by Stefano Vaj
[408] His assistant Laura de Paoli, to whom we owe this tale, has even told Chiara Valentini (La fecondazione proibita, p. 26) that at least ten years prior to the birth of Louise Brown in England, Petrucci, who died of a hearth attack in 1973, would have clandestinely implanted many embryos in Germany and Italy. The official position of the Catholic Church on this matter has been sanctioned by the forty pages of Istruzione sul rispetto della vita umana nascente et la dignità della procreazione, on demand by John Paul II and signed by cardinal Ratzinger (until 2013 pope Benedict XVI). Less obvious are the protests against IVF, at least at the beginning, by several feminists (an international collective, the FINRAGE, Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, claimed, not without merit, that “conception outside the body of the mother facilitates eugenic manipulation and control”); and above all those rooted in the green-ecologist circles. “Like in the case of other manipulations of nature, also on ‘artificial children’ there was the suspicion of ‘breaching the boundaries’, like in other fields dominated by pro-science culture. Taking this position even further, a group of mostly male environmentalists, among them the green leader Alex Langer, had issued a document to declare themselves in solidarity with cardinal Ratzinger in his condemnation of the test tube and of genetic manipulation. What is most interesting is that many intellectuals took their distance in the ensuing polemic, not so much because of the issue itself, but because they did not want to ally with the ever-more conservative church” (Chiara Valentini, ibidem, p. 53; see also the writings of a group of female editors of Nuova Ecologia with the title “Quanta confusione su Ratzinger,” in the far-left Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, May 8th 1987).
[409] See Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. XI.
[410] This irrespective of the truly absurd regulations by statute enacted by the Italian Parliament on IVF, which, “christianly” considering the manipulation and possible discarding of the embryos as homicidal and blasphemous, today allows that embryos may be produced and conserved but…only very few at a time (see the bizarre compromise of the “three-children rule”: “given that we don’t dare to simply prohibit the method, and that one embryo is too few for in vitro fertilisation to be feasible in practice, let’s feign that killing up to a maximum of three is not sinful”). The only consequence of this is to necessitate the repetition of procedures and treatments that are as useless and expensive as they are dangerous and unpleasant for the mother – perhaps this gives her an opportunity to expiate her desire for an offspring in defiance of Providence… Not only that: the reimplantation of an embryo recognised to have defective genes is, as we have seen, at least in theory compulsory in spite of the mother’s freedom to abort it later on (!) – although such an obligation can of course not be coerced and is probably in violation of article 32 of the Italian Constitution. Furthermore: heterologous donor insemination is forbidden, but the husband’s (or … “companion’s”) consent to such procedure is proclaimed valid to the effect of preventing the possibility of a later denial of paternity (a provision with obvious purposes, but odd all the same since it discriminates for no clear reason the situation in which fecundation occurs without the consent of the putative father, but…via normal sexual intercourse); vice versa, while the wellbeing and/or respect for the potential, unborn child is claimed to be the fundamental principle of this law, the implantation into a mother other than the one who provided the ovule is prohibited, even when the latter is in no way capable of going through a pregnancy; so is, unconditionally, the reimplantation of an embryo of a father dead before insemination (a practice clearly regarded as too “Faustian”); thus mandating the discarding of the unfortunate embryos concerned even when everybody would like to see them becoming full-fledged children. Cf. Chiara Valentini, La fecondazione proibita, op. cit.; but consistent opponents of IVF are equally willing to stress the absurdity of this law; see, for instance, ed. Giuseppe Garrone, Fecondazione extra corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo, op. cit.
[411] The real distinction between males and females in sexed species has of course nothing to do, as in the popular imagination, with the extroversion or introversion of the respective reproductive organs, which at most concern mammals, nor with some form or other of in-body conception or gestation (in species of fish the female deposit the eggs that are fertilised only afterwards, and in species of insects where the fertilised eggs are conserved in a body sac by the male), but with the fact of generating a very large number of very small gametes, or a small number of rather large gametes. Such distinction, that applies universally to sexed species, from humans to angiosperm plants, determines the known “sociobiology” of reproductive strategies of both sexes. In any case, if for men there are normally no problems of depletion, or exhaustion with time, of one’s gametes reservoir, recent discoveries regarding the increase of genetic risk linked to advanced parental age also on the side of the father might make it advisable also for young men to stock their sperm in their prime for a possible later use.
