“What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge’s warning is like the ghost of Jacob Marley foretelling our doom, but unlike Scrooge, we don’t seem willing to hear. Two recent news stories illustrate.

Like Passing the Baton

First comes a history-making scientific experiment that allowed two women in Texas to carry the same child before birth. They did it with “a cutting edge process called reciprocal effortless In Vitro Fertilization using INVOcell.”

US magazine reports: “The same-sex couple, Ashleigh Coulter, 28, and Bliss Coulter, 36, say they always wanted to find a way to have a child together, and new advances in fertilization techniques allowed that to happen in one sense: they both were able to carry the child at different points in the baby’s development.”

Harvested eggs from Bliss fertilized by donor sperm were placed in the chamber of the INVOcell device, which Bliss carried in her vagina for five days. Then the embryos were frozen, then finally transferred to Ashleigh’s womb. “Almost like passing the baton,” one of their doctors said.

This pregnancy and birth story is being framed and sold as an incredible achievement of medicine, and a barrier-crushing victory for the “LGBTQ community.” We’re supposed to read it with a noisemaker and confetti in hand.

Sorry, no. It’s just the current zenith in human manufacturing. It’s the latest “cutting-edge” example of our desire to be God and determine the course of human life on our own terms.

I’ll Trade Ya

Second comes the story of Lisa, a woman who had a girl, but wanted a boy, so she asked if anyone would swap kids with her. Seriously.

As the New York Post reported:

The 37-year-old actress is so desperate to have another son, she is ready to trade her one female embryo — the last embryo she has remaining after multiple rounds of IVF — for the male embryo of a stranger. “I’m doing this for my son,” she told The Post. “My husband grew up with sisters and wants a boy too. This is the way we want to complete our family.”

So she used social media to ask if anyone out there had a male embryo to exchange for a female embryo. The Post story says she found an interested party. An embryo-swap will be negotiated.

The Human Market

And the next envelope is pushed, and the line is moved farther back, and the question of what is morally right is shouted down with charges of judgment and intolerance. We are God now. We decide what is right, and we do what pleases us.

In 2018, it pleases society to manufacture, trade and destroy tiny human beings at our pleasure. At its essence, this is human trafficking. People — extremely tiny ones — are being requisitioned, bought and sold, frozen, destroyed, and now even traded. This is the stuff of business and profit. We buy, sell, trade, and manufacture things that we own; things that we have power over; things that we control.

Human beings must never be treated as things we own and control.

Where is the Justice for the Child?

This is why the Catholic Church has always insisted that we have no right to separate procreation from the marital act. Manipulating the process of conception and creating embryos outside the womb is assuming God’s prerogative for ourselves. And it inevitably and predictably leads to turning babies into commodities.

It leads to man acting like God, assuming for himself the authority of God, the power over life and death. It leads to adults who trade babies because they simply don’t want a girl. It leads to doctors and mothers creating multiple children, manipulating them until they die, and now experimenting with God’s perfect design for gestation in order to satisfy their own wants.

In both these stories, notice the motivation: what the adults want.

“This is the way we want to complete our family.” Lisa

“Obviously, us being two women, we were like how can we make this happen? We felt like there has to be a way.” Ashleigh and Bliss

Children are God’s precious gift, and it is right and natural that men and women should long for a child. God planted that desire in our hearts. Yet He has ordained the manner in which children are created, and the foundation upon which the family is to be built, and that is marriage.

Children are the fruit of marriage because they need both father and mother. They are the fruit of the marital act because a child is a gift to be received, not demanded.

Is There Any Line We Won’t Cross?

If we already regard our children as assets to be traded, and experiments to be tried, then what is the cliff’s edge that will finally cause our society to stop and say, “This is too far. We have no right to do this”?

It used to be that parents taught their children, “You can’t have everything you want just because you want it.” Now whatever must be done to satisfy the adults’ wants, so be it. What is just and right toward the child is inconsequential.

If we will trample over even the lives and human dignity of our own children, is there anything that will stop us from satisfying our desire to be God? Scrooge learned the value of the smallest life and repented of his error.

Will we?