Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

THE MORALITY OF ADOPTING FROZEN EMBRYOS 135
might make these decisions imprudent or even morally wrong,
they are not wrong in principle.
Let us next examine Surtees’s objection to giving up the
embryo for adoption, namely, that such an action denies “the
children the parental love they are by natural justice entitled to
from their original parents. It is never licit to reject one’s own
child…” 36 From this Surtees draws a principle that it is never
permissible to create a child with the intent to give it up for
adoption. This claim finds support in DV, which in the context
of a critique of surrogate motherhood speaks of the “right of the
child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the
world and brought up by his own parents.” 37 However, interpreted
in one way, the claims made by Surtees and DV regarding
what biological parents owe their children could be interpreted
as ruling out not only giving up an embryo for adoption, but also
giving up a child for adoption. For both actions would seem to
contravene the rights due to a child on one understanding of
these rights. On this view, it would thus seem to be wrong for
any Catholic agency to ever counsel a woman in crisis pregnancy
to consider giving up a baby for adoption and then find an
adoptive home for him or her. Again, perhaps both DV and
Surtees should be understood to be making the more modest
claim stated above, that one should not bring into existence children
whom one does not intend to gestate and raise. In other
words, perhaps the principle is something like the following: one
should not seek to conceive and/or gestate a child one does not
intend to raise. This would seem to be a reasonable moral principle,
indicating the wrongfulness of bringing children into existence
while planning in advance to abandon those children.
However, couples who have embryos created in vitro do not
typically set out to give up some of their embryos for adoption.
Typically, it is only after a successful pregnancy that they consider
offering some of their embryos for adoption. For those
who plan in advance to leave this option open, this is a kind of
36 Surtees (1996), 8. Surtees later elaborates and further specifies what
he means by “reject” (p. 14, n. 4). However, that qualification, if taken seriously,
vitiates the force of the argument he is making at this point in the
paper.