TORONTO, Ontario, March 8, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A sexpert who believes that sexuality is defined simply by pleasure and penned an graphic ‘how-to’ article for men on masturbation is about to publish a children’s book about how babies are made.
The homosexual rights community is getting behind the book for its positive portray of the dozens of alternative methods that can be used to create a new human life (about 30 according to the author). The author intends that his “book for kids about sex,” aimed at pre-schools through to 8-years-olds, will also be accompanied by a teacher’s resource to assist its implementation in a school setting.
Written by Cory Silverberg and illustrated by Fiona Smyth, What Makes a Baby is what the author calls “my response to the fact that books about where babies come from leave many of us out.” The book is designed to include “all kinds of families – regardless of how many people were involved, what the orientation, gender identity, or other make up of the family is, or how it came to be that way.”
“This poor man’s project is an amalgamation of the moral degeneration of the West,” said author, painter and cultural critic Michael O’Brien to LifeSiteNews. “It is really about having what we want without consequences—and feeling good about ourselves in the process.
“Based in a profound ignorance about human nature, and about what makes for a healthy family, it is the next stage in the self-destruction of the traditional family and healthy society that was once the foundation of Western civilization.”
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Silverberg set out on KickStarter last month to raise $9500 to cover the costs of publishing and promoting his book. He exceeded his goal within the first day of fundraising and now has 1,590 backers with a total of $53,697 raised.
Silverberg disparages traditional stories that tell what he calls a “nice story (mommy + daddy + intercourse = you!)” adding, “more and more of us are acknowledging the help we get to bring children into our lives. That help might be a doctor, fertility clinic, adoption or foster agency; it might be a turkey baster and a friend; it might be a sperm donor or a surrogate.”
Dr. Christine Schintgen, children’s author and assistant professor of literature at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Ontario told LifeSiteNews that she believes Silverberg’s project is “clearly an attempt at social engineering that is symptomatic of the Brave New World we now live in.”
“Instead of acknowledging the fundamental truth that sexual intercourse between a husband and wife is both the normal and the desired way to bring children into the world, this book will attempt to normalize morally problematic, and sometimes bizarre, forms of reproduction,” she said.
“Do we really want our children to grow up thinking that being the product of ‘a turkey baster and a friend’ is no different from being the fruit of a loving act of procreation between spouses?”
Silverberg goes on to describe the vision of his book at greater length, explaining, “We talk about sperm, egg, and uterus without gendering either them or the bodies they reside in or come from. We do it without saying that you need a mommy and daddy, or even two people who know each other, and we make it very clear that there are many ways these elements can come together.
“The illustrations won’t ruin it by tokenizing or stereotyping what families look like. In fact they make it clear that all families are possible.”
O’Brien agrees with Schintgen that the fundamental ideas behind “What Makes A Baby” are morally problematic. “As described, the program is full of distortions and outright falsehoods about what constitutes the nature of love, the nature of fruitfulness, and the responsibility that always must accompany the commitment to love.”
O’Brien argues that a child learning through Silverberg’s book that he or she was the product of technology, not the fruit of the loving union of his mother and father could begin to doubt his self-worth. “A child born from in vitro fertilization arrives at birth only at the cost of the death of dozens of his brothers and sisters. As that child grows and comes to understand his origins, what will he feel about the deaths of his siblings? If his parents can kill them because they are supposedly not human, how secure will he feel?”
“No amount of sociological tinkering and feel-good projects such as this one will change our nature. A child with ‘two Moms’ or ‘two Dads’, or any other artificial configuration of family, may feel loved on a certain level, for a time, but he or she will also suffer serious harm on a deeper level. At the very least he will experience a significant lack within himself,” said O’Brien.
Silverberg told Good Vibrations magazine that he is already “working on a few plans to increase access to the book both in alternative formats but also by having a significant number of books that can be donated right away to shelters, bookmobiles, LGBTQ parenting groups, libraries, and community organizations, all places that often don’t have the money to buy beautiful books.”
O’Brien said that a “book that propagandizes children by striving to make them feel comfortable with the profoundly disordered, by saying that dysfunction is not dysfunctional, that it is normal, is short-range kindness resulting in long-range cruelty.”
“By all means, let there be no unkindness to children. But let us also recognize that authentic life-giving love cannot be built upon a lie. It’s the children who pay the price for our lies. Band-aid efforts like this book are not going to heal children because the bandaid itself is part of the disease.”
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, while the prefect for the congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote in Donum Vitae that the child “has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage: it is through the secure and recognized relationship to his own parents that the child can discover his own identity and achieve his own proper human development. … For this reason, the child has the right, as already mentioned, to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents”.