Fools and Angels

“The lawyer of an Israeli couple who won the right to use their dead son's sperm to inseminate a woman he never met says the case is a boost for family rights.”

Is the boost for family rights a boost for the family itself ? Maybe we should back up and ask, Who is family ? Then we could go to what are family rights ? The family was, is, and always will be immediate blood relatives. But my goodness the definition is taking a beating from every which direction and then some. For every law there is exception and somehow the exception has in very many cases grown to be bigger than the law itself ! Now a days the ‘family’ by definition is pretty well anyone whom you choose. I ask, “Why?” Is it perhaps because what family really is, carries something special that those redefiners want in the worst way, so they use the word to at least add the connotation and thus the illusion that they have what they want ? Like ‘gay’? By the way did you notice that by my definition a couple with no children is not a family ?

When I first saw the headline I thought that perhaps the sperm had been ‘donated’ before death, but then I realized that that had not been the case. “… court ruled in favour of his parents who had the sperm extracted after his death …” If the sperm had been donated before death there would have been one question but now there is another. “The Cohen family took legal action after the hospital where their son's sperm was stored refused to release it, saying that only a spouse could make such a request.” Not only is there the question of not legally married people having children but there is also the complication of having one of the parents being dead even before conception ! I might ask why the hospital removed sperm in the first place when they knew that the man did not have a spouse ? What next ? Weddings after one partner is dead ? Kind of like paying someones way out of the bad place after they have expired? Did the good Dr. who extracted the sperm spend any time at all reflecting on whether he / she should be doing such a thing …

The boost for family rights turns out to be to the detriment of family.

How did that go “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread …