PSU Magazine Summer 1989

"Who Owns the Child?" Technology, ethics and legal rulings create a complex question examined at a PSU symposium. By Cynthia D. Stowell A woman has just given birth to a child in the county hospital. In a couple of days, mother and newborn will go home and start their new life together. Right? Maybe not. What if the child was born addicted to heroin? What if the "mother" had agreed to bear the child fo r an infertile couple in return for a sum of money? What if the mother is an unwed teenager who wants to finish school and the well-employed father feels he can bet– ter care for the infant? What was once a natural assumption - that the biological mother and her off– spring form a union that few mortals can put asunder - has in the closing years of the twentieth century been challenged by a host of ethical , legal and technological possibilities. PSU 16 Such issues of custody and parental fitness are the stuff of newspaper headlines, as the American public, judiciary and service sector struggle to redefine values and set new standards in a previously very private arena: the conceiv– ing and rearing of our children. Just leaf through some recent papers: In New Jersey, a surrogate mother has a change of heart and flees with a baby that is genetically half her own but con– tractually the " property" of another couple. In Illinois, a distraught father holds hospital personnel at gunpoint while he unplugs the respirator that is keeping his comatose 16- month- old child alive. In Oregon, members of a community with unconventional religious and social beliefs run into a firehouse one night with the limp body of a chi.Id they have disciplined to the point of unconsciousness and eventual death . PSU phiJosophy professor Patricia BackJar was clearly influenced by news stories like these when she selected the topic for this spring's "Humanities Pre– sent" symposium sponsored by the Univer– sity Honors Program. The question she posed for discussion was " Property or Person : Who Owns the Chi.Id?" The answers she received from her guest speakers - a phiJosopher and a lawyer - were often in the form of more, and equally provocative, questions. But one thing they both said with certainty was that in a responsible, ethical society, BackJar's question should not have to be asked. "Who owns the child? The correct answer, of course, is no one," said Laurence D. Houlgate, professor and chair of the philosophy department at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. Asserting that a child cannot be owned like a watch or a car, Houlgate Bronze sculpture by former PSU art pro– fessor Frederic Littman , stands in Council Crest Park.