[412] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 58.
[413] In his contribution to Fecondazione extra corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo, ed. Giuseppe Garrone, op. cit., p. 38.
[414] Hervé Kempf, La révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., pp. 49-52.
[415] Contraceptive methods, especially hormonal and intrauterine methods, allow one to determine at least negatively the identity of the father of one’s own offspring, preventing intercourse to lead to a pregnancy with a partner who for whatever reason is considered unsuitable, and avoiding that parental investment be taken up by undesirable offspring.
[416] Selective abortion has in its turn been made possible by prognoses, radically improving over those based on family medical history in their capacity to discriminate a single embryo, that are enabled by clinical procedures such as amniocentesis and above all chorionic villus testing that has the merit of being practicable at an earlier stage and of carrying fewer risks. (Cf. Harry Harris, Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion). New techniques about to be patented would allow even less invasive diagnostic maneuvers, based on a simple and minimal sample of foetal blood.
[417] Cf. Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. XII.
[418] From the introduction to Giuseppe Garrone (ed.), Fecondazione extra corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo, op. cit., p. 11.
[419] This discriminates, amongst other things, against cases in which the couple is perfectly able to conceive naturally, but the father has a venereal disease, or the mother is not able to carry the pregnancy to term, or even where the health or life of the mother would be seriously jeopardised by pregnancy. It also forces a couple susceptible to conceive of a defective embryo, who would have been easy to select away in vitro, to expose the mother to the risk of having to abort, perhaps many times, in order to be able to conceive a healthy child. Furthermore, it is rather ridiculous that, according to the current state of the law, the “couple” – whose existence and joint participation is necessary to make the assistance of the physician legal – must, in addition to being composed of persons of different gender, have… the same residence, which of course excludes all those domiciled elsewhere for whatever reason, while apparently allowing incestuous IFV amongst members of the same family (!). It remains unclear however if the law applies to the case when the fecundation takes place in utero, not as the result of intercourse, but of artificial insemination. If this is not the case, a woman could freely continue to buy sperm on the market, while any use of an ovule outside the female body would inevitably fall under the rigour of the law discussed herein.
[420] See A. McLaren, “Embryo Research,” in Nature, 1986, p. 320 (quoted in Fecondazione corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo, ed. Giuseppe Garrone, op. cit., p. 45.) The idea had already been advanced by the Warnock Committee, put in place by the British government to help legislators clarify the matter. Cf. Department of Health and Social Security, Report of
the Committee of Inquiring into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, London 1984.
[421] The “strategy” most often considered by those among the Catholics who do not want to rule out any recourse to assisted procreation, is that of collecting the sperm from a conjugal sexual intercourse from the vagina (so as to avoid masturbation, which by the way could be bypassed by some rather unpleasant surgical removal of sperm from the epididymis, to which one has recourse anyway in case of oligospermia), and a preservative (in which one shall have made a small hole, in order not to completely obstruct any possible God-ordained natural conception), at the same time as the removal of an ovule by the usual procedure. On the other hand, in order to avoid that fecundation takes place outside the body, which has been expressly forbidden by the teachings of the Church, the ovule and the spermatozoa must be implanted one after the other in the body of the woman before it takes place (the use of a small air bubble is advised in order to delay the “marriage” of the two until they find themselves “saintly” inside their vas natural). See on this matter the explanations given by the catholic gynecologist Nicola Garcea in the interview “Se le cicogne tardano a venire,” ed. Delia Vaccarello, on L’Unità of November 7th 1991. The procedure discussed is also known as “GIFT” (!).
[422] Cf. CIOMS, International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects, Geneva 1993.
[423] Langer and Vacanti, “Artificial Organs,” in Scientific American, September 1995.
