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By Kodi Barth
Kenya’s first test tube babies have
kicked up a storm. Despite the torrent of jubilation at
the news that the country’s first lab-fertilised babies
were safely delivered to a Nairobi childless couple last
Monday, the Catholic Church is leading religious voices
spoiling the party.
Nearly a week later, cheerful
baby stories still fill handsome slots in local
newspapers and broadcast airwaves. And the man behind it
all, Dr Joshua Noreh, could be a billionaire by month
end. With up to 100 couples reportedly lining up a day
after the historic deliveries, each couple likely to put
down the Sh300,000 cost of one attempted pregnancy,
quick math says Dr Noreh could be depositing Sh30
million this week! The man is going to need a lot of
accountants.
But
nobody is talking about the money angle. The point is
that Kenya’s childless couples can finally have babies
after a quick visit to the lab.
Even some religious leaders
reportedly joined in the fray of jubilation earlier in
the week. But the Catholic Church hesitated. According
to a Wednesday story in the Nation, Kenya Episcopal
Conference chairman Archbishop John Njue only told
reporters that the development was a serious matter, and
held back on further comments.
On Thursday, however, a
Mombasa Catholic priest lauded the progress in medicine,
but warned that not all that is technically possible is
moral. "Couples should be made aware of all the
implications of having babies through [in vitro
fertilisation, IVF]," Father Pascal Mwakio told Catholic
Information Service for Africa (CISA), a Nairobi-based
Internet news agency.
And a Catholic journalist
with the Nation expressed concern that a rush for babies
would negate the whole institution of marriage. "What do
babies have to do with love?" Dorothy Kweyu, the
Nation’s revise editor, asked in a Wednesday opinion
article. Kweyu, who said she was a mother of nine, was
bothered by the IVF procedure. "Given that sperms used
in test tube technology are produced by masturbation,
Christians cannot possibly accept it," she wrote. It
"perverts the essence of sex between man and
woman."
Well, what would a Catholic
mother of nine and celibate men behind the altar know
about the agony of childlessness? Why is the Catholic
Church spoiling the party with moralistic pontification?
The issue is bioethics, a discipline dealing with
the ethical implications of biological research and
applications. Consider this: Monica and her husband,
Charles, can’t have a baby. So, a sperm is drawn from
Evans, a willing donor, to fertilise the egg of Monica’s
sister, Phoebe, in a Petri dish. Several "bad" embryos
are eliminated before a "perfect one" is artificially
inserted into Monica’s uterus, which carries the
pregnancy all the way. Whose child is born out of
this?
Ok, this may be extreme, but
now quite possible in Kenya. In the West where the
technology evolved and the cost of treatment is fairly
affordable, ask an audience how many know a baby born by
IVF, or know a couple who has tried to get pregnant this
way, and about half the hands in the room would go up.
Then ask if the couple involved was Catholic. Virtually
all the same hands go up a second time. The stark
reality is that to couples who have tasted the agony of
childlessness, religious or ethical questions are a
luxuries indulgence.
But as Pope John Paul II
credibly demonstrated in recent years, wading upstream
against fashionable opinion doesn’t bother the Catholic
Church one bit. It will, therefore, have problems with
Dr Noreh’s breakthrough. And the issue won’t just be
about the extra live human embryos frozen at minus 196
degrees Celsius or the ones discarded. Even if IVF were
done without making extra embryos at all, this way of
making babies would still be morally objectionable;
because, as Kweyu said, the procedure strikes at the
very core and meaning of marital
sexuality.
"IVF is really the flip-side
of contraception," says US priest, Father Tadeusz
Pacholczyk, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Yale
and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. "Rather than
trying to have sex without babies, we try to have babies
without sex." The moral problem with IVF, he adds, is
that it substitutes an act of laboratory manipulation
for an act of bodily union between man and woman. It
turns procreation into mass production! (The Associated
Press reported on March 31 that bioethics advisers to
President Bush are urging more scrutiny of "America’s
infertility industry"!)
Babies, according to Catholic
theology, shouldn’t be made from just sex, let alone a
lab. Babies should come as an icing on the cake after
great lovemaking; the result of an incredibly rich
language of the parents’ bodies. That is what creation
is all about.
The problem with IVF is not with the baby, which
the Church always considers a gift and a blessing. The
problem is how far parents are willing to go in their
own desire for a child. In other words, babies, even
when desperately desired, should not be brought into the
world by making use of disordered means such as
adultery, rape, cloning – or IVF. Even for married
couples, the Catholic Church seems to say, children are
a privilege, a bonus to the marital bliss; never a
right.
But the
Church is painfully aware, too, that it can only preach
from the pulpit, never in bedrooms. Behind the closed
doors and drawn curtains of the bedroom, only the
conscience is supreme. And a pure conscience, thank God,
is blameless.
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The writer is a journalism lecturer at the United
States International University,
Nairobi.
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