Past Issues

This issue− the second in our series on “recovering origins”− is devoted to reviewing artificial reproductive technology (ART). The question is about technological intervention in human reproduction, which our society tends increasingly to answer purely in terms of practical results in the short term, and without any consideration of the nature of the human person either as a parent or a child. Is it true that in conceiving a child, the bodily unity of parents is negotiable?

This issue is the first of our four-part series on “recovering origins,” where we consider the various dimensions of the origin of the child, all of which have been put into question today in thought and in practice. The first of those is the unity of two −by which everyone always and everywhere comes into being− in the face of the wide-spread practice of divorce. For many years talk about divorce has minimized the effect of divorce on children (provided the divorce was a “good divorce”). Adult Children of divorce themselves have begun to say otherwise by identifying an “ontological wound” left by the break in their unitary origin. If what they say is true, this has enormous implications for society – implications so large that the topic is likely to be avoided and the evidence disregarded by mainstream political and media groups. All the more reason, then, to focus on it.

The inaugural issue of Humanum proposes the child as the most basic figure of the human, a figure which is often lost to view in our liberal culture, bound up as it is with a logic of childlessness, through its forgetfulness of being and its Origin.