Honour thy Father and Mother’ is an instruction that comes to us from on High. But it is not just a Catholic or Christian demand. Until recently it had been timeless and universal. It was an instruction that was central to the proper organising of society. It was often taken as a given, an objective truth.
Why was that? Children were begotten, not made, so to speak. They came into the world through the natural ordering of society, where a man and woman came together, in union, two flesh becoming one. It was not just the natural order, it was the social order too. Children were a gift, sometimes not necessarily a desired gift, but a gift nonetheless.
Parents were landed with children, usually – although not always and sometimes quite often – after fulfilling the social obligation of marriage, and its subsequent consummation. Parents did not will their children into the world, but they came into the world sometimes as a complete surprise, and had to be looked after and reared.
The rearing took sacrifice. Parents found themselves with a responsibility and a burden, where for each of them, and for each and every day, they had to choose again and again, whether to accept that responsibility and give the child a future, however imperfect. And for each day that responsibility was filled, in return was the expectation that the Father and Mother would be honoured in reciprocation.
But the world has changed now. No longer are children begotten, they are made. Whether it is through contraception, IVF and now surrogacy, the arrival of a child is much more deliberate. Abortion is involved here, too. The child’s existence in the world is no longer the happy fault or the unexpected gift, but the product of a conscious decision of parents to create the child.
Contraception means that a child is no longer begotten but brought to life through an (often deliberate) act of omission on the part of parents. IVF means that children are brought into the world through the willed commission (often paid for) of adults who desire that child to be created, not for its own sake, but for theirs.
Through surrogacy, the child is brought into the world by adults often for the exact same reasons but compounded by the selfish act of denying the willed child a relationship with their natural, genetic parents, for the sake of the commissioning parents.
Abortion and its legalisation, its promotion and its normalisation, provides parents with the means of decommissioning any child that is begotten into the world, for their own sake, not his or hers.
This reshaping of the parent child relationship has a profound effect on society, one that we are only starting to see. Increasingly, children look not to their parents as people who sacrificed for their sake but as the people who are responsible for the sufferings and imperfections in life they have to endure.
The relationship is turned on its head. A child now finds the source of any suffering, sadness, pain, loneliness, in the wilful commissioning by their parents. No longer is filial duty owed in response to sacrifice, instead there is a growing phenomenon of children choosing to divorce from their parents as intergenerational resentment rises. Children blame parents for bringing them into a brutish world instead of thanking them for preparing them for, protecting them from, its harshest vagaries.
Irish governments continue to adopt increasingly ‘progressive’ social policy options, with surrogacy being the most recent but unlikely to be the last or most extreme, that place the interests of prospective parents ahead of what is best for children.
The truism that every child should be a wanted child, often touted as a justification for liberal abortion regimes, is one that will have social ramifications into the future that have not yet been considered.