Besides Oliver O’Donovan, one of the most powerful Christian bio-ethicists that I have come across is Paul Ramsey. Ramsey’s Fabricated Man struck my heart with the clarity it brought to our views of children, and the manner in which they are brought (or not brought) into the world. If you read two bio-ethics books this year, get O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made?, and Ramsey’s Fabricated Man.
Excerpted from page 88 of Ramsey’s book:
“We procreate new beings like ourselves in the midst of our love for one another, and in this there is a trace of the original mystery by which God created the world because of His love. God created nothing apart from His love, and without the divine love was not anything made that was made (John 1). Neither should there be among men and women, whose man-womanhood (and not their minds or wills only) is in the image of God, any love making set out of the context of responsibility for procreation or any begetting apart from the sphere of human love and responsiveness. Thus is our man-womanhood created in covenant and for covenant - the covenant of marriage and the covenant of parenthood.
Men may be able to subdue the mystery of procreation, they may be able to subdue all the wonders of human sexual response, in their sciences. But they can not subdue the mystery in the fact that eminently human communications of marital love are also the places where we engage as pro-creators, and establish and step into the covenant of parenthood. Men can only deny that there is any mystery to be honored here; they can only reduce the matter to an accident of biological nature that could as well not have been so, or could be changed to vegetative reproduction. Herein men usurp dominion over the human - the dominion they hold rightfully only over the animals. This is bound to pierce the heart of the hunmanum in sex, marriage, and generation.”
‘BH
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