Abstract
The author of this book, a professor of English, persuasively argues that it is ‘healthy for bioethics to be in conversation with informed nonspecialists who will raise questions often lost in the detailed considerations of specialized bioethical issues’ (p. 3). Professor Fritz Oehlschlaeger points out the political nature of ‘genethical’ questions and the fact that he is, at any rate, a child, husband, father, grandfather and patient, as well as a volunteer working with those affected by mental illness (and he lists other relevant roles too).
The point is well taken—the value of Oehlschlaeger’s own contribution being perhaps less in the area of tight philosophical or theological reasoning (though some interesting arguments are offered) than in providing glancing insights, fresh perspectives and narratives which help us negotiate the terrain. As someone who was for many years non-Christian and ‘pro-choice’, who shares the goals of feminism and retains attractively humane instincts in the areas of war and social justice, he says that he is writing for ‘moral acquaintances’ rather than moral friends or strangers as he surveys an array of issues, from contraception and abortion to enhancement and human cloning.
As befits his academic background, Oehlschlaeger is perhaps at his best in dealing with language, narratives and human emotions. He reflects on the experience of learning from one’s children (and having sometimes to ‘unlearn’ for the next child); he analyses the Frankenstein story in relation to having one’s life ‘written for one’ and relationships treated as replaceable; and he notes the ‘curious flatness of affect—intended, I think’ (p. 314) of Singer’s discussion of a woman ‘replacing’ a foetus so as to go on a climbing vacation (that is, aborting the child and conceiving a new child after the vacation). ‘Suboptimal’ infants can also be replaced, via infanticide, and Oehlschlaeger draws the grim picture of a utilitarian state which—faithful to its non-particularist principles—might encourage parents to move beyond their emotions to accept such replacement in order to maximize benefit. ‘Rational state policy might honor such parents’, he suggests, ‘as precursors to a utilitarian paradise, for they will have demonstrated, where it matters most, that each, to them, has been one and no one more than one’ (p. 318).
Abortion is discussed at length in the book, including in relation to war—a comparison well worth reading, even if it is not always quite convincing. Oehlschlaeger’s understanding of the conditions of just war is perhaps a little shaky, as is his treatment of killing and letting die in the context of Thomson’s famous ‘violinist’ analogy for abortion. Having said that, there is certainly some significance in the fact that the foetus, unlike the ailing violinist, is subject to ‘the ordinary degree of jeopardy’: both the support of pregnancy, and the need of the foetus for that support, are very ordinary, though the violent act in practice of expelling the foetus from its mother is to some extent a separate issue.
Oehlschlaeger has some acute comments to make on the privatisation of childbearing and childrearing as a consequence of treating pregnancy as supererogatory—despite the fact that most women do in reality carry their babies to term: ‘Doing the heroic in the absence of a clear societal requirement is perhaps praiseworthy, but it hardly obligates the rest of us to support one’s choices’ (p. 146). He suggests that as childbearing ceases to be the norm, ‘it becomes necessary rhetorically to present children as resources in order to make claims on public funding necessary for education and social welfare’. Taking the point further, he says: ‘It seems inevitable that children will come to seem private commodities at home—where they must satisfy parents convinced of their own heroism in even venturing to have children—and resources available for others’ use in their public lives’ (p. 147). This reflection, which develops themes often raised by pro-life feminists and communitarians, is important and worth taking to heart.
The book is, however, uneven, and there are repeated failures in vigour and in nerve. Oehlschlaeger’s gentleness can be effective, but is less so when he is assuring us of Peter Singer’s ‘deep and sincere desire to limit suffering’ (p. 301), or claiming that Singer ‘has primarily used the comparison of human infant to higher mammal to raise the status of non-human animals and not to diminish the status of human infants’ (p. 302). Those who enjoy the more acerbic treatments of Singer and fellow infanticide defenders by, say, Christopher Coope, Rosalind Hursthouse or Jenny Teichman will find such kind words uncalled-for. There is also a surprising lack of resolve when it comes to legislation: there are puzzling references to ‘undue force in law-making’ (p. 59), and Oehlschlaeger seems unprepared to call for a legal ban even on reproductive cloning—let alone on abortion. This may owe something, at least in the case of abortion, to a mistrust of human reason uninformed by faith—and perhaps also to a failure sufficiently to separate the issue of injustice from that of degrees of moral culpability for injustice. To say that certain choices should be legally proscribed, to protect the innocent and the common good, is not to pre-judge the moral or even the legal culpability of those individuals who would (though many others would not) go on to make those choices. Admittedly, the question of what penalties abortion might reasonably attract and for whom—doctors, women or others—would need some thought; but to suggest that no penalties should be attracted for anyone, any time soon, is discouragingly weak.
