Artificial Intelligence Illuminates Creation and Procreation
Published April 26, 2004
Men who are actng with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit often love in the way just described. They need not be Christians--God works through people of all beliefs. Nevertheless, one wishes that this love were more common that it is. Someday it will be, when "every tear will be wiped away." In the meantime, there is all the more reason to pray for the grace, and to use all human means, to love truly.
Children
Children are bound up in all these thoughts. To begin, mothers and fathers do not create their children, nor are they the masters of their children. Some people accuse the Catholic Church of being obsessed with babies. She is not. Rather, she is obsessed with love. Parents, the Church teaches, do not make babies. Rather, they make love. From this act of love, somehow, we know not and should not want to know how, the miracle that is a child may result. God creates the universe anew every time a child is conceived. He brings forth out of nothing a human soul that will live forever, a soul made in the image and likeness of God, called from all eternity to share in God's eternal beatitude. Parents are given the privilege of cooperating with God in this sublime endeavor.
What threats there are today to little children! Here in Washington, DC, this very day tens of thousands will march in favor of the right to kill babies in the womb in the name of freedom and autonomy. A multi-billion dollar industry has sprung up all over the world to manufacture and promote devices to keep children from being conceived at all. Children are seen as threats to the autonomy of their mothers. Children keep mommy from advancing in her career and being successful. Children require expensive, inconvenient day care. Someday they will grow up and go to college, and by that time, we have all heard, college will cost $100,00 per year, and who can afford that?
Around the world hundreds of thousands of children are used as prostitutes, and the authorities do shockingly little to stop it. In the rich countries, children are now being manufactured in laboratories, much as in Artificial Intelligence. In this case, whose good is primary--the parents', who pay for the procedure, or the child's? Recall the scene in Artificial Intelligence when David finally meets the scientist and asks where he came from. He is led into a room with model after model of himself. He is not the product of an act of love. He knows this is wrong. How much different is in vitro fertilization? Often half a dozen or more embryos are created--each unique, each human--and discarded before settling on a chosen few to implant. Because of IVF, there are today a couple hundred thousand human embryos in freezers in the United States; this even as some forty million "unwanted" babies in wombs have been aborted in the United States since 1973. The very act of creating these embryos was an injustice; what to do with them now is an almost impossibly difficult dilemma. AI, the title by which Artificial Intelligence was marketed, could also stand for "artificial insemination."
- Artificial Intelligence Illuminates Creation and Procreation
- Published: April 26, 2004
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- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: SF
- Writer: Kieran Dickinson
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Children are little people, with their own thoughts, dreams, feelings, hurts, sense of justice, wills, intellects, and memories.
How could a "child" possibly have all these attributes before it has even entered the world?
Two points in response to the last comment. First, a fetus has "entered the world" as soon as he or she was conceived. Second, while it is true that a fetus does not have all of the attributes mentioned, there are other reasons to treat the fetus with appropriate dignity. The most important is that human beings have an innate dignity and should be treated with this dignity at all stages of their lives.
The "pro-life" movement reminds me of that Ikea commercial: "Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you're crazy."
It is possible that a fetus can feel pain in the biochemical sense, the way that an insect might. But there is no way a fetus has thoughts, dreams, sense of justice, wills, intellects, or memories; in marked contrast to the woman who bears it.
There are many cases where people develop unusually strong emotional attachments to animals, treasured belongings, or people they've never met. That's normally harmless. But there comes a point where your fetishes infringe on the hopes and ambitions and the dignity of other people. At that point, you cause more suffering, not less.
JR, I wouldn't go about it that way - I would say that "choice" is a matter of competing rights and that as painful as the choice may be, the functioning person's rights to determine the "management" of her own body outweighs those of a pre-person. The ultimate point is to give every born child the kind of care and attention that Kieran is calling for.
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Fascinating and thought-provoking. Thanks! While I have no disagreemtn with your final paragraph, I don't agree that in vitro is necessarily not an act of love, and I think almost always that it is.