Conjugal vs. commercial view of marriage and children / adoption/ in-vitro/ pets

A couple of posts ago we linked to a story of human rights and marriage and made a few comments.

Over the weekend I did have a chance to talk to my husband about it, and it threw up the predictable point about being adoptive parents, and then also in-vitro fertilization.  Personally, having gone through the fertility mill and having felt the full gamut of emotions associated with it, I would still say that I would not participate in in-vitro fertilization for the simple fact that the extra embryos have to be dealt with somehow.  Who or what are they?  Are they not also my children?  But they are good for disposal?  I want a child so badly that I will throw several out?  I couldn't do it.

In terms of adoption, I mentioned already that the adopted person has a right to an origin story better than "Oh, we wanted a child so badly and  God sent you to us."  The adopted person does not exist to make his or her parents happy.  This is not good enough. Similarly, gay couples who just have to have children in their lives, must have a better story than: oh well, so and so helped us have a  baby, how loving and caring of him or her. It is not human enough.  It disregards basic human nature, creation and need for meaning and attachment.

On the radio, today, I listened to several authors interviewed on the topic of attachment to pets.  One of the speakers believed that the current language and understanding of human to animal care is too often couched in language of "baby" or even "lover";  in any case, everyone seems to look for unconditional love.  As individuals mature they need to accommodate themselves to others and sometimes also get their ego's bashed in.  This does not happen with a dog. It is easier to love a dog.  People took different points of view on this and pointed out that dog love does not preclude human love and mature relationships.  Granted that, but the question is with our changes in family structure, everyone working, 50% divorce rates, etc. are we looking to love from pets rather than other sources?  And what does it say about our view of children and pets in comparison?  Do we view children as pets?  And do we view dogs as children?  It can happen and I think we would all say that this is disordered and we perhaps need to analyze our relationships a bit more deeply.

My point, our relationships to parent, spouse and children are fundamentally not like our relationships to pets.  There can be "love" and affection in these relationships, but "love" has to be more than a feeling.  "Love" has to have a story.  Love has to have sacrifice.  Love has be designed by the maker.  Love can never be a commodity.  And a new person needs to know the conjugal relationship that created him.

Good comments on marriage and human rights

http://palamas.info/human-rights-the-consensus-marriage-model/#more-10269

"No, the argument against SSM is a natural law argument. Or, as Milbank says, for 'the individual, the experience of a natural-cultural unity is most fundamentally felt in the sense that her natural birth is from an interpersonal (and so ‘cultural’) act of loving encounter – even if this be but a one-night stand. This provides a sense that one’s very biological roots are suffused with an interpersonal narrative.'" 

I'll print it out and discuss it with my husband.  I need to get this point understood better.
My own thoughts so far are, as mentioned before in a post called "Children's Rights", are that
children are not like puppies.  They essentially belong to the couple who conceived them, flesh and blood and love and so on.

As an adoptive parent, I also know well what it is to raise a person who is not genetically your own child.  It is not hard to do.  It is very easy to develop a great devotion to someone not your own flesh and blood.  BUT for the child it is a different matter.  The child needs to know, needs to know her own father, her own mother, her own background.  It is a human right.  She needs to know why she was placed.  She needs to know that the reason was good and solid.  She needs to understand.  She needs to find out and accept.

A little boy or girl is a child conceived in human love.  A little boy or girl is not a pet.  We need to differentiate between the animal kingdom and ourselves.  We are different.  You could sneak a different egg into a bird's nest and the baby bird would never know that it wasn't taken care of by the parent bird. A human being has the right to know and the right to have a proper reason why he or she was not raised by genetic parents. Even off-spring from sperm-donations are looking for their fathers.  It cannot be denied.

We are not monkeys.  Darwin was wrong.  Does that come into play here?

HE made them Male and Female.  We are created to be superior in consciousness, rationality, emotionality, morality, language, soulfulness (see the last few posts on Nagel's Mind and Cosmos).  And not only are we human, not monkey, we are also male and female with significant differences.

Children's Rights

Below is a comment I made on a thread about homosexual marriage.  Someone else had raised the issue of children.  Being an adoptive mother, I have always held this issue close to my heart.  Having adopted around 1990, we were involved with a private agency that promoted open adoption.  At time, open adoption was still somewhat new and certainly broke the molds of my thinking and feeling.  But now, truly, I have to say that this is the humane option.  

Children become – and have already become – objects which others have the right to as opposed to subjects with rights themselves.  (Andrew)

This is really the most weighty point of all. What about the children?

The moment some raises the point that children ideally are raised in a home with their own biological mothers and fathers, the cry goes up that this hardly ever happens. There is so much divorce, etc. Yes, we know there is divorce and we know divorce is traumatic for children. But this goes way beyond the difficulties involved in changing your living arrangements. A person needs to know where he or she comes from. This is not trivial. A person needs to know her mother and her father. In Germany, the supreme court just ruled that someone conceived via insemination has the right to know the father, the sperm-donor.
Why does is always matter so much to people? Why are their lives consumed with finding a birth mother or a birthfather? Why are these teary stories always in the media? Because we need to know. We need to know so that we can know ourselves. A part of a person is incomplete when the relationship with the biological parent is missing. It is a human right to know your parents. And if you cannot live with your parent, you need to have a good reason to feel satisfied. Why did my mother place me for adoption… ? What were the reasons? Does it make sense? Did she care about me? Or I am I just trivia. People become obsessed with this.
Yes, yes, there are reasons why some of these relationships are not wise or feasible or sustainable… but again, the undesirable results don’t allow us to abandon all efforts at reaching the best outcomes. In Australia, just last week, the prime minister apologized to a conference center full of women for the decades of pressure put on single moms to release their children for adoption. A child is not a puppy. I don’t want or get a child just to complete the picture of a nice, little home. A child is a brand-new human person, created out of the love of a man and a woman. This is the bed-rock of existence.

Adoptees are the only party to an adoption without a voice. While adults make (and are expected to make) many decisions on behalf of their children, adoption is the only decision made for children that displaces them permanently. This isn’t to say that adoptive placements can’t be positive, growth-enhancing, and give adoptees a loving, supportive environment, but it can never negate the fact that there is another family out there with whom the adoptee is intimately connected. How adoptees acknowledge (or don’t) and come to terms (or don’t) with this dual ‘belonging’ is a question each adoptee has to answer for her/himself.

The adoptee or the child of sperm-donation has no choice in the matter. The impact of this needs to be fully considered, but one rarely hears about it.

In former times, when adoptions occurred they would involve orphans or extended family looking after children.  Or else the father would remarry and there would be a step-mother, which, after learning all of Grimm's fairy tales, was also not always an excellent solution.  But, no doubt, a step-mother can be easily demonized, no matter what she does.  The human heart will always cry self-pity and neglect.  Such, we are.  Anyhow.  And now, society is such, that hardly a family has the means to keep anyone at home for childrearing.  It has become a matter of funds even when there are two parents.  Who can take on an additional child?  Still, where ever possible and where ever reasonable, a child needs to have sufficient closeness to his or her natural family, mother and father. 

A terrible mistake was also made when various church charities came to this country and removed the aboriginal children to residential schools.  The well-known end of this story is most tragic. Anything that can be learned from this nightmare should be learned from this. 

Another mistake is being made in Africa where well-meaning charities set up orphanages when instead funds should be channeled to the surviving grand-mothers and older siblings to raise those who have not died of HIV/AIDS.  The orphanage strategy is very bad and we've discussed this previously (I'm not sure of the thread right now;  maybe I can link to it later.)