by Ken Myers
Despite the fact that the frontiers of bioethics have changed, Leon Kass’s 1985 book, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (Free Press) continues to be a stimulating source for reflection (for those with ears to hear). The first section of the book includes five chapters under the heading “Eroding the Limits: Troubles with the Mastery of Nature.” The chapter titles in this part of the book are “The New Biology: What Price Relieving Man’s Estate?” “Making Babies: The New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality,” “Perfect Babies: Prenatal Diagnosis and the Equal Right to Life,” “The Meaning of Life — in the Laboratory,” and “Patenting Life: Science, Politics, and the Limits of Mastering Nature.”
In the chapter on making babies, Kass asks what is really new about technologies that make babies. “Such life will still come from preexisting life, no new formation from the dust of the ground is being contemplated, nothing as new — or as old — as that first genesis of life from nonliving matter is in the immediate future. What is new is nothing more radical than the divorce of the generation of new human life from human sexuality, and ultimately, from the confines of the human body, a separation that began with artificial insemination and which will finish with ectogenesis, the full laboratory growth of a baby from sperm to term. What is new is that sexual intercourse will no longer be needed for generating new life. (The new technologies provide the corollary to the pill: babies without sex.) This piece of novelty leads to two others: There is a new co-progenitor, the embryologist-geneticist-physician, and there is a new home for generation, the laboratory. The mysterious and intimate processes of generation are to be moved from the native darkness of the womb to the bright (fluorescent) light of the laboratory, and beyond the shadow of a single doubt.
“But this movement from natural darkness to artificial light has the most profound implications. What we are considering, really, are not merely new ways of beginning individual human lives but also, and this is far more important, new ways of life and new ways of viewing life and the nature of man. Man is defined partly by his origins and his lineage; to be bound up with parents, siblings, ancestors, and descendants is part of what we mean by human. By tampering with and confounding these origins and linkages, we are involved in nothing less than creating a new conception of what it means to be human.
“Consider the views of life and the world reflected in the following different expressions to describe the process of generating new life. Ancient Israel, impressed with the phenomenon of transmission of life from father to son, used a word we translate as ‘begetting’ or ‘siring.’ The Greeks, impressed with the springing forth of new life in the cyclical processes of generation and decay, called it genesis, from a root meaning ‘to come into being.’ (It was the Greek translators who gave this name to the first book of the Hebrew Bible.) The premodern Christian English-speaking world, impressed with the world as given by a Creator, used the term ‘pro-creation.’ We, impressed with the machine and the gross national product (our own work of creation), employ a metaphor of the factory, ‘re-production.’ And Aldous Huxley has provided ‘decantation’ for that technology-worshipping Brave New World of tomorrow.”
