Part 1
Part 2

This lecture was delivered as a combined session for the preconference institutes prior to the 2009 CBHD summer conference, Global Bioethics: Emerging Challenges Facing Human Dignity.

Part 2
Part 3

This lecture was delivered as a combined session for the preconference institutes prior to the 2009 CBHD summer conference, Global Bioethics: Emerging Challenges Facing Human Dignity.

Sex, without babies? Behold the origin of our conundrums in reproductive ethics! Our culture developed the technology to separate the sexual act from procreation, classically with the extramarital use of the Pill (in the sexual revolution), and thus was unleashed a host of problems that have plagued us ever since. So the argument goes.¹ We would have no reproductive ethical dilemmas had we kept together the sexual act and procreation.

As a medical student, I did Obstetrics Gynecology training in 1973. Afterward, I pursued a career in Internal Medicine and Nephrology and, other than with my wife and two sons, never entered a delivery room or cared for either of the two persons combined in a single pregnancy. The timing of my Obstetrics education, however, must have been propitious. The date should hearken back to a year that still lives in infamy—the year of Roe v. Wade.