Abstract
Over the past four decades, ART (assisted reproductive technologies) has fundamentally altered the ways of reproduction and the perception of it, as ART has gained in importance not only for individual procreation, but also for population development. ART has opened up the possibility of childbearing to groups of women and men who did not have this option before, and thus redefined the concepts of conception, pregnancy, motherhood, and parenthood. How do Buddhists respond to medical technologies and their implied ethical aspects? We have to admit that there are little direct or authoritative teachings from Buddhist scriptures due to the reasons: (1) family life or reproduction as a lay issue that is not a primary concern for the monastic tradition and (2) ART is a medical technology that was not popularly used until recent decades. This paper will explicate ethical issues involved in gender, sex, reproduction, and parenthood in conjunction with article 16 of the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. The question will also be approached from a Buddhist perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Damien Keown, a well-known Buddhist scholar in the West, has observed that “[i]n general, in Asia, Buddhist monks avoid commenting on lay matters, particularly those involving reproduction, regarding them as inappropriate for celibate practitioners who have renounced worldly life.” (Kerridge et al., 2010).
- 2.
To indicate a submissive position of women, the “Eight Observations of Respect” are: (1) A nun who has been ordained even for a hundred years must greet respectfully, rise up from her seat, salute with joined palms, do proper homage to a monk ordained but that day. (2)A nun must not spend the rains in a residence where there are no monks. (3) Every half month a nun should desire two things from the Order of Monks: the asking as to the date of the Observance day, and the coming for the exhortation day. (4) After the rains, a nun must invite before both orders in respect of three matters, namely what was seen, what was heard, what was suspected. (5) A nun, offending against an important rule, must undergo discipline for half a month before both orders. (6) When, as a probationer, she has trained in the six rules for two years, she should seek higher ordination from both orders. (7) A monk must not be abused or reviled in any way by a nun. (8) From today, the admonition of monks by nuns is forbidden. Some scholars, however, hold different opinions. For example, Paula Arai questions if women’s institutions at that time were indeed androcentric, maintaining that we should not judge the practice in ancient time from today’s standard of gender equality, especially if we consider the fact that nuns have willingly taken on the eight additional precepts throughout the centuries. (Arai, 1999, 50; Sponberg, 1992, 3–36).
- 3.
Sources within the early Buddhist canon cite numerous instances of women who had renounced worldly life and became fully enlightened. These prominent women followers seem to have held positions of great respect: many, like Pātācārā, were known for their ability to teach the Dharma; the Buddha specifically praised others like Khemā for the depth of their understanding. (Malalasekera, 1960). The most known early Chinese Buddhist text about women is called Lives of the Nuns(Biqiunizhuan比丘尼傳) written by a monk named Shi Baochang (釋寶唱) in 517.
- 4.
For more information on women in Ch’an Buddhism, see Shih, 1992, 181–207.
- 5.
They insist that “only such a distinction can help reveal how the social perceptions of motherhood are constructed…” (Neyer & Bernardi, 2011, 7). Motherhood as social representations rejects a metaphysical or an abstract notion of motherhood by seeing the definition of motherhood, along with reproduction, as “an ordering principle of societies” (Neyer & Bernardi, 2011, 8). Meanwhile, social motherhood means motherhood is not limited to women.
- 6.
In the Mettā Sutta (on Kindliness), it states, “Just as a mother would protect her only child with her own life, even so, let him cultivate boundless thoughts of loving kindness towards all beings. Let him cultivate boundless thoughts of loving kindness towards the whole world — above, below and all around, unobstructed, free from hatred and enmity.” (Habito, 2002, 365).
- 7.
It has to be admitted that family life, including mothering and motherhood in Buddhism, has been marginalized, if not ignored, so there are not many scriptures dealing with these issues (Metcalf & Sasson, 2015). When speaking of women in Thailand, A. K. Terrell (2009, 31) writes that: “Women’s identity is depicted in Buddhist scriptures as embodied and social, embedded in relationships with others, and dependent on things of this world – the world of samsara or suffering.”
- 8.
In traditional Chinese society, women with infertility (buyun 不孕) were humiliated with a social stigma. Since infertility was often blamed on the wife, the husband was allowed to get divorced or to marry a second wife. For Buddhists, the idea of karma sometimes leads to a moral judgment that a woman’s infertility is a sign of retribution for wrongdoing by her in the past.
- 9.
This is associated with reproductive health. It implies that people can have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so. Implicit in this last condition are the right of men and women to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which are not against the law, and the right of access to appropriate healthcare services that will enable women to go safely through pregnancy and childbirth and provide couples with the best chance of having a healthy infant (ICPD, Paragraph 7.2).
- 10.
It is also known as Women’s Blood Bowl Sutra. It was popular in both China and Japan yet was not included in the Buddhist canon. The earliest version of this text was likely composed around the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth.
- 11.
Buddhist views on sex in ancient times were negative, which was well expressed by the image of mothers who gave birth to children in a desexualized way. For example, in the Lotus Sutra, the ideal mother is said to give birth to her children through the mouth, thus suggesting that childbirth as the result of sex is impure.
- 12.
For the Daoist religion, sex is not just a matter of reproduction but an integral part of the “inner alchemy” which is cultivated for longevity and spiritual development.
- 13.
According to Zong-ren Qiu, a Chinese bioethicist, there are several family disputes on the father of the baby due to the ambiguity in the process of AID (Vayena et al., 2001, 78).
- 14.
As Keown puts it, “There is no Buddhist objection to IVF as a technique in itself: since Buddhists do not believe in God they do not see the creation of life in the laboratory as raising theological problems. Indeed, if all fertilized embryos were implanted it would be hard to see any Buddhist objection to the technique” (Kerridge et al. 2010, 37).
- 15.
According to Ding, Chinese law neither generally prohibits nor expressly permits surrogacy. There are no specific rules governing surrogacy except four relevant provisions set forth in three sets of departmental rules made by the Ministry of Health (Ding, 2015, 34).
- 16.
In some Buddhist countries, a child conceived from donated genetic material has the right to meet his or her genetic parents as he or she reaches maturity (Arenofsky, 2018, 105). Parenthood in this situation is defined only in a biological sense instead of a social one.
- 17.
Franklin points out, “The representation of assisted reproduction as natural science in the service of the natural family draws upon recognizable and traditional conventions and invokes well-established systems of belief such as those concerning the value of the nuclear family and of scientific progress” (Franklin, 1995, 328).
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Zhang, E.Y. (2021). Motherhood and Reproduction: ART from a Buddhist Perspective. In: Tham, J., Garcia Gómez, A., Lunstroth, J. (eds) Multicultural and Interreligious Perspectives on the Ethics of Human Reproduction. Religion and Human Rights, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86938-0_5
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