“I want to have children with you.”  These are the opening words of the U.S. Bishops’ new document on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology,
issued on November 17 (www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ).  The document is addressed specifically to married couples suffering from infertility and considering their options.  It attempts to balance a sincere empathy for their bitter experience of loss with clear guidance on ethically legitimate alternatives: “The Church has compassion for couples suffering from infertility and wants to be of real
help to them.”  The text acknowledges the temptation they can experience to cut a ‘faustian bargain’ in order to secure the object of their desperate desires.  And it encourages them to hope in God even in the face of human disappointment.  Specifically, it asks whether certain forms of assisted reproduction are consistent with the flourishing of marriage and with the duties we owe to nascent human life.  In the words of the statement: “Some solutions offer real hope for restoring a couple’s natural, healthy ability to have children. Others pose serious moral problems by failing to respect the dignity of the couple’s marital relationship, of their sexuality, or of the child.”

The Church has identified herself as an “expert in humanity” [1].  But who has the temerity to claim to be an expert in the female half of humanity?  The complete identity of the female—call it the nature of ‘femaleness’—is hidden in the complex body-soul unity which constitutes the human person.  And so an understanding of the female body is one key to unlock this complex reality.  But an understanding of the body is not enough to understand the person.  Although human persons are always bodily and human bodies always personal, persons are not reducible to their bodies. They are their bodies, but they are more than their bodies, because the animating principle that makes their bodies to be living bodies is a non-material soul.  But is there such thing as a properly “female soul”?  Can spirit per se be engendered?  These are weighty questions.

When God made man, he did not make a conscious subject aware of itself as a self to which he then added a body as an afterthought. Rather, when he made man, "male and female he created them," and he blessed them, saying: "Be fertile and multiply" (Gen 1:27-28).

Here I examine Charles J. Reid, Jr’s “Marriage: Its Relationship to Religion, Law, and the State,” Douglas Laycock’s “Afterword,” and offer final comments.

I summarized pp. 157-176 of Reid’s chapter in Part I of this review; in them he showed that traditionally in Western civilization and particularly in Anglo-American history marriage was regarded as “a divine institution.” Here I focus on the section “Marriage and the State” (176-187) and on his “Conclusion” (187-188).

1.    Ms. O’Leary, can you begin by helping us understand what is meant by feminism, and whether there are particular distinctions among feminists that are important to recognize?

It is important to distinguish liberal feminism from radical feminism and these from the search for authentic womanhood based on the truth about the human person.

If you were looking for another indicator of the cultural malaise to which our young are subjected today, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) delivered last week.   At the 2008 National STD Prevention Conference in Chicago, March 11th, they issued results of a nationally representative survey which found that slightly more that one in four (26%), or 3.2 million, teenage girls between ages 14 and 19 have contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD).  Among those infected, about 15% had more than one disease.  Some groups had about twice the national average – nearly half of young African American women or adolescents in the survey had an STD.