Sometimes, in my more somber moods, I wonder if mankind is pleasing to God – or mocking Him as we tinker with our laws of production and reproduction.
Can mankind create test tube babies?
In a sense, if you consider artificial insemination, the answer is yes. Talk show hosts and guests fling terminology without a blush, as if they were talking as glibly as they were discussing the weather.
Artificial insemination of both human and animal are regularly discussed in language as openly as planting and hoeing a garden. It seems as if people love to display their newfound freedom to spill their knowledge of things once considered to their grandparents too sacred to whisper out loud or in public.
That was the atmosphere of my childhood back in the early 1930s. I was a tender 13 when my father, Clifford, assembled a herd of Jersey cows imported from the Island of Jersey. One of them was a grand old cow named Lady Alden, then 12 years old and without calf. All dad had to do, the local vet told him, was to buy the proper equipment, collect semen from a bull and impregnate the cow.
Presto! She would be with calf. Nothing to it.
But that did not happen. So dad enrolled in a two-day program at the University of Kansas and tucked me in his old Chevy for the ride.
Needless to say, the first day of lectures kept my head tucked down in my adventure book, “The Frontier Boys in the Rockies.” The second day, when the live demonstrations were held, was a different story. I was horrified at what went on when the bull was brought in to demonstrate how semen was collected, and the horror was multiplied when the cow was brought in and I saw what happened next.
Unfortunately, Lady Alden never did breed and finally died without leaving any offspring. But my unfortunate introduction to AI left me a loathing of the practice. I never overcame that great distaste of what I realize now is an irrational and stupid opinion of a practice that has created millions of great animals that help feed the world.
Then came scientists who experimented with the removal of fertilized eggs from the reproductive tracts of a cow and inserting spare eggs into a surrogate mother. Thus, the genetic base was multiplied six or seven times. This is miniscule, of course, when compared to the almost finite supply of sperm that can be obtained with the male genes.
Then, someone reasoned, if sperm can be successfully frozen in liquid nitrogen at minus 30 degrees, thawed and remain valid, why not tiny embryos themselves? So science perfected that technique as well – but for what practical reason remains to be seen.
Suddenly the technology explosion has reached its highest level of the animal kingdom – homo sapiens himself. What was a sincere tool to help man feed and clothe himself better became a day-by-day toy.
With only casual or no attention to aspects involving inheritance and custody, without any consideration of emotional or psychological circumstances, the mad scientists have rushed into human experimentation of cloning, surely the most obscene of all.
The world will never be the same. And we can only ask ourselves, “What next?”
Have we become a nation of scientific murderers? To whom the sacred spark of life is only a lab experiment?
The most brutal abortionist pales beside such human deviants.
When will the womb itself be replaced by an artificial one?
Hear me.
Nature has labored for eons to perfect what we are, imperfect as we are. At worst we are children of nature; at best, children of a Higher Power that we have a right to deny.
The mating game was not or is not an accident. Who knows what thrill vibrates through the cosmos when man and woman join in love, who knows what indelible message is imprinted upon the new being conceived by the embrace of the Creator.
In the absence of it, what do we have? Men and women without fidelity. Institutions brimming with the emotionally crippled. Record suicide rates among the young – or irrational young with guns who murder as a means of self-gratification.
I truly pity the vast army of people who live in cities, who have no knowledge of or attachment to the reality of life. Living forever in the concrete jungles called cities.
And what do they learn of the true basics of life? Little or nothing. They need to be taught from day one of the basics of life. From where their food comes, who produces it, how and where.
Otherwise they will be conquered with their hands held out, plates and hearts empty, while those who know where food comes from will conquer them without firing a shot.
Farmers and farm families be proud. They do not know it, but our country men and women need us, more today than ever before.
