Texas high court wrangles over life

Or rather, this court is wrestling with a power struggle over frozen embryos and who gets to control them.

Augusta Roman wants to keep the embryos and try to have a baby. Randy Roman wants them destroyed, or at least kept frozen.

The case of Roman vs. Roman now before the Texas Supreme Court pits her right to have children using the embryos against his right not to have children. 

They already have them, in these embryos. Life of the species Homo sapiens is human life, and at this embryonic stage, they still have to mature and grow, the way all human persons continue to grow through the phases of life.

They sort of realize that…

A court order to discard the embryos would violate Augusta’s moral beliefs. To her, it would be the same as the state forcing her to have an abortion.

“If I was pregnant with these embryos, no one should come and say to me abort them,” Augusta said. “There is no difference between embryos inside the womb and outside the womb. I’m already pregnant. It’s just implanting.

“It will never be a symbolic fight for me,” Augusta said. “I’m praying the courts won’t destroy my future children.”

…but the fuzzy thinking shows up there in the term ‘future children’, because, they’re already there.

You know, the slippery slope that has become a vertical plunge was predicted by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae.

It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

He wrote that in 1968, and here we are.

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions…

It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching.

Prophetic words, again. 

There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a “sign of contradiction.” She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.

Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.

In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way she defends the dignity of husband and wife.

No social or civil liberties activism can match the work of the Church in looking out for the common good.