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During this year we interrupt our normal teaching programme to consider some of the ethical and moral issues that are in the press day by day. They are not the only ones but they stir up controversy and often put us at odds with the society we live in. Today we look at the morality of such issues as contraception, abortion, IVF treatment, human cloning. Later in the year Ian Miller will take up the issues surrounding ending life, euthanasia and the like. In July we look at the whole area of civil justice and is relationship to God’s justice. In October we have set aside a morning to question the whole area of sexuality in the kingdom of God. These are not easy matters to get our heads round or react to but they are the challenges of a modern technologically advanced and pluralist society. Today I will not necessarily give neat tidy answers. You may well disagree with me. I am not going into scientific research or much on sociological impact. I will attempt to put some biblical markers down and consider how those markers impact the debate.
Medicine is the new God. And it empowers people to make life and death decisions about ourselves and other people. The problem for Christians is that living in the 21st Century means that it is very obvious we can decide on who lives and who dies. In fact we are ever moving closer to so called ‘creating life’.
We are faced with a new secularism that demands rights and freedoms and is on the offensive to break every taboo. The danger is that we react, as many Christians have, and dig in on obsolete definitions and interpret the scriptures without reading what they actually say and what science is enabling us to do.
Today we look at matters of birth. And we begin with God’s word as we believe him to be the final arbiter of what is right and wrong. Not tradition or Science or secularism.
No Killing
Exodus 20: 13 summarises the sanctity of life in two words : No murder. Or Do not Kill and that is the key to a lot of legislation in the Old Testament. It specifically deals with child sacrifice, which was banned. Animals were to be sacrificed, never human beings. Leviticus 20. 2-5. In Genesis 22 Abraham is prevented from sacrificing his son and a ram is offered instead. There is a nasty story in Judges 11 about a guy called Jephthah who sacrifices his daughter to fulfil a foolish vow but the Law was clear that human life was to be protected.
The question has developed in time to “at what point is a life a life”. And how much are we allowed to do in engineering life?
When do we become ‘living’? These are complex matters. It is commonly held among Christians that the human Spirit is created at conception when the male sperm impregnates the egg. However, although this is a clear point of time there is no Biblical warrant for this as the defining moment. Clearly the Bible speaks of God knowing us in the womb and even John the Baptist responding prophetically while in the womb but there is no specific reference to conception being the starting point. It makes sense that we should not create embryos just to destroy them, simply because we do not know when God implants spirit into us. In fact the Bible sees spirit as wind and tends to describe the entry of the spirit in terms of breathing which could place the spirit being born after birth not before. Therefore it is not as clear as some Christians would make out.
No Adultery
A second relevant matter is the Command “ You shall not commit adultery”. This may not initially seem relevant but in the last week or two there have been two celebrity surrogate births where a woman carries and gives birth to a child on behalf of someone else, which has brought the issue to the fore. The command is embedded in the principle of marriage set out in Genesis 2:20-24.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21
So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was
sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with
flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken
out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”
24 That is why a man leaves his father
and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
However it is clear that the principle was edited in time as polygamy is never condemned in the Bible although it does not fit with the one flesh principle. Surrogacy is known in the Bible. Both Sarah and Rachel had surrogate children. The outcome was never satisfactory. Sarah became despised by Hagar and Jacob’s family was somewhat unsettled. It is quite difficult to sort out that rather complex family with two wives and two surrogate mothers or concubines. Interestingly the true mothers are clearly identified and part of the family.
Returning to the principle of No adultery the underlying core of a family unit is a holy marriage based on fidelity and trust. It is in that environment God intends children to be born and grow up.
Made in the image
of God.
Genesis 1:26-28
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind
in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea
and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over
all the creatures that move along the ground.”
I do not have time to explore this in detail but you can do so by looking at a number of passages of Scripture which I will put with this sermon on the website.
Genesis 1:26-28; 5:1-5; 9:1-7
What I want to draw to your attention is that being made in the image of God means that we have moral, spiritual capacities, consciousness, free-will, reason and language. Each of us is a unique individual. But more than that we were created to relate to God and one another. In particular God created humans to be heterosexual and to reproduce heterosexually. Asexuality and all sorts of other forms of reproduction are part of the created order but not for humans. This is emphasised in the New Testament and the one flesh principle of Genesis 2 is repeated.
How much right have we to choose?
This question is forced on us by modern technology on one side and a Roman Catholic tradition on the other. We must be clear that we do have the right to choose over our own bodies and behaviour but within the safe boundaries set up by God. The Roman Catholic Tradition is that you should leave it to God to control birth and intervention is sinful.
