A Brave New World in Naperville?

There is a proposal to build a fertility clinic at Washington and Benton in Naperville. The proposed facility touches close to home for us. We’ve been trying to conceive for 29 months.

Not long ago, we were told by one specialist that if we ever wanted to become pregnant, we’d have to use in vitro fertilization. We know the pain and heartache that bring people to a fertility clinic like the one being proposed. We assume that couples going to such a clinic have the best of intentions, and we judge the hearts of no one who has taken this path.

But we strongly oppose the proposed clinic based on serious ethical concerns. The proposed facility is not ethically neutral; this is not the same as bringing in a family restaurant, a clothing store, or an optometrist. Some of the procedures associated with the proposed facility promote an understanding of the human person that undermines fundamental human rights and dignity.

Procedures like in vitro fertilization reduce children to the product of a technological process. A child becomes a manufactured commodity, produced in a relationship of domination, subject to quality control, manipulation and even disposal.

We desperately want a child. But our desires, even for something so good, do not justify bringing that about by any means whatsoever.

This is not simply a question of zoning and planning. It is consenting to a particular worldview for the people of Naperville — a worldview in which a child is not procreated, but manufactured. With any number of beneficial things that could be built on this site, why bring into our community something carrying with it these ethical issues? Why invite into our downtown Aldous Huxley’s vision of a Brave New World in which children are not so much born as they are decanted?

Mike and Mary Beth

Brummond

Naperville