THE UNBEATABLE INFERTILITY ARGUMENT: Wally Kosterman

[Wally is a Canadian engineer and father of four. He is responding to my earlier post on what is wrong with saying either a) because some married people do not have sex, marriage is not a sexual unions and/or b) because some infertile people marry, marriage has nothing to do with making babies.]

Maggie

I agree the arguments are absurd. These are among the fatuous arguments being presented up North (In Canada), seeming in an effort to decouple marriage from the capacity for procreation: because "infertile" couples are allowed to marry, they argue, the ability to procreate cannot be an important feature of marriage.

I would suggest an alternate view. To begin with, the ability to produce children seems to me to be the sole and only justification for the state/ government to intervene into the institution of marriage. As a past Canadian Justice/ Prime Minister (PE Trudeau) once said "the
nation has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." TRUE!. However it has EVERY business in the "nurseries of the nation." The production of new citizens through childbirth is of strategic importance to any state (in the same way that production of new citizens through immigration is
also important). And if marriage is the preferred method for providing for children, then the state would be irresponsible not to be in the game. Conversely, If marriage is
viewed as merely a committed, intimate personal relationship, the state should exit the business on the grounds that it is offensive to liberty for any state to regulate personal relationships as such, except as they affect the common good.

I would suggest that if marriage is no more than a committed relationship, it does not warrant any particular status before the state. Therefore, its importance must necessarily come from its procreative dimension.

Now, for practical reasons it would be unproductive and unncessarily cruel for marriage laws to focus on fertility directly. However, by focusing on marriage as a union between a man and a women, the procreative dimension is preserved at least by inference. The institution itself in law is more stable because gender is more permanent. The fact that it becomes "over inclusive" by including infertile couples is just a reasonable compromise --the cost of doing business.



posted by maggie at 3:31 PM VOTE

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