Frankenstein's Children
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus |
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus |
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Mary Godwin married Shelley after the death of his first wife, Harriet, and bore him two more children. The youngest, Percy Florence Shelley, was the only one to survive infancy. Mary was familiar with untimely death; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Her father, journalist William Godwin, raised Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, alone. Mary's vision of her mother was strongly influenced by one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy, the elder Mary's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," published the year of her death. Young Mary read this and her mother's other works, and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory. No doubt her mother's death and that of her first child were influential in her concept of the preciousness and fragility of human life, and the role of motherhood as its author.
Mary Shelley's narrative has been altered and revamped so many times that modern versions only slightly resemble the original save in the name of the monster. The movie starring Robert De Niro and Sir Kenneth Branagh is probably the one closest to her original story. Instead of creating a beautiful baby, Baron Frankenstein creates a hideous monster and dies trying unsuccessfully to destroy it. The monster, in turn, realizing its inherent wickedness, vows to burn itself on a funeral pyre so that no one else will ever know of its existence, but is last seen floating away on an ice floe, its eventual fate forever unknown. "Frankenstein," in its many forms, is often seen as a morality story about the consequences of attempts to usurp the creative power of God, but the original is equally as demonstrative, perhaps more so, of the unwisdom of trying to usurp the creative power of women, the sole natural custodians and guardians of their unborn children.
The right to choose how to exercise this uniquely feminine creative power has recently been challenged by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on June 24th, 2022. This decision sparked a number of draconian anti-abortion state laws, including the The Alabama Human Life Protection Act which, among other things, makes it unlawful for any person intentionally to perform or attempt to perform an abortion except if an attending physician licensed in Alabama determines that an abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child's mother (Alabama Code § 26-23H-4). The mother doesn't get a vote! Currently, the Alabama attorney general has indicated that "attempt to perform an abortion" includes assisting a pregnant mother to travel to another state where abortion is legal to have one there. Again, the mother doesn't get a vote.
I think it is interesting that Alabama Code § 26-23H-2(b) mentions "sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children," without defining what these terms actually mean. On the other hand, Alabama Code § 26-23H-3(7) defines "unborn child, child or person" as "A human being, specifically including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability." So: according to Alabama law, an unborn child (at any stage of development) is a human being! Verrrrrry interesting!
By passing a law interfering with the most basic rights of women and defining an unborn child (or person), as a "human being," the mostly male Alabama legislators may have created something of a Frankenstein's monster of their own. A February 16, 2024 decision by the Alabama Supreme Court, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C., notes that frozen human embryos which neither Dobbs nor Alabama Code § 26-23H-4 acknowledge, are certainly "unborn." The decision also goes into detail to point out that the term "child, which Alabama Code § 26-23H-3(7) specifically identifies, has been recognized as the subject to which Alabama's "Wrongful Death of Minor Act" (Alabama Code § 6-5-391 (2022)) applies.
The decision involved the death of five embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, a facility designed to keep extrauterine embryos alive at a fixed stage of development by preserving them at an extremely low temperature. If properly safeguarded, an embryo can remain alive in a cryogenic nursery "indefinitely" perhaps outliving his or her parents!
Between 2013 and 2016, the plaintiff parents involved were treated by a fertility clinic operated by the Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C. ("the Center"), where doctors were able to help the plaintiffs conceive children by joining the mother's eggs and the father's sperm "in vitro" - that is, outside the mother's body. The Center artificially gestated each embryo to "a few days" of age to make sure they were definitely alive and then placed them in the Center's "cryogenic nursery,"
Several embryos were created. Some of them were implanted and resulted in the births of healthy babies. The remaining embryos were contracted to be kept in the Center's cryogenic nursery, which was located within the same building as the local hospital, The plaintiffs allege that the Center was obligated to keep the cryogenic nursery secured and monitored at all times. But in December 2020 a patient at the Hospital managed to wander into the Center's fertility clinic through an unsecured doorway. The patient then entered the cryogenic nursery and removed several embryos. The subzero temperatures at which the embryos had been stored freeze-burned the patient's hand, causing the patient to drop the embryos on the floor, killing them.
