Ultimately only love gives life

Friday, July 24th, 2015

“It is not enough to simply generate a life – it is necessary to provide a loving context because ultimately only love gives life,” says Dr John Kleinsman, director of the New Zealand Catholic Bioethics Centre.

‘And that means the ‘proper place’ for children to be conceived is in a loving marriage between a mother and father.

Kleinsman says Catholic belief is that technology to assist in conception undermines “the dignity that is owed to us as persons when it takes conception out of the personal and quintessentially human paradigm characterised by a self-giving unconditional love”.

A lengthy article in the Herald on Sunday says that as lifestyles and relationships change, and new and advancing fertility technologies are discovered, so too does the make-up of the modern family.

The traditional family is still the most represented according to Statistics New Zealand (couples with children rose from 447,894 in 2006 to 469,290 in 2013) but alternatives are on the increase.

Single-parent families, for example, jumped from 193,635 to 201,804 and numbers of extended families living together has gone from 82,692 to 100,605 over the seven-year period.

It means a generation of children will be growing up with a new “normal” when it comes to the concept of family.

The article refers to claims by a University of Cambridge professor that, based on 35 years of international research, children brought up in “new family forms”, such as same-sex families, and children born from IVF do as well as children from traditional families.

It also asserts that a lack of mother or father figures in the home didn’t adversely affect children, as long as they had stable and supportive parental role models.

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