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The right to bear children
Read the article / show / issue that provoked me to write a letter and my response below that or go straight to my response
Date Posted on this Site
May 11, 2009
Publication
Toronto Star
Publication Date
May 9, 2009
Published Content
Stuart Laidlaw
There are two things in Ashley Bulley-Arbos's house she always wanted, but feared she would never see.
Cribs.
"We had them set up at five months," says Bulley-Arbos, now seven months pregnant with twins thanks to in-vitro fertilization. "It was pretty exciting."
Married to her high school sweetheart, Bulley-Arbos never had any doubt she wanted children. Not many, but she knew she would never feel complete if she didn't have kids with the man she loves, Adrian Arbos.
More than that, she says, it's her right to be a mother – and she wasn't going to let a little thing like infertility get in her way.
"It's not a want, it's a need for me," she says. "If I hadn't ever got pregnant, I could never be happy."
The 25-year-old is now an active member of Conceivable Dreams, a support group for couples needing medical help to get pregnant.
Tomorrow, Mother's Day, the group will lead a march at 10 a.m. from City Hall to Queen's Park with 200 women pushing empty strollers to demand that the province fund in-vitro fertilization. Quebec recently announced that it would soon begin funding up to three IVF cycles per couple.
Bulley-Arbos's friends and neighbours rallied to help her and Arbos raise two-thirds of the $15,000 cost for IVF. She will speak at the rally – dubbed the Pram Push – to tell her story of relying on bake sales, community barbecues and a Bands for Babies charity concert to raise the money.
"It took us a while to get over that we were going to charity," she says.
No one, Bulley-Arbos says, should have to rely on handouts to pay for a medical treatment. "It should be anybody's right to have a baby. This is a medical procedure," she says.
Not everyone agrees.
"It's a perfectly private matter, it's a private interest," says Udo Schuklenk, a medical ethicist at Queen's University.
Being a parent is not a right, he says.
My Response Letter
Although I feel greatly for those who have difficulty conceiving, no one has the right to kill children in order to have children.
Far from benign, in-vitro fertilization requires the creation of several embryos... real human beings! What happens to those real human beings? Many will be die during the implantation process. Others will be discarded once a child is conceived. Still others will be destroyed in scientific experimentation, many for their stem cells.
Most definitely, those that survive are children of God and must be loved, respected, and protected. But we are not a society of utility, where the end justifies any means. We cannot destroy life in order to create life and, most certainly, the government should not allow or fund such immorality.
Jason Gennaro
Was my response published?
No