Volume 10, Issue 1, Spring 2010
Responses to Dignitas personae - Part I of II
Christopher Tollefsen
Pages 75-85
Divine, Human, and Embryo Adoption
Some Criticisms of Dignitas personae
The author shows how, by means of adoption, spouses become parents together and as the fruit of their marital love. The account serves two purposes. First, it allows a rebuttal of two types of objections to embryo adoption: that embryo adoption fails to respect the mutuality of marital love and that it in some way “constructs” parenthood. Second, the account makes it possible to recognize a deficiency in the way Dignitas personae understands embryo adoption, a deficiency indicated by the Instruction’s discussion of embryo adoption in the context of “treatments for infertility.” The author suggests that the Instruction is guilty of a misuse of terms and possibly a misunderstanding of the nature of adoption as such. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.1 (Spring 2010): 75–85.