[424] Hervé Kempf, La révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 74.
[425] Steve Connor, Deborah Cadbury, „Headless Frog Opens Way for Human Organ Factory,” Sunday Times, 19th October 1997.
[426] For example, it will be possible to clone and produce, instead of a whole individual, just a liver, either the sort destined to be consumed as foie gras or one usable for a human transplant, in the latter event irrespective of the the essentially theological problem of whether “human rights” or the regulations protecting the physically-challenged (here lacking limbs, nervous system and all sorts of other things normally available to an individual of our species) would be applicable to the liver concerned.
[427] Spengler wrote in the thirties: “It pertains to the essence of human technology that in every invention is inherent the virtuality and the necessity of more inventions, that every fulfilled desire generates a thousand others, that every triumph over nature is the impetus to greater triumphs. The thirst of this predator cannot be quenched, his will can never be satisfied; this is the curse that befalls this life form, but also the greatness of its destiny. It is precisely to the most excellent human specimens that rest, happiness and pleasure are unknown. And no inventor has ever accurately predicted the true consequences of his invention.” (Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (ult. ed. C.H. Beck Verlag, Monaco 1991). English edition Man and Technics. A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, University Press of the Pacific, 2002. Here p. 91 of the Italian edition, op. cit.)
[428] “In reality, the inventor’s passion has nothing to do with consequences. It doesn’t matter whether his invention is useful or detrimental, fertile or destructive; and it wouldn’t matter to the inventor even if he too knew it right from the start. But no one predicts the effect of a “technical conquest of humanity” – not to mention that “humanity” as such has never invented anything. It is probable that discoveries in the field of chemistry such as synthetic indigo and artificial rubber will soon disrupt the life of entire nations; the electric transportation of energy and the use of hydroelectricity have devalued the areas rich in fossil fuels as well as their inhabitants. Have reflections of this kind ever induced an inventor to destroy his work? Whoever believes that has little knowledge of man’s predatory nature. All great inventions and enterprise have their source in the joy that strong men feel in victory.” (ibidem p. 108)
[429] It is unquestionable that the rocket and the digital calculator, DNA, heredity and mutations, the atom and long distance reception/transmission, as well as recording, of sounds and images, the microscope, pathogens, combustion engines and quantum theory, all this was discovered and invented during a time lapse that corresponds to the lifespan of a human being, roughly speaking from 1870 to 1950, corresponding to an acceleration of history that simultaneously manifests in every field of social, political and cultural life. Much of what has been achieved since can be regarded as at most a refinement, an improvement, an application, a by-product of things thought out at that time, and this even when such developments are actually taking place. The Westerner of the 1970s had good reasons to find it plausible that by 1982 the first humans would land on Mars or the first nuclear fusion plant be built, and he was used at the time to cross the Atlantic on supersonic passenger planes that were taken out of use many years ago. The United States risk, following the definitive withdrawal of their disastrous Shuttle, having to resort to Russian technology from the days of the first lunar landing (!) to transport equipment to the so-called International Space Station.
[430] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 113.
[431] Massimo Fini, Sudditi. Manifesto contro la democrazia, Marsilio Editori, Venezia 2004, p. 98.
[432] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes.Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. (1918), ult. ed. Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, Monaco 1997. Ultimate English edition edition: The Decline of the West, Vintage 2006 (abridged); Kessinger publisher 2003 for the complete edition in two volumes.
[433] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes.Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, op. cit.
[434] Ernst Jünger, Worker. Dominion and Gestalt, op. cit.
[435] Nietzsche The Will to Power Book III.
[436] On this conception of history see Giorgio Locchi, “Il senso della storia,” in l’Uomo libero no. 11, as well as Wagner, Nietzsche e il mito sovrumanista, Akropolis, Rome 1982, and its popularisation by authors like Armin Mohler or Alain de Benoist (cf. for instance “Fondements nominalistes d’une attitude devant la vie,” in Nouvelle Ecole no. 33, June 1979, translated into Italian by Stefano Vaj, “L’idea nominalista,” in l’Uomo libero no. 7).