Bioethics and the Family: Family Building in the Twenty-First Century

Rapid developments in reproductive technologies and shifts away from traditional religious commitments have led to significant changes in how marriage and the family are understood. Family building in the twenty-first century has become ever more post-modern: morality as it applies to family life has been fully deflated into various and diverse lifestyle choices. For many, Christian moral teachings regarding sex, reproduction, and marriage appear old fashioned and unenlightened. Such norms prudishly prevent persons from engaging in sexual relations, marriages, and divorces, as well as manipulating nature in ways that each finds pleasurable or otherwise individually fulfilling. Indeed, progressive activists have long endeavored to redefine the family, so that it would cease to be thought of as created through the monogamous and life-long bond of the marriage of husband and wife. The hope has been to bring other living arrangements, such as same sex partnerships and single motherhood, as well as artificial reproduction techniques and abortion, fully into the social mainstream. From homosexual marriage, to commercial surrogacy, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, in vitro fertilization and abortion, each author in this number of Christian Bioethics, diagnoses the growing cleft between the Traditionally Christian and modern society.