We need to step back from the heat of the argument sometimes to recognise that choice is written into our lives. Godly people choose to marry. Married couples choose when to have sex and the majority of families in this church have practised some sort of contraception. Otherwise we would all have large families of 8 or more children.
So lets pause there and consider the moral issues relating to contraception.
Contraception the means of preventing pregnancies while being sexually active.
The problem about contraception is that sex outside of marriage, not just illicit affairs, carries the possibility of conceiving children. It is sex without the commitment of marriage that has led to much of the current wave of unwanted pregnancies and the need for day-after contraception. I note that this week Boots has been accused of encouraging Chlamydia by making the morning-after pill available on demand. So choosing outside of the simple ‘No Adultery’ principle is sin, not choices within a marriage relationship. The same applies to much of abortion and the treatment of fertilised eggs. The choice breaks the ‘No Killing’ principle and at that point our right to choose is temptation to sin.
We do have the right to choose. The proof text that is used against this is the sin of Onan Genesis 38:8-10 but that was clearly a refusal to provide children for his brother rather than a warning against contraception or masturbation.
The point I am making is that choice is not new or wrong. It is the degree of choice or the number of choices that has made us stop and consider. we do have the right to choose over our own bodies and behaviour but within the safe boundaries set up by God. It is understanding the safe boundaries that God has set up that matters. You see, once we, as a society, desert God’s way, we have problems piling up on us.
Moving to the issues that surround childbirth, the options are terrifyingly multiple.
Abortion the means of ending a pregnancy and on the other hand infertility can be treated and there are a number of assisted reproductive technologies ranging from supporting normal sexual activities, IVF treatments, and the whole question of surrogacy.
Which brings me to abortion. The most terrible words that can be said of someone is that they are unwanted. So unwanted pregnancy is a serious problem. The created child needs to be loved and cared for. If there is to be human rights that is it. The question is what to do about unwanted pregnancies.
Adultery is usually the problem not abortion. However, married couples who do not feel they can cope with another child but have conceived by accident or design need to be considered.
Love not censure.
I must take issue with the way the church in general projects itself as anti-abortion and not for love and care. You cannot refuse abortion without providing adoption and other support. That is not the Jesus way. So our abortion counselling, as provided by Care Trust, seeks to find love and care for the mother-to-be and the child. If necessary it supports a woman through an abortion because she has the legal right to do so. That does not mean that we are in favour of abortion. But at the point when pregnancy has already happened we must be careful to love first and care for all parties. So ranting and raving about abortion clinics is mindless religiosity. We are aware of the guilt problems that follow from abortion and, dare I say, only in Christ, is there true forgiveness, healing of the mind. So we have the means of healing for the spiritual and moral sickness around us. What we need to be doing is laying the foundations of a society in godly values and mutual respect.
Abortion to prevent
deformity.
But in our new ‘Brave New World’ we use abortion to prevent deformed children being born. This has real problems as routine testing these days can identify possible deformity in early pregnancy and abortion is offered if not pushed on the parents. We need to be cautious. The scourge of Europe in 1938-1945 was a society built on intolerance to deformity. The definition of deformity widened from physical to mental to ethnic, leaving only true Aryans as acceptable, the rest of us to be treated at best as slaves, at worse, as a disposable work force.
The moral and ethical issues revolve round how you define deformity and on how reliable the tests are in identifying the deformity.
Current possible law
change on Abortion
As to the matter of when an abortion should take place. We remain content that abortion where the life of the mother can only that way be protected is acceptable. We consider deformity not a true reason for an abortion (unless there is a risk to the mother’s life) We consider any date too late but would encourage society to reduce the number of weeks of pregnancy in which abortion is legal.. Currently we are able to abort viable children and that must be wrong by any standard.
The other main Judeo-religions, Islam and Orthodox Judaism do not forbid ART.
However it does not carry this ethic across to other medical conditions and happily supports medical intervention as a positive good in almost every other field of medicine.
So where does that leave us?
At the extremes we are clear, Abortion on demand is immoral because it does not respect the unborn child. Contraception techniques that abort fertilised foetuses would follow as wrong but the underlying problem is in the adultery as much as the killing element. However, the pill, use of condoms, sterilisation used within the fidelity of the marriage relationship are not only acceptable but to be encouraged as responsible parenthood.
Infertility
treatment Before we discuss this I want to point out that childlessness a huge emotional issue for couples who discover that
they are having difficulty in having children or cannot after any amount of
help and investigation. It is painful and a heart breaker. We have a role as a
caring community to weep with those who weep and bear one another’s burdens, to
comfort and support childless couples in their pursuit of a child if that is
their deep desire. That may lead to medical intervention or adoption. Adoption might be the choice for some families and the
church then has a role to welcome in this ''new birth/child" into the
church family (especially where the adopted child might be older). Love in a
family means fundamentally acceptance. We have to accept one another just as
Christ accepted us. We have to love one another just as Christ loved us.
