Hagar’s Child: Theology, Ethics, and the Third Party in Emerging Reproductive Technology

Abstract

Every gesture is a moral gesture, and every moral gesture, every decision creates a narrative that is at once personal and public, at once unique and taken within a tradition of human moral activities. Nowhere is this more true than in reproductive medicine, and no tradition stronger or more closely held than traditions of religious practices. Thus, emerging reproductive technology has become one of primary ethical attention and concern for religion. For the three Abrahamic religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the story of Hagar, the young slave used as a surrogate mother to Abraham’s firstborn son Ishmael, is the shared ground for the first family of faith, and it is fully of drama and tragic necessity. In the Hebrew Scripture, as noted above, the effort to create a child outside of the usual narrative of marriage does not go happily, and for Muslims, the plight of Hajar (Arabic for Hagar) is central to the Hajj, the required pilgrimage to Mecca, in which her frantic search for water to maintain her son, after they are cast out and left in the desert, is one in which she runs back and forth seven times between two peaks, Al-Safa and Al-Marwah. This physical act of desperation is replicated, as thus, the pilgrim must use his/her body to re-enact the seven circuits in the desert heat, running up and down the hills. The drama of the third party is repeated, reenacted, and respoken so powerfully in these traditions that it clearly raised the question, “Why?” Especially as recounted of an historical era in which disempowered slave women were commonly seen as property, why is the text so attentive to the problem of the use of these women as mothers? It is a core question for scholars who seek to understand the positions of contemporary religious traditions and contemporary third-party reproductive projects, for such core foundational narratives capture both the desperation, frustration, and infinite yearning of infertility, and the ethical problems with the use of the body of another in the service of so central a human activity as childbirth. This chapter will briefly review some of the ethical and theological concerns of a number of traditions as they considered third-party reproduction.