The cover of Time recently featured the headline “The Childfree Life.” China has for some time enforced the “one child policy.” With this policy, children have no siblings and ancestors only exist in the direct line. Millions of girls are aborted in preference to boys.
European populations are declining and dying for lack of children. Among both married couples and the unmarried, children conceived by in vitro fertilization are common. Few orphanages exist because most “unplanned pregnancies” are aborted. As a result, countless innocent lives are destroyed in the womb before birth. Genetic testing has resulted in children with Down syndrome and other genetic abnormalities being aborted. We hear of children being produced for “spare parts” or for scientific experimentation “so that we can improve mankind.”
In the midst of all this confusion about the gift of life, is the argument for the alleged “right” of a same-sex couple to adopt a child.
How does one think about such “adoptions?” First of all, we have the corresponding phenomena of lesbians deliberately impregnating themselves either by natural means with the assistance of a willing male or by artificial means with the aid of a sperm bank. This arrangement is condoned because a single woman “has a right to a child.”
In the case of males, it is a bit more complicated. They have either to impregnate a woman with the agreement that the resulting child would be taken by the father or they use in vitro with a surrogate mother who is paid to bear the child. Again the reason for this process is that a man has a “right to a child.”
Does such a rationale make sense? Can we morally think of children from the viewpoint of only one progenitor? No male or female alone has a right to a child, but only a right to marry and to share in the marital embrace. As Donum vitae states, “The child has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage.”
The Church has largely withdrawn from the area of caring for children who are potentially up for adoption because in many places the law now requires that adoption of children by same-sex couples be facilitated. The rationale given for such adoption is, again, that this homosexual couple has a “right” to children. Nota bene: Not to their children, which is impossible, but to children in general.
This adoption claim is sometimes supported by sociological “evidence” that homosexual couples can do just as well as man/woman couples—though the support for such claims is very weak. No doubt some heterosexual men and women mess up their children’s lives. No doubt some homosexual individuals are decent enough. The primary issue remains the duty a parent has to the child.
The child and its good is the context in which we must think of homosexual or any other sort of adoption. The child exists for its own sake, not to fulfill some so-called “need” or “right” of parents.
What are we to make of this reasoning that would justify homosexual adoptions? If we think about it, we must begin by recalling that two men or two women cannot as such beget anything of each other. This is not just a fact, but an indication of what ought to be.
As Aristotle understood it, any relationship that two homosexual men or women have is, from the point of view of parenthood, “in vain.” The relationship has no natural purpose. It can never naturally result in the fruit of children. In reaction to this fact, people who are homosexual claim that nature is depriving them of something they have, as individuals, a “right” to. These individuals proceed to argue that their “right” must be supplied by legal adoption of existing children without parents. Such adoption is then portrayed as an act of charity on the part of the homosexual couple remedying the problem of abandoned or orphaned children.
The starting point for thinking of adoption is not the parents but the child. What is due to the child? Parents do not to have a “right” to a child. With the proper qualification, persons have a right to marry. If a man and woman marry and children result from their relationship, they both have an obligation to love and care for any resulting children in a proper home.
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The word “marriage” can only be applied to a relationship of a man and woman that is not intrinsically sterile – their embrace has the unique capacity of begetting a new life. To use the term “marriage” of a homosexual relation is simply equivocal. Such a union has nothing to do with sex or marriage in its primary meaning as a relation from which children can be conceived and born.
Put differently, the child needs both a mother and a father. Any adoption system must begin here, with what the child needs, not with what the parent needs or has a “right” to for his or her own self-esteem. It is an act of blind injustice to place a child in a home where it does not have the gift of both a mother and a father.
Every homosexual adoption is objectively an act of injustice to the adopted child. It is not only a question of justice to the child but to the homosexual individuals themselves. It protects them from the delusion that they can somehow provide what they intrinsically lack by nature. The state that provides for such an irregular adoption is itself violating its obligation in justice to the children it is by law and nature designed to protect.
Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., taught political science at Georgetown University for many years. His latest book, The Mind That Is Catholic, is published by Catholic University of America Press. His forthcoming book Remembering Belloc will be available from St. Augustine Press in the spring of 2013.