In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a process by which egg cells are fertilised by sperm outside the body, in vitro. IVF is a major treatment in infertility when other methods of assisted reproductive technology have failed. The process involves hormonally controlling the ovulatory process, removing ova (eggs) from the woman's ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a fluid medium. The fertilised egg (zygote) is then transferred to the patient's uterus with the intent to establish a successful pregnancy. As a common reason for infertility is the lack of male sperm Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI, pronounced "icksy") is an in vitro fertilization procedure in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg, enabling pregnancy to happen with any viable sperm from the husband.
At this point the only issue we have is that normal IVF treatment fertilises more than one egg and then stores the spare zygote until pregnancy is established. However, the couple can ask that only one is fertilised and embedded at a time, it does make for a more complex process as a new embryo has to be created at each attempt.
I can see no reason to prevent a couple, married before God from using IVF where normal pregnancy cannot be achieved,
However, where either eggs are not viable or sperm is not viable, then the medical solution is to use donor egg or sperm. At this point a whole new range of ethical issued arise, as it is surrogacy. Mainly to do with the nature of parentage. As in the case of Elton John, the question is who is the natural mother and father?
Going back to the one flesh principle, any introduction of donor sperm or eggs seems to breach the principle. It would seem that it is simply a designer adoption process and where money is involved, a form of prostitution. The point at which we start engineering the DNA to create a child of our choosing moves us into the whole question of what happens if the designer child does not live up to our expectations or our expectations change. Having played God we would have to accept the results of our choices. There can be no going back. We have given life; we do not have the right to take it away. In the cases where a child is born to provide a way of sustaining another’s life lots of questions arise about the rights of the child to accept their role in life, what happens if the expected life-saving process fails, and so on. That it is complex is never a reason for refusing to tackle these issues but we will have different emotional reactions depending on our relationship to the problems and solutions. That may well lead us to different interpretations of what is right or wrong. Being part of the family of God does not mean we all agree on every issue and we must learn to live graciously with those we disagree or end up in a church of one!
I want to just touch on an issue that is still a possible future technology. The idea of human cloning.
Here we must be sensible. In the created order, cloning happens. We call it identical twins. And here we have experimental evidence that asks questions of those so keen to experiment. Identical twins do not develop identically even in the secure environment of stable family life. They have different interests, behaviour and so on. Cloning , for example to produce a replacement of someone who died would not produce a repeat person. We are not genetically determined. That is science fiction poppycock. We also know that, although genetic engineering has developed faster racehorses, the horse racing world is not full of Red Rum repeats simply because even in the animal kingdom it is not automatic. There is a lot of selecting out and failures and rejects -something that would be intolerable if applied to humans. The image of God principle is more than DNA more than genetic imprint. Each of us is unique, created to love and be loved.
I have only scratched the surface. If you want to explore further, you need to read the literature available. From a Christian perspective you could start with
CARE UK http://www.care.org.uk/ look under ‘advocacy’
the Medical Christian Fellowship http://www.cmf.org.uk/ and look under ethics/public policy – early life
the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship http://www.lawcf.org/ and look under Public Policy , all of which have articles on their websites.
Further to that, there are a whole variety of books but be warned, everyone is writing from their own viewpoint and just because they write it and publish it that does not make it right. That is why we started with what I believe are the ground rules embedded in the Word of God.
You will probably not have agreed with everything I have said. My intention is to ask questions and suggest directions in which to look for the answers. So if I have challenged your own thinking, rather than reacting aggressively, consider others viewpoints, and come to a conclusion but above all accept that we are not of a tradition that insists on blind obedience to the church. We seek to be led by the Spirit of God and learn from him. Seek revelation from him and study the Word of God. Be informed but open to the fact we do not always agree because we are not cloned!
Finally I want return to the secondary point in this sermon, in this society we will meet many who disagree with us and have acted in ways we do not agree. Condemnation and hard words may make you feel good but they win few people for Christ. Love, compassion, listening and caring are the ways in which the kingdom will grow. There will be Christians whose life experiences are very different from the biblical ideals. But Jesus stepped into that world, he was slated for being with the untouchables of his society. But it was there he was heard because he came not to call the righteous but sinner to turn their lives around. So our gospel is for the child who does not know their natural parents, regardless of the people who parent them. It is not a matter of how they came to be born, they are created to be loved by God and other people. And we need to tell them in particular of the love of God, which includes everyone created in his image. That love reached you in your sin and gave you newness of life. That is our prayer for everyone born on this planet.
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