Is Your Mother Legal?

Now Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.This week’s item is from The Baltimore Sun May 17, 2007, with a headline:Ruling Alters Idea of Mother.The following are excerpts:A baby conceived from an egg donated by one woman and implanted in another may have no mother at all under Maryland law, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday.The court’s 4 to 3 opinion creates blank spaces under mother in birth certificates of twins born in 2001.The man who arranged for the children to be born from his sperm and donated eggs, and the woman with whom he arranged to carry them, brought the case.The two wanted it made clear that she had no legal claims or responsibility for the children.The man wanted to be a biological father, so he arranged to create a child of his own with donated eggs from one woman and gestation provided by another.The hospital however, place a surrogate on the birth certificate as the mother.When the man tried to have the surrogate removed from the birth certificate the judge balked, saying, We didn’t see any authority in the law to do that.The egg donor was not involved in the case.These are troubling and controversial issues among theologians as well, said the Reverent John R. Sharp, “This is a revolution, and we need further study on the ethical, legal and psychological ramifications of surrogate motherhood,” he said.

Tom:

Dave, isn’t it amazing what kind of mess humanity can put themselves in just by trying to work things out according to their own ways, not according to God’s way?This is, not just convoluted. You have a child even though there has to be a natural birth mother, but is it really a natural birth mother?For example, you have an egg and a sperm, so that has to come together to produce something; now you have that implanted in another woman as the surrogate carrier of this fetus—wow!

Dave:

Well Tom, you’ve given us a news item that I really don’t even know what to say about.It’s going to get worse, I mean, wehaven’t got to cloning yet.I don’t know when they will, but eventually—You see, if we went back to Genesis 11, and the tower of Babel and why did God confound languages and scatter them?Because He said, Whatever they imagine they will be able to perform.And Genesis makes it very clear the imagination of man’s heart is evil continually, only evil, it says in fact.So you want to get off on your imagination—you are trying to make things be what they are not, you’re trying to somehow change God’s order.

Tom:

That creates will, doesn’t it, Dave?I mean, part of the imagination is just not that something magical is going to happen, but there’s a rebelliousness, there’s a willfulness against what God has laid out that’s a major part of this, isn’t it?

Dave:

Yeah, but of course, we recently did some programs on The Secret.The whole idea of The Secret is you can be what you want to be, do what you want to do.

Tom:

Create reality with your mind.

Dave:

Right.So, God said, Whatever they imagined, okay, that’s the mind now, is evil.You know what cancer is, Tom, it’s a cell that has gone wild.It’s not following the original DNA orders but something has gone wrong and it’s doing it’s own thing.Isn’t this what the hippies used to say, “Do your own thing, man, do your own thing.”You know, everybody wants to do their own thing.But we are teaching rebellion to our children, it makes it very difficult in the public schools, but because they do not want to be under the law of God.We’ve thrown the Ten Commandments out of the public schools, we’ve thrown it out of society, we want to sort of honor God in an off-hand way so that we are not totally pagans.

Tom:

Right, but Dave, it’s a situational ethics, but the situation has gotten out of hand, it’s crazy!

Dave:

Well, it will only get worse.Paul writes, “Evil men and seducers will wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.”But Tom, as to the specifics of this, how would you unravel this? I do not believe that it is something that people should be involved in.Now, if a woman cannot bear, or the man cannot father a child, well, I guess that’s in God’s hands.Now, you want to pray about it and see if God will do a miracle?That has happened in many cases, but to take this into your own hands and begin to play around with the way God has created man and woman, you are in rebellion, I believe, against God’s will.Now the problem, Tom, becomes—see, I often say, “Look, the so-called gay life style, they have gay pride parades, how can you be proud of something which if everybody adopted it, it’s the end of the human race because these people don’t produce children.”Ah, but now we can do it artificially.So you can have a couple of lesbians living together and they can have children.So now they are circumventing God’s way of doing things.Tom, the rebellion, if the Lord tarries, is only going to get worse, and to try to reason from the scriptures with anyone about this as the only solution they are not going to accept that at all.

Tom:

Right, and Dave, as the rebellion gets worse the ramifications, the consequences, just as we are seeing here, the courts don’t know what to do with this.We’ve got people trying to match this and make this work out and so on and so forth, it’s sad, it’s really tragic, it’s worse than sad.