Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

THE MORALITY OF ADOPTING FROZEN EMBRYOS 127
of technological impregnation are wrong. 24 According to Geach,
any kind of technological impregnation is wrong because like
adultery (for a married woman) or fornication (for an unmarried
woman), it is against the virtue of chastity. That is, it is
unchaste for a woman to allow herself to become impregnated
with a baby who has come to be in any way other than through
the act she performs in sexual intercourse with her spouse. 25
At first glance, this last claim seems obviously wrong. For
what could have less to do with a woman’s exercise of the virtue
of chastity – the temperate exercise of her sexual desire – than a
technological impregnation, the act of allowing a technician to
implant an embryo in her womb? Furthermore, it does not even
appear to have anything to do with the generative good (or telos)
of an act of sexual intercourse, that of the conception of a
human being. For in her act of allowing an embryo to be
implanted in her womb, there is no goal of conception, since the
embryo already exists. For these two reasons, this action
appears to have nothing to do either with chastity understood as
a form of temperance, or with the act that potentially conceives
a human being.
In response to the view that a technological impregnation
has nothing to do with chastity traditionally understood (i.e. as
a form of the virtue of temperance), Geach responds that the
traditional understanding of chastity, while correct as far as it
goes, is inadequate. Sexual temperance is only part (and not the
most important part!) of the virtue of chastity that a woman
exercises. Fundamentally, chastity for a woman lies in her maintaining
her “reproductive integrity.” 26 According to Geach, a part
of a woman’s reproductive integrity consists in her commitment
24 See Geach (1999).
25 Geach uses the term “marriage act” rather than sexual intercourse to
indicate the kind of act through which a child is to come to be. This term has
the consequence of collapsing different kinds of acts into the category of
“marriage acts.”
26 “So,” according to Geach, “the question about the woman who allows
herself to be made pregnant by technology is whether she is doing this: is
dis-integrating the marriage act by using a part of it out of context.” Geach
(1999), p. 344.