From the Chinese history blog, Frog in a Well, comes this story about a woman in Taiwan who sued and won the right to "harvest" the sperm of her recently deceased fiancee for use in a future in vitro fertilization. This called to mind the sad case in the US of a Virginia woman who died but was kept alive artificially in order to allow for the birth of the fetus she was carrying; the baby died about five weeks after delivery.
These are truly tragedies: people faced with the death of a loved one and struggling to preserve a legacy in the form of a child. There may be legal distinctions to be drawn in the Taiwan case - the woman was not yet married to the man who died and, presumably, would not have the same rights to his body as she would were she his wife - but the underlying desire to defy death seems to unite the cases.
And when we talk about death, Chuang Tzu comes immediately to mind. He would likely be skeptical of any effort to deny the reality of death and attempt to produce a birth after death. He spends a fair amount of space in this writing contemplating death, how each thing comes in its own season and how, if we can accept the passing of each thing's season, we will be free of anxiety and pain. Following from that, it would seem that the woman in Taiwan and the family in Virginia were both unable to simply accept the end of a loved one's life.
Now, in both cases there is a link to the abortion debate in the US. In the US story, pro-life advocates supported sustaining the "life" of the mother artificially to save the potential child in her womb. I'm not sure if those same advocates would support harvesting sperm from a dead man, but such an action is not logically inconsistent with some of the more extreme pro-life positions, which would see sperm as potential life in themselves.
Chuang Tzu's take on all of this would be different than staunch US pro-lifers. He would probably be generally against abortion in the conventional sense (i.e. medically intervening to remove a growing fetus produced by living biological parents), on grounds of aversion to attempting to manage the course of nature. He would probably reject in vitro fertilization on the same grounds. But he would almost certainly reject the idea of keeping a dead person alive to enable reproduction later. The idea of creating a life that does not yet exist from a life that has ceased to exist would be too much tampering with Way.
He certainly understands the human emotion attached to death, but he counsels us to look at the larger, cosmic picture as a means of accepting our inevitable demise. When his wife died, his friend found him singing in a most undignified manner, and asked if he was acting inappropriately; to which Chuang Tzu famously replied:
When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change took place and she had a body. Another change took place and she was born. Now there's another change and she's dead. It is just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.
Now she's gone to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped. (192)
Those changes come and we cannot really control them or deny them, just as we cannot resist the changing of the seasons. And we should not try to extract life from death.
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