Word: motherhood
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Since it was introduced last January, TIME's Ethics section has examined the dilemmas of conscience posed by such modern practices as surrogate motherhood, tests and treatments for AIDS, removal of feeding tubes from terminally ill patients and advances in genetic engineering. This week our ethical inquiry is set on a much wider stage. It is an exploration of the rules and practices of American politics, business and society at large...
...Vatican, too, raised a storm last March when it issued a document calling for legal restraints on medical manipulation of human birth, including in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and termination of flawed fetuses. Moral traditionalists of all faiths cheered. Biomedical science, they claimed, must not intrude on natural life processes. But many liberals sided with Michigan Lawyer Noel Keane, a pioneer in arranging surrogate agreements, who reportedly declared, "I think the church is a little out of touch with reality." The document has prompted serious debate, but so far it has moved the country no closer to a consensus...
...opinion piece entitled "Mommie Dearest," Steven Lichtman followed almost all his fellow journalists and ignored one of the most basic questions raised by the issue of surrogate motherhood: Do Americans wants to be pioneers in a modern-day baby business? Slavery, I've always thought, was abolished over 100 years ago. Yet today, our society is contemplating--allowing, for the time being--the legalization of baby-buying...
...work at least as much a part of the great artist--that genius which is peculiar to and defines him--as the child is of the surrogate mother? I would argue that it is even more so. The moral strength of "motherhood" doesn't derive from the mere carrying of the child. The mechanical rigors of childbirth are common to all women. The spirit and personality of the parent are not imparted so much in the biological production of the child as in the nurturing and rearing...
...into the 19th century the emotions of parenthood were hypothetically involved when children were abandoned to baby farms, workhouses and, most frequently, to wet nurses, who assumed the duties of motherhood for two to five years of a child's life. In Dickensian realities, the only emotion expended by institutions like workhouses was greed. The relationship that probably comes closest to the Baby M. case was that between a governess and her charges, whom she was technically hired to tutor and discipline, but for whom, more often than not, she provided tenderness and affection as well. Rochester paid Jane Eyre...