The plaintiffs sought compensatory damages under Alabama's "Wrongful Death of Minor Act" (Alabama Code § 6-5-391 (2022)). The trial court expressed its view that "[t]he cryopreserved, in vitro embryos involved in this case do not fit within the definition of a 'person' or 'child'," and it therefore held that their loss could not give rise to a wrongful-death claim. When this decision was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, it ruled otherwise.
Public reaction was swift! If a frozen embryo fits the definition of "human being" in Alabama, it is difficult to defend putting it to death, deliberately or through negligence. This particular case is very narrow; it applies specifically to whether a law intended to compensate parents for the wrongful death of their minor child can be used to sue for damages if the "minor child" is a human embryo that has never been in a human uterus. LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C. says that it does. What is yet to be determined is if the deliberate destruction of unwanted embryos, with the consent of the parents, is "wrongful."
Given that Alabama considers an embryo a human being and clearly prohibits an abortion "except if an attending physician licensed in Alabama determines that an abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child's mother," it is difficult to justify the killing of a living embryo for any reason under Alabama law other than a demonstration that its continued existence (in a tank of cryogenic liquid miles away from its family) somehow obviously jeopardizes the health of the mother (wherever she might be), or, in fact, even then! I would be interested in the reasoning of any "attending physician licensed in Alabama" who might make that claim!
The immediate consequences, in Alabama at least, are to put the entire process of in vitro fertilization (IVF) under scrutiny. If a viable embryo is a "child" under the law, whoever has responsibility for its health or safety needs to be very, very careful about running afoul of Alabama law by injuring, harming or, God forbid, killing it! Several news stories have made the point that it might be better not to create them at all! The latest news coverage I have seen reports that some IVF treatments in Alabama have been suspended until the courts and legislature get all this sorted out. If infertile couples in Alabama want to have children, they might have to adopt those who are unwanted by the biological parents!
That would be my recommendation. Such couples have been adopting and raising orphaned children since the dawn of the human race. Having been involved in abortion and adoption in my own family, I have come to the belief that there are plenty of loving parents and children in need of them to go around. IVF creates unnatural "Frankenstein" children, the products of a laboratory rather than the exchange of marital intimacy. I'm against it for that reason alone, as well as several others!
I have long been an advocate of recognizing unborn children as having the same rights as anyone else. Like the Catholic Church, I maintain that an embryo must be protected and respected as any other human being, and that creating human embryos outside the uterus of the child's lawful mother is morally wrong, regardless of the reason or purpose. Unfortunately, there already are uncounted numbers of frozen embryos whom nobody wants, in cryogenic nurseries, who are recognized as children by the state of Alabama. They need loving parents, too!
Regarding Catholic teaching, an associate of mine points out that the Catechism of the Catholic Church uses the term "embryo" eight times (paragraphs 2271, 2274, 2275, 2323, 2377) other than in the index; the term "fetus" only once (paragraph 2274), in defense of diagnosis for legitimate theraputic purposes, and the term "oocyte" not at all. Therefore, he maintains, the Church endorses abuses of human "fetuses" other than for diagnostic acivities, and any abuse at all of "oocytes." This strikes me as claiming that the Church endorses the abuse of slaves if they are "darkies" (or that they are not persons)! I prefer not to discuss the subject with him on the theory that it is unethical and immoral to engage in a battle of intelligence with an unarmed opponent!
I see a general prohibition of IVF as providing an incentive for parents who want a child and can't have one to adopt one that somebody else has but doesn't want, including unwanted embryonic children already in cryogenic storage. It might just increase the opportunity for these and other orphans to be adopted by loving, devoted parents and reduce the incentive of women to have abortions if they know there is a guaranteed, positive alternative to keeping a child they don't want.
It seems to me that those are good things!