I was reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Unsettling of America,” on the subway this morning, in which he describes how the American narrative—and I would add, the narrative of modernity—can be understood by the division between exploitation and nurture. He takes the strip miner as the model exploiter, and the old-fashioned farmer as the model nurturer. “The standard of the exploiter,” he says “is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s…. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place.” Of course, all this “exploitation” has been done in the name of human progress: we strip mines so that we may have things like coal to keep us warm and to give us electricity.

Laying aside the question of whether or not you agree that a strip miner is a model exploiter, Berry’s distinction between the exploiter and the nurturer, I think, fairly characterizes what is happening with assisted reproductive technologies. In the name of progress—indeed, in the name of nurture!—entrepreneurs are exploiting the human body, extracting sperm and eggs from one person and inseminating them into another person. (If you doubt whether “exploitation” fairly characterizes what’s going on, read here the account of Alena Sveta, fellow blogger and one woman who’s experienced both ends of donor conception.) In the name of progress, we extracted extravagantly from the earth. Now, in the name of humanism—even family values—we are on to the human person. Infertile and wanting a child? No problem. Meanwhile entrepreneurs make huge sums of money, taking advantage of, among other people, young women with loads of college debt who can quickly make a couple grand by “donating” an egg.

I do not doubt for a moment that plenty parents of donor-conceived children have good intentions and are loving parents. But I do suspect that the clinicians and entrepreneurs behind donor conception are engaging in nothing less than exploitation. And I do question the underlying assumption of donor conception: that we can, without substantial harm, exploit the natural order of sex, procreation, and parenthood and remake it so that it fits our own ends. Because we are body and soul, such a stripping of the natural order cannot happen without an unsettling of the human person. Alena describes the unsettling feeling of not knowing, until she was a young adult, who her biological father was. Is she not right to be unsettled by this? She also tells of the sadness and pain that came after she became a “donor” herself—“I feel like I sold my first born child.” Again, is it not natural and right that she is unsettled?

The contemporary green movement has pointed out that the industrialist’s blithe lack of concern for nature’s limits has not come without a steep cost. Why should we expect that our brave new venture into assisted reproductive technologies will be any different?

Categories: Reproductive Technologies

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