Even the moral proscription of abortion seems, for Oehlschlaeger, subject to perplexing apparent exceptions: though describing abortion in the case of rape or incest as a ‘grave wrong’, he asserts in the same breath that here it is supererogatory to carry the unborn child to term. Consideration of the stories of women in such situations who regard their role, though certainly painful initially, as very far from supererogatory, might have helped Oehlschlaeger to see this issue with new eyes. Yet again, Oehlschlaeger observes that ‘Abortion should be free from criticism on “child-centred” grounds only when we can clearly say that life itself—from the standpoint of the child—would be so unbearably painful or hopeless as to constitute a wrong. Even then we should utter this judgement with fear, trembling, and the hope to be forgiven’ (p. 242). Though tentative, this comment is alarming, and will give aid and comfort to supporters of eugenic abortion—at least where this is seen as ‘foetal euthanasia’.
On pre-conception issues, Oehlschlaeger engages respectfully and thoughtfully with Roman Catholic treatments of contraception, with which (perhaps not surprisingly) he disagrees. In so doing he lays great emphasis on the different experience of marriage at times in history when long-term survival of children—and indeed of spouses themselves—has been very uncertain. In such situations, spouses might be fertile for most of, or all of, their short married lives, but might still lose their children or not survive themselves as a couple when their children have grown. While it is certainly true that high infant mortality can lead to a particular imperative to conceive, as one’s best hope of some children surviving, to say that the emphasis would then be on procreation apart from childrearing, when childrearing would be very much aimed at by those getting married, does not seem convincing; nor is it convincing to argue that sex or marriage would be seen as less unitive just because life expectancies were short. Many couples are in this situation today, due to fertility problems, genetic or other serious conditions, or simple grinding poverty: such couples can still feel deeply unified, though accepting the very real possibility of death for themselves and/or their children, and perhaps the need to space any children they may have in licit and effective ways.
On the alleged traditional neglect of the importance of childrearing, as opposed to childbearing, one thinks of Augustine’s observation that children should be ‘received lovingly, nourished humanely, and educated religiously’. Childrearing is, of course, a foundational rationale of the marriage institution: the particular kind of friendship (exclusive and lifelong) that marriage whether fertile or infertile involves. Or one can think of papal justifications of family spacing, albeit by non-interventionist means, precisely to enable responsible rearing of any child conceived. Nor does Oehlschlaeger sufficiently distinguish between procreative-type behaviour that is not fertile in effect (for example sex after the menopause) and behaviour from which fertility has been deliberately withdrawn. The first, but not the second, is non-obstructed and ‘apt for generation’: the spouses’ bodies, in the words of Alexander Pruss, ‘strive towards’ conception, and are unopposed in this, just as in fertile intercourse.
Another problem with Oehlschlaeger’s account—and indeed with the accounts of some Roman Catholic writers—is that of insufficient separation of chastity from generic temperance. When chastity is seen too much as a matter of temperance, albeit temperance applied to sex, chastity becomes something that no longer involves at the very deepest level the structure of marriage, marital acts and all our attitudes to sex, gender and reproduction but, rather, something that can be simply listed side-by-side, as Oehlschlaeger lists it, with other virtues needed for good marriages. The argument put by various writers in these areas that chastity is, at least in part, a separate virtue with a unifying rationale is not really addressed, although Oehlschlaeger notes that children’s needs can affect moral norms both in and outside the sexual context. In the case of abortion and infidelity, he indicates that these are at odds with ‘the kinds of sexual practices we should encourage if we are to cherish and rear children as the unique and irreplaceable beings parents come to know them to be’ (p. 50). There is, however, a need for more serious inquiry into harmful attitudes to children that other sexual practices may help to create. There is some evidence that contraception can increase liability to abortion, leaving aside the issue of ‘contraception’ that is itself abortifacient. IVF, as the mirror image of contraception, and the vehicle of a harmful ‘body-language’ all its own, is the subject of only one brief reference in the book (other than in the context of cloning), which, given the book’s title, is surprising.
In short, this book, for all its virtues and insights, is perhaps best treated as a collection of interesting ideas rather than a systematic study of the subject area. With all due appreciation for the distance Oehlschlaeger has travelled in critiquing our consumerist and unparental society, some will feel that a more radical critique of that society is very much in order. It is still the case, as Oehlschlaeger says, that ‘people give birth to, rear, and love unique, unrepeatable, imperfect human beings’, and in the process ‘learn how to rear and love and how to accept and rejoice in both their children’s and their own inevitable failures to conform to any preconceived idea of what is going on’ (p. 180). As he points out, ‘The effect can be, then, to turn the parents to traditional sources of wisdom about the parenting and generational process’ (p. 180). There may, perhaps, be even more to learn from those traditional sources than many of us yet believe.