47: Technologizing Babies, Forging Nations

The hosts talk with Matthew Lee Anderson about his piece on whether there is a right to have children. How does your relationship to your children change if you regard them as products rather than gifts? Then they discuss the specific ethical issues of in vitro fertilization, and reflect on the technologization of fertility through the lens of C. S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength. Then, Susannah speaks with Pater Edmund Waldstein about the role of monasteries in Christendom, and how their witness to the supernatural life of the church complements the life of the natural family. They go on to discuss questions of political order: since grace perfects but does not destroy nature, how should we think about polity? Is an ethnostate the only “natural” polity? Should we be trying to restore the Holy Roman Empire? Pater and Susannah solve all these problems definitively.