Dead Fathers

Father’s Day, which we recently celebrated, is a dangerous day. It’s dangerous because fatherhood itself is controverted in contemporary society. Consider how The New York Times marked the observance: with a cartoon disguised as an op-ed on the wonders of being a “trans-male” (i.e., female) “father”—because “to my daughter, my gender was never complicated.”

In the wake of Father’s Day, Americans should ask themselves how the challenges of technology amplify a basic question: “What is a father?” Artificial reproduction and surrogacy have already sliced and diced maternity into genetic, gestational, and social shards. Advocates of this dualist barbarism typically want to attach the label of “mother” to social motherhood—the person usually with the least biological, but likely most financial, investment in the case. 

Fatherhood does not lend itself as readily to the same tripartite dissection, but it does allow for dividing the biological from the social. Indeed, that’s just what some men who have abandoned their offspring have been doing for quite a long time!

But technology now affords us a new twist: posthumous paternity—fatherhood without a live father.

The Hastings Center, a premier secular bioethics think tank, recently focused the spotlight on this question. In its March-April 2026 Report, it asked: “Should Parents of the Deceased Have Standing to Initiate Posthumous Sperm Retrieval?”

The question arose in the context of the aftermath of Hamas’ 2023 terrorist attack on Israel and subsequent casualties of young male Israel Defense Forces soldiers.  Israeli law allows the deceased’s “surviving female partner” to request posthumous sperm retrieval. But what if he had no wife or significant other? Do parents have a right/interest/[legitimate] desire to raise up the next generation—their grandchildren—from a man who was dead even before the child was conceived?

The problem is not unique to Israel, which I offer here as but one variant of a broader phenomenon. As Catholic bioethicist William May pointed out more than three decades ago, anytime the creation of a human person is relocated from the human embrace of the conjugal act to the technical manipulation of joining gametes, the process is in principle disconnected from marriage and parenthood as we have hitherto understood those realities. They not only replace intercourse by a technique but, in fact, also degrade human sexual intercourse into just another “technique.” 

Pope Pius XII alluded to this base alchemy when, in his 1951 “Allocution to Midwives,” he condemned artificial insemination as reducing “the conjugal act to a mere organic function” to connect gametes while converting “the domestic hearth, the family sanctuary, into a biological laboratory.” This is not mere papal poetry. Pius captured the truth that technologizing the human act of bringing persons into existence cannot happen without fundamentally revaluing (to their detriment) sex, parenthood, and the child—even if one asserts intentions to the contrary.

Sex becomes mere gamete delivery. Parenthood becomes a state of mind. And a child, as former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit put it, becomes a “parental project,” a product designed according to two peoples’ desiderata and specs.

A father is not just a sperm manufacturer; his body is not just a factory. Fatherhood is a bond of persons, a communion to which both persons—father and child—have a right. The consequences that follow from paternity without the presence of the father are an injustice, whether they stem from parental abandonment or making a child from a corpse. The rupture between consequence and presence cannot be repaired by the abortion option—eliminate the “consequence”—but only by recognizing the wrong and injustice that comes from permitting acts that allow for that rupture. 

Yes, a child always remains valuable. But a child always has a right to a mother and a father. Sometimes, events beyond one’s control render that impossible. But there is a difference between events beyond one’s control and acts freely chosen and done even amid circumstances beyond one’s control. There is a difference between what happens and what I did. There should be no controversy about the proposition that deliberately making an orphan is always wrong. There are no “good reasons” for making an orphan.  

There is a tendency in some parts of the “Catholic Left” to salute Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas,as a welcome departure from “pelvic theology” in favor of social doctrine. That dichotomy is false. Posthumous sperm retrieval shows us the inseparability of those two domains. Unbridled faith in technology that renders human persons mutilated or redundant is wrong, whether it replaces jobs, sex…or fathers.