help (I
have to skip over the many technological problems that can affect this procedure in
practice, and which make one wonder whether there really are no fundamental problems at
all).
There are already more complications in a simple case of artificial insemination by
sperm donation, where the functions of A, C and E are combined in one female person, but B
and F are two different persons, F being either a man or a woman, or even absent. It has
to be asked whether, and if so to what extent, it is possible in practice for a sperm
donor to bear the responsibility for the consequences of his contribution, and the extent
to which the rights of the child not to be separated from his or her (real or biological)
father and the right to maintain personal relations and direct contact with him on a
regular basis (art. 9 CRC) can and will be observed.
In the case of anonymous sperm donation the donor does not take any responsibility at
all and the rights of the child just mentioned cannot be realized, in principle.
‘But’, the sperm donor may say, ‘I trust that D will take over my
responsibility and will make sure that my sperm is received by a woman who can and will
combine the functions of A,C and E in her person and who can find a suitable F to support
her in raising the child’. Sufficient arguments seem to have been given for the
superfluousness of any further responsibility on B’s part, and his disappearance into
anonymity seems to be justified. But he has shifted his personal obligations onto the set
of persons I have called D, without any guarantee that D is able and willing to bear that
responsibility.
On the contrary, however. The potential parent’s specific task is to make a
careful consideration of his own, and his or her potential partner’s willingness and
capacity to fulfil their obligations towards the potential child. The specific task of
persons employed in the medical sector is to meet demands for medical help if they can,
without discrimination. In practice this means that in my country, The Netherlands, any
woman can have artificial insemination, whether she wants to be an unmarried woman or to
live with another person, male or female.
In my view, what those involved must realize is that when the child born this way grows
up, goes in search of its identity and asks about its father’s identity, it can never
receive a sincere and satisfactory answer. The sperm donor who disappears into anonymity,
the woman who is inseminated with his sperm and the medico-technical persons whom I called
D, all deprive the child of the possibility of knowing its descent or its biological
origins and therefore — since the last is a relevant entity in relation to identity
— also deprive it of its right to identity (art. 8 CRC).
But things can get a lot more complicated. The various functions A,B,C,D, E and F need
not be combined in specific persons at all. A case that no longer belongs to the realm of
fiction is one in which D implants the genetic material of A and B into the surrogate
mother C, who has been contracted by the childless couple E and F to bear their future
‘adoptive’ child. This can be arranged at several clinics in the USA, the
procedure costing some tens of thousands of dollars. Now it is quite possible that all
parties concerned act in good faith, intending to fulfil the wish of the childless couple
E and F to have children. Putting the medical technology into practice could seem morally
admissible, the more so because the regulation and practice of traditional adoption are
far from perfect. The aspect, however, that strikes us the most is the fact that in this
set-up the child is reduced to a commodity from its conception until after its birth, and
that is contrary to article 35 of the CRC. Furthermore we have seen that in this procedure
the rights of the child with regard to its identity as well as its right not to be
separated from its own — that is, its biological — parents are violated.
But the woman who offers to be a surrogate mother should also ask herself whether she
is doing the right thing by herself and the child. This is not only with regard to the
fact that if she does it for financial reasons, her actions are in conflict with the
rights of the child, who should never be an object of trade. Even if she does not do it on
a commercial basis, she commits herself to giving up or being separated from the child
that has formed an organic unity with her own body, and that has been, or has become by
ovum donation, her child. With this commitment she not only violates the right of the
child not to be separated from the mother, but she also throws away her own right not to
be separated from her child. When discussing the abortion issue, I touched on the problem
that terminating a pregnancy always represents a tragic infringement of her own integrity,
as any woman who has actually had an abortion will testify. For this reason the problem is
better avoided, or if this is impossible, at least to abort as soon as possible after
conception. If a mother has to relinquish her child after bringing the pregnancy to full
term, we may suspect that this violation of her fundamental right not to be separated from
her child implies a long-lasting trauma.Yet it must be feared that there are enough poor
women in the world who are ‘willing’ or can be forced to give up their bodies to
rich profiteers in this latest form of exploitative prostitution. The term surrogate
motherhood is in fact a misleading euphemism for prostitution of the womb.
Let us review this whole procedure once more. Persons who cannot themselves conceive
and produce children place an order for a child to be produced, have the order carried out
by third parties by means of reproductive technology, cause the disappearance of the
biological parents (that is, the ovum donor A and the sperm donor B, who are together the
genetic parents + the surrogate mother or ‘womb prostitute’ C), and when it is
born adopt the child to take care of it as if it was their own. In this way they are
simultaneously responsible for the production of a new person as well as the separation
from and total disappearance of that person’s real, biological parents. In fact they
reduce the child to a commodity, they make an orphan of the child and deprive it from its
identity. These are all gross violations of the rights of the child and violate the
repeated principle:’in all cases the interests of the children shall be
paramount’ (art. 16 CEDAW, art. 21 CRC). One could wonder if the very persons
responsible for these violations should be entitled to adopt these children as their own.
The term ‘adoptive parents’ is, in this case, a misleading euphemism for parents
who commission the production of an orphan. If one person’s desire can only be
fulfilled by sacrificing the rights of another, it is clear that the protection of rights
has priority over the fulfillment of desires.
These cases of sperm donation, womb prostitution and orphan production clearly show
that the medicotechnical, functionally segregated, analytical structure of thought has
gone too far in reducing human procreation to the simple sum of A,B,C and D, whose result
is then handed over to E and possibly F. But the product, the child, could justifiably
reproach us afterwards, that we had behaved irresponsibly and in contravention of human
rights.
Allow me to cite one actual instance. In September 1997 a Los Angeles judge declared a
two-year-old girl an orphan, though all the adults who contributed to her existence are
probably still alive. The girl is the result of the efforts and contributions of a
medico-technical team, a sperm donor, an ovum donor and a surrogate mother, but the couple
who had ordered the child divorced before the child was born. The judge declared that the
man of the couple, since he had never become the legal father, had no obligations towards
the child, but also that the woman in this couple could be no legal mother. So the girl
was declared an orphan, because the responsibility of all those who contributed towards
her was so fragmented that it could be denied by and for all.
How can we possibly expect that such a child, so uprooted from its biological heritage,
brought into the world so irresponsibly, in a way so clearly at odds with basic human
rights, will grow up and become a balanced human being with a sense of responsibility for
others? We might expect, rather, that such children suffer serious identity problems in
later life, and should not be surprised if they develop such a hatred towards humanity
that they form a time bomb under our society.
Conclusion
Medical science, itself split up into innumerable specialized fields, no longer sees
the human being as an entirety, but has a caricatural, reductionist view of humankind.
Today’s specialized medical field of human procreative technology can produce
tomorrow’s psychiatric patients. These developments in science should be
reconsidered. This need is all the greater now that the newest scientific developments
include cloning. All too often we have had to concede that the possible applications of
new technologies were implemented before we had found an answer to the fundamental
question of whether what is possible is also permitted, and of where the boundaries of the
morally acceptable actually lie.
The declarations of human rights are widely accepted as standards for human behaviour;
the implementation of human rights is an issue often included in political agreements.
Instead of just holding them up as examples to people in far-away countries, we should
also conduct ourselves according to their principles. If philosophers really want to
educate human beings, then they should develop a philosophy of responsibility. They should
direct their intellectual powers towards the production of clear analyses of the concrete
problems with which people struggle every day. In word and deed they should give an
inspiring example of responsibility towards humanity and commitment to the fight against
violations of human rights.
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