{"id":1715,"date":"2016-09-26T21:08:56","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T01:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=1715"},"modified":"2016-09-27T13:11:17","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T17:11:17","slug":"an-insane-brave-new-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=1715","title":{"rendered":"The Insanity of our Brave New World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"xytex\"<\/a>James Christian Aggeles is a paranoid schizophrenic<\/a>\u00a0with various personality disorders and grandiose delusions, which came to the forefront after he donated sperm to Xytex, Corp., a ‘fertility company’ based in Atlanta, Georgia.\u00a0 Mr. Aggeles claimed to have an I.Q. of 160 (well above Stephen Hawking’s and Einstein’s), with various degrees, and working on a Ph.D in ‘structural neuroscience’ (whatever that is).\u00a0 You might think he was laughed out of the sperm bank, with a kick in the pants.<\/p>\n

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But no:\u00a0 In fact, Aggeles could have claimed that he could bench 400 pounds and had invented sliced bread, for Xytex did not bother to check any of his credentials, but blindly took his sperm, which they used to make a whole lot of little embryo-babies, some of whom were transferred to (we think) 36 unsuspecting would-be-mothers, who dreamt of their little tykes growing up also to be like their paper-tiger Dad, at least according to his ‘grandiose’ resume.<\/p>\n

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Now, all these three dozen Mums are raising children who may grow up to be unemployable schizophrenics, ahem, just like Dad.\u00a0 Three Ontario mothers are suing the corporation (most are in the U.S.).<\/p>\n

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Thus is the brave new world in which we live, the fruit of the tragic\u00a02004 \u00a0Assisted Human Reproduction Act<\/em>, permitting certain in-vitro fertilization practices in Canada: Unlike our neighbours to the south, we cannot buy or sell sperm or eggs, but we can use them.\u00a0 A number of Catholics supported the Bill back then, as at least prohibiting some of the worst evils.\u00a0 However, contrary, I would argue, to Pope John Paul II’s teaching in paragraphs 73-74 of\u00a0Evangelium Vitae<\/em>, we introduced into positive law some other grave evils, as we see in the case of the prolific Aggeles who, it seems, will not be charged, as not\u00a0compos mentis<\/em>\u00a0enough to understand what he was doing.<\/p>\n

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I would imagine that the corporate heads at Xytex knew, as did the desperate mothers, eager for a little Junior, but without the proper means and environment by and in which to bring him into the world.<\/p>\n

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Of course, these sperm banks are in the business of profit, so why would they check their donating clients?\u00a0 What sells, sells, and smart, healthy sperm cells sell, whether they be smart or healthy in reality.\u00a0 After all, say the hand-wringing execs of these misaptly-named misanthropic centres of fertility, who really is ever going to find out, at least until it is far too late?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By happenstance, Xytex inadvertently cc’d an email to some of the families with Mr. Aggeles’ real name.\u00a0 A quick Google search determined that he was not the genius he claimed to be, far from it, so the cat was out of the bag, or the true nature of the sperm out of the secret vaults of the bank.<\/p>\n

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There are a whole lot of Mr. Aggeles’ out there in the world, siring untold dozens, even hundreds, of children (keep in mind that in sperm banks, many more embryos are conceived than are transferred to wombs, for there is a high failure rate in these procedures, so Aggeles is likely the father of a lot more than 36).<\/p>\n

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Need I recount the host of evils of this practice? Children who know not their fathers, nor mothers their, what, husbands (of a sort)? Multiple siblings who know not they are siblings?\u00a0 Lack of genetic diversity?\u00a0 Technological manipulation and control of human reproduction? The thousands, if not millions, of non-transferred embryos left in cold storage, left to what the Church has called an ‘absurd’ fate, likely eventual death, as they are abandoned and forgotten? For a Magisterial and theological take, see the trivium of documents: \u00a0Humanae Vitae<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1968),\u00a0Donum Vitae<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1987)\u00a0and\u00a0Dignitatis Personae<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(2008)\u00a0all well worth a read.<\/p>\n

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Thus is the Promethean Age of Man, or, in this case, Woman:\u00a0 If Woman wants a child, and has no Man, then a child must be given her, in a twisted parody of Luke’s Gospel, where a Woman conceives of the Holy Spirit, without a Man.\u00a0 And, lest we forget, this Woman had the help and support of one of the greatest of Men, Saint Joseph.<\/p>\n

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I keep hoping we might return to\u00a0some<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>sort of sanity and reason in our world, but, ten years after Benedict XVI’s crisp, clear and direct Regensburg Address calling for such a return, my hopes keep getting dashed on the rocks of madness.\u00a0 An article this morning announced that they now may be\u00a0able to use sperm alone to fertilize ‘any cell of the body’<\/a>.\u00a0 Hence, we may soon have children without mothers, along with children without fathers. \u00a0All you men out there, we may even be able to conceive our own children, quite literally ourselves, in a bizarre twist to cloning, the ultimate\u00a0vanitas vanitatis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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A final note:\u00a0 There was a review this morning of a new Bridget Jones film, a decade and a half after the first of this franchise which I have never watched, and of whose plot I am nescient (it was apparently a vague adaptation of Jane Austen’s\u00a0Pride and Prejudice<\/em>).\u00a0 In this new incarnation (pun intended), Bridget, played by the now 47 year-old Renee Zelweeger, has a one-night stand (or is that \u00a0a two-night?) with both of her paramours of yesteryear.\u00a0 She conceives, remarkably one might think, and now has to decide which one she wants to be father of her child.\u00a0 Post hoc, propter ergo hoc<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Such is the age of choice and determining your own destiny as a woman, even in middle-age, as the breathless CBC reviewer gushed over my Friday morning porridge.\u00a0 No longer do such independent and free-thinking females require men, not for their money, their living, nor, now, for their children.<\/p>\n

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In\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>life, insofar as we are still grounded in reality, we should ponder the\u00a0tragedy of the Italian woman<\/a>\u00a0who had herself filmed having sexual relations with her boyfriend, and the film somehow ended up on-line. The video, as one might suspect in our world without honour, went viral, being viewed more than a million times on various social media sites.\u00a0 The woman, known only as ‘Taziana’, killed herself in the midst of trying to change her name and identity, as she tried to escape the unbearable shame.\u00a0 May God have mercy on her soul, and on those who helped goad her to her tragic death.\u00a0 The shame that is inherent in the act of sex (see John Paul II again, in his Theology of the Body<\/em>) rests more\u00a0upon the woman, which is why, I suspect, so many of the fairer half turn to these anonymous sperm banks for their babies, rather than turning to one-night stands with, for want of a better term, ‘real’ men.<\/p>\n

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I will say this:\u00a0 At least the fictional fornicatory Bridget\/Renee knew, in the epistemological and the Biblical sense, who the father of her child was, with some degree of certainty.\u00a0 Not so the poor, misguided women who were technologically, and blindly, united with the schizophrenic Aggeles, and all others like him, geniuses or not.\u00a0 The greatest victims in this whole immoral swamp are the poor children of these misbegotten unions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Brave new world, indeed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Christian Aggeles is a paranoid schizophrenic\u00a0with various personality disorders and grandiose delusions, which came to the forefront after he donated sperm to Xytex, Corp., a ‘fertility company’ based in Atlanta, Georgia.\u00a0 Mr. Aggeles claimed to have an I.Q. of 160 (well above Stephen Hawking’s and Einstein’s), with various degrees, and working on a Ph.D […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1715"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1727,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions\/1727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}