The crisis over the institution of marriage and contemporary bioethics.

AuthorGormally, Luke
PositionSpecial Issue: The Nature of Marriage and Its Various Aspects

INTRODUCTION

The crisis over the institution of marriage is reflected in the social reality that very many people have lost a sense that "marriage" names a fundamentally unrevisable normative pattern proper to the sexual relationship between a man and a woman. The name "marriage" is nowadays increasingly appropriated to refer to same-sex relationships, a development which has already been given statutory recognition by a number of legislatures. Since marriage is the foundation of the family, as traditionally understood, a loss of a sense of the normative claims of marriage has brought with it a loss of a sense of what is proper to the family, with dire consequences for the well-being of children.

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo's article is in part an apologetic aimed at assisting people to recover a sense of marriage as a natural institution characterized by a normative pattern for the man-woman sexual relationship, and in part a diagnosis of the roots of the loss of a sense of this normativity, which has been replaced by the belief that marriage is a radically mutable social construct. (1)

In what follows I shall first seek to pinpoint the salient features of Cardinal Trujillo's apologetic for the thesis that marriage is a natural institution; and I shall offer some commentary on the direction of his apologetic. Then, turning to his diagnosis of the roots of the contemporary subversion of marriage, I shall identify certain idees recues of bioethical discourse, standardly invoked to justify developments in biomedicine subversive of marriage, and which reflect an outlook with many contemporary advocates. The social subversion of marriage is best understood by reference to this outlook. Finally, I shall try to state what the focus of our response to this situation should be.

  1. MARRIAGE AS A NATURAL INSTITUTION

    1. Cardinal Trujillo's Case for the Thesis

      Cardinal Trujillo's case for regarding marriage as a natural institution is based on the claim that, in being the distinctive kind of relationship it is, marriage answers to two fundamental sets of needs characteristic of the nature of the human condition:

      (i) the needs of men and women for fulfillment through self-giving in a relationship which honors their dignity; and

      (ii) the needs of the child in his/her begetting, gestation, and rearing. (2) Precisely in meeting needs fundamental to the nature of the human condition, marriage belongs to the created order.

      The Cardinal explains the first set of needs by reference to a central thesis of the theological anthropology of Gaudium et Spes: that it is in the nature of man that he "cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself." (3) Marriage meets this need because it is a covenant "whereby spouses mutually bestow and accept each other." (4) The giving and the receiving being unreserved (implying exclusivity and fidelity in the sexual relationship) are conditions of a non-instrumentalizing and non-exploitative relationship between the spouses and so conditions for each spouse honoring the dignity of the other. Unreserved self-giving in sexual intercourse is a necessary condition of the "intimacy" that is proper to marriage, namely the "intimacy" of being "one body." Authentic bodily self-giving in marriage is rooted in a disposition of the will to love the good of the other. Mutual self-giving, so based, constitutes marital friendship (for friendship requires that each love the good of the other as his or her own good). Marital friendship, authentically lived, meets the fundamental human need for a person fully to find him or herself "through a sincere gift of [ ]self." (5)

      Precisely in its character of unreserved self-giving, marriage also meets the basic need of a child in his or her begetting, gestation, and rearing. For unreserved self-giving in sexual intercourse necessarily includes the gift of one's fertility, so that it is evident that the relationship is ordered to the good of the child. "By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children...." (6) A relationship of unreserved self-giving is perfectly adapted to the good of the child, for it establishes a relational context for receiving the child as a gift equal in dignity to the couple themselves and so to be accepted unreservedly as the fruit of their self-giving, and cared for in ways consistent with the child's dignity.

    2. Grounding the Thesis in the Good of the Child

      In seeking to make intelligible the notion that marriage is a "natural institution," the Cardinal appears to give no priority to one kind of need over the other--either the spouses' need for fulfillment in self-giving or the child's need for acceptance and treatment consistent with his or her dignity. This is puzzling. The human need for fulfillment through self-giving hardly points to the natural moral necessity of the institution of marriage. To say that it does would be to imply that self-giving in human relationships is not realizable outside the context of marriage.

      There is a case for saying that in the current state of cultural confusion, retrieval of the idea of marriage as a "natural institution" has to begin with the needs of the child. Why? Because whatever elasticity there may be in the use of the word "marriage," it is taken to refer to some kind of sexual relationship. So the question arises: Why dignify a sexual relationship with the name "marriage"? As Elizabeth Anscombe remarked more than thirty years ago: "To marry is not to enter into a pact of mutual complicity in no matter what sexual activity upon one another's bodies. (Why on earth should a ceremony like that of a wedding be needed or relevant if that's what's in question?)" (7) So what is it about sex that requires marriage and what in marriage does sex require? What requires the particular kind of commitment that is appropriately called "marriage" is the central role that sex plays in human life, namely the role of reproducing our kind. Because sexual organs are reproductive organs, how we conduct ourselves in the matter of sex shapes our relationship to the central human good of offspring, which our sexual powers exist to realize.

      If one acknowledges this, one can begin to recognize that it belongs to the nature of the human condition that sexual relationships must exhibit certain characteristics if human beings are to be well-disposed to the good of children. It is an adequate understanding of the good of children which makes clear why it is a natural moral necessity that sexual relationships should have a certain form--the form that is appropriately called "marriage."

      What truths about children are most important in determining what is conducive to their good in their conception, gestation, and rearing? Two truths: the first, that each human soul is a direct creation of God, and parents are therefore collaborators with God in the begetting of a child; the second, that every child has the same God-given destiny as his or her parents. In being created and called to eternal bliss, each child is an irreplaceable being in God's providence and, as such, is equal in connatural dignity to his or her parents. (8) Given these general truths about any child, every child's entry into the world needs to be into a generative relationship in which the child is accepted as an irreplaceable gift equal in dignity to his or her parents.

      It is incompatible with this understanding of the dignity of the child that he or she should be generated in a manner analogous to a product, as happens in those reproductive technologies which work in the form of mastery over biological materials. The human origin of a child should be sexual intercourse expressive of an unreserved self-giving love on the part of a man and a woman who are committed to treating each other as irreplaceable (i.e., their sexual relationship is exclusive and permanent). For the character of such a sexual relationship disposes the spouses to unreserved acceptance of the child as the fruit of their relationship, an unreserved acceptance which alone is appropriate to the dignity of the child; one might almost say that the acceptance is "built into" the character of their intercourse insofar as it is expressive of unreserved self-giving, for such self-giving erects no impediments to the spouses' fertility.

      Unreserved acceptance of a child entails open-ended commitment to the good of that child for love of the person he or she is. The joint commitment of parents to a child needs to be unbroken, for voluntary abandonment of commitment is deeply undermining to the child. The "moral ecology" which fosters love of the child's good is the moral ecology provided by parents committed to an exclusive sexual relationship in which each seeks the good of the other and in which each is accepted for the person he or she is.

      Unreserved self-giving in a sexual relationship between a man and a woman poses no impediments to their fertility. That sexual intercourse should be of the generative kind is a fundamental necessary condition of people being well-disposed to the good of children, for it is a condition of people recognizing that sexual activity should be confined to and appropriate to the relationship that is conducive to the good of children--the one that is appropriately called "marriage." If it is thought that there are good reasons for engaging in sexual activity which deliberately excludes its generative significance, there are hardly grounds for confining sexual activity to marriage. Without a reason for seeing the morally inseparable connection between sexual activity and marriage, people will not be open to the gift of children for the persons they are precisely in and through their sexual activity.

      We may conclude, then, that reflection on the good of the child points to the moral necessity, for securing that good, that:

      * sexual activity should be of the...

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