LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2004, Page 401

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS 401

ial interactions are seen in a variety of extended family structures,
and the church welcomes all of God’s children precisely because
God invites and welcomes us all as his children by adoption in
Baptism.

Nonetheless, God’s Word teaches us never to pursue sexual in-
timacy and/or procreation of children apart from God’s institution
of marriage and family.

Procreation in Scriptural Perspective
Christians and Reproductive Technologies

With these biblical insights about marriage and family in place,
we can now turn to specific questions concerning reproductive
technologies, including cloning.

Given the struggle between the life of the flesh and the life of
the Spirit that marriage and parenting at their best represent, what
use might be made of reproductive technologies? Our reference
point will be the marital union of woman and man fruitful in the
procreation of children.

The reproductive technologies have been developed primarily
to help rectify problems of infertility in marriage—a burden en-
dured also in biblical times. The Bible includes many stories of in-
fertility and often portrays the gift of a child as the overcoming of
what stands in the way of new life and the joy it brings under God’s
favor.'? We would seem to have every reason to explore the possi-
bilities of using genetic scientific insight and technique to address
hindrances to the bearing of children in marriage.

While we may find a legitimate role for a variety of reproduc-
tive technologies, we should note in passing that many Roman
Catholic Christians have examined the possibilities and argue that
the connection between natural sexual intercourse and procreation
should be left undisturbed. Similar reasoning leads to the rejection
of the use of contraceptives, because they too disturb the natural
connection. Consequently, Roman Catholic teaching tends to re-
turn a negative verdict against the technologies we will be dis-
cussing.'* The use of fertility drugs is considered a different matter
as long as they do not disturb the natural context of conception in
connection with sexual intercourse.'* Not all Christians have
thought that Roman Catholic reasoning on these matters is suffi-
ciently rooted in the Scriptures, and some have therefore taken dif-
ferent approaches.

The basic premise at work in the Commission’s 1996 report on
Christians and Procreative Choices is that God’s Word establishes
as the appropriate context for procreation the loving relationship of
husband and wife conceiving a child from their bodily lives as fa-
ther and mother. This means that as long as a child is conceived
from the sperm of the husband and the egg of the wife in a faithful
marriage, the fundamentals of biblical guidance are being observed.

Within this context the technique of artificial insemination with
the husband’s sperm is considered a possible approach to over-
coming infertility. However, artificial insemination with donor
sperm from outside the marriage conceives the child in a way that
disturbs the delicate balance between sameness and difference in
God’s plans for marriage. Remembering that ours is never less than
an embodied life, we see that the child is in this case the product of
the wife’s body and the body of an absent (and usually anonymous)
donor. This asymmetry in the relation of husband and wife’s bodily
life to the child’s bodily life disturbs the way the child relates to
each parent. Artificial insemination by donor is therefore an inap-
propriate remedy for infertility.'*

Surrogacy presents similar but also different problems. As noted
in the beginning of this report, modern day surrogacy is the practice
of having a woman who is not intended to be the social mother of
the child provide the womb in which the child develops until it is
able to be born. Surrogacy that conceives the child from the surro-
gate’s egg rather than the wife’s egg would be ruled out in much
the same way as artificial insemination by donor. It brings about

an asymmetry in the relation of the child to the social father and
mother. Any use of sperm or eggs from outside the marriage is an
inappropriate disturbance. Furthermore, carrying a child for nine
months is such an intimate act of parenting that, even if the sperm
and egg are from the infertile couple, the surrogate’s presence dis-
turbs the child’s relationship to its various biological and social
parents. Consequently, surrogacy is discouraged.'°

In vitro fertilization often uses sperm and eggs from the hus-
band and wife, and the wife carries the child. In this circumstance
there does not seem to be a disturbance of the marital relationship
and the relationship between the parents and the child. On the other
hand, in vitro fertilization can be practiced using sperm and eggs
from any of a variety of donors. In such cases the violation of the
purposes of marriage seems once again to occur."” ,

The prospect of cloning raises rather different questions.
Clearly, the biblically informed line of thought we have been fol-
lowing would rule out cloning outside the context of marriage.
Cloning, however, would not necessarily mean importing gametes
from outside the marriage. Instead, the problem would be that the
child would be fully the child of whichever parent provided the
complete double set of genetic instructions.

Cloning is fundamentally unacceptable because only one per-
son’s bodily life provides the genetic instructions; the delicate bal-
ance of marriage is once again disturbed. The child stands in an
asymmetric relationship to the father and the mother, because its
total set of genetic instructions has come from only one parent. The
parent who has supplied the genetic instructions is not only the
child’s parent, but also the child’s genetic twin. (Indeed, some point
out that the son or daughter is, genetically speaking, actually an-
other child of his or her grandparents.) In short, cloning human be-
ings is a fundamental assault on the created order of God. Through
cloning, the parents will have erected significant barriers to their
transcending the search for mere self-fulfillment.

We note also that a child produced by cloning is deprived of the
normal conditions for establishing its own identity apart from the
cloning parent. In the usual case, each of us develops physically
from a unique double set of instructions that is drawn from, but is
significantly different from, that of our mother and father. The fact
that mother or father has developed a certain way physically may
tell us something about ourselves, but the way our parents have de-
veloped physically is not a story that will be identical to our own.
In the case of cloning, however, the cloning parent’s physical de-
velopment has been governed by instructions that are identical to
those directing the development of the cloned person. The cloned
person is thus deprived of the surprises of uniqueness that come
with sexual procreation. In this respect there is a huge moral dif-
ference between the situation of naturally occurring identical twins
and the “time-delayed” identical twins produced by cloning. Natu-
rally occurring identical twins begin life together with the unique
sets of instructions that come from both of their parents. They to-
gether begin a journey of surprises concerning their unique physical
development. They are not in the situation where they could know
and be oppressed by what their twin has already long ago accom-
plished or failed to accomplish with the unique composite of ge-
netic instructions that conditions their development.

“Give Me Children or I Shall Die”’

Christians are deeply sensitive to the sorrows of infertility. Not
only Rachel cries out “Give me children or I shall die!” (Gen.
30:1). It is crucial also to remember that in this sinful world there is
finally no such thing as a perfect marriage and family.

Assessments of reproductive technologies vary considerably
from Christian to Christian. We have already mentioned that
Roman Catholic moral reasoning tends to resist any technology that
removes conception from the immediate context of loving sexual
intercourse between husband and wife.

2004 Convention Workbook