Embryo Adoption and the Extended Inseparability Argument

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-35
Author(s):  
Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco ◽  

The Catholic debate over embryo adoption is at a genuine impasse awaiting resolution from the magisterium of the Catholic Church because both sides have reached a point where there is a fundamental disagreement. Several Catholic ethicists have argued that the ethical reasoning linking the acts of having sex and of making a baby, and therefore reserving both to the causality of a husband, should be extended to the act of becoming pregnant. This would rule out embryo transfer in all its manifestations. However, this dispute cannot be resolved by further argumentation, but requires authoritative definition in response to the question, Should the principle of inseparability be extended to the act of becoming pregnant?

2018 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Charles D. Robertson

Those who consider embryo adoption/rescue a licit means to save the lives of cryopreserved and abandoned embryos often have recourse to an analogy between gestation and wet nursing, claiming that since procreation is complete at the moment of conception, there is no moral difference between gestating another person’s child and wet nursing another person’s child. The claim that procreation terminates at conception is evaluated in light of the thought of St. Thomas, and a determination of the moral means of ordering oneself to the good of the species by means of procreation is made in accordance with the natural law reasoning advocated by that saint. Summary: The Catholic Church teaches that procreation must be the fruit of the marriage act. Some moral theologians consider procreation to be complete at the moment of conception and so conclude that the impregnation of a woman by means of embryo transfer does not violate the principle that procreation must be the fruit of marriage. Others, however, consider procreation to include gestation and birth. This article advances reasons why the latter view should be preferred and what this entails for the ethics of embryo adoption or rescue.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justo Aznar ◽  
Miriam Martínez-Peris ◽  
Pedro Navarro-Illana

1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANCESCO DEMARTIS

On August 1, 1996, due to the expiration of the five-year preservation limit provided by British law for unclaimed and legally unusable frozen embryos, 3,300 embryos were thawed and discarded. In Italy the news of this impending event triggered many reactions among scholars as well as the general population. In Massa, a little town in Tuscany, a most unusual response arose. Two hundred women banded together and asked to carry out a prenatal adoption. Their purpose in making this request was to avoid what they believed to be mass infanticide. Many of the women were married and already had children. They belonged to a local Catholic association. Nonetheless, their reaction was their own response to numerous appeals to respect life by the Catholic Church worldwide and by Italian Catholic thinkers especially.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Eduardo Acuña Aguirre

This article refers to the political risks that a group of five parishioners, members of an aristocratic Catholic parish located in Santiago, Chile, had to face when they recovered and discovered unconscious meanings about the hard and persistent psychological and sexual abuse they suffered in that religious organisation. Recovering and discovering meanings, from the collective memory of that parish, was a sort of conversion event in the five parishioners that determined their decision to bring to the surface of Chilean society the knowledge that the parish, led by the priest Fernando Karadima, functioned as a perverse organisation. That determination implied that the five individuals had to struggle against powerful forces in society, including the dominant Catholic Church in Chile and the political influences from the conservative Catholic elite that attempted to ignore the existence of the abuses that were denounced. The result of this article explains how the five parishioners, through their concerted political actions and courage, forced the Catholic Church to recognise, in an ambivalent way, the abuses committed by Karadima. The theoretical basis of this presentation is based on a socioanalytical approach that mainly considers the understanding of perversion in organisations and their consequences in the control of anxieties.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Potocki

The activities of John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society have been analysed in terms of liberating Catholics from clerical dictation in political matters. Yet, beyond the much-discussed clerical backlash against Wheatley, there has been little scholarly attention paid to a more constructive response offered by progressive elements within the Catholic Church. The discussion that follows explores the development of the Catholic social movement from 1906, when the Catholic Socialist Society was formed, up until 1918 when the Catholic Social Guild, an organisation founded by the English Jesuit Charles Plater, had firmly established its local presence in the west of Scotland. This organisation played an important role in the realignment of Catholic politics in this period, and its main activity was the dissemination of the Church's social message among the working-class laity. The Scottish Catholic Church, meanwhile, thanks in large part to Archbishop John Aloysius Maguire of Glasgow, became more amenable to social reform and democracy.


Moreana ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (Number 157- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
John McConica

During the period in which these papers were given, there were great achievements on the ecumenical scene, as the quest to restore the Church’s unity was pursued enthusiastically by all the major Christiandenominations. The Papal visit of John Paul II to England in 1982 witnessed a warmth in relationships between the Church of England and the Catholic Church that had not been experienced since the early 16th century Reformation in England to which More fell victim. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was achieving considerable doctrinal consensus and revisionist scholarship was encouraging an historical review by which the faithful Catholic and the confessing Protestant could look upon each other respectfully and appreciatively. It is to this ecumenical theme that James McConica turns in his contribution.


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