cormacburke.me.ke

NOTES
[1] The first significant change in the Protestant judgment on contraception was at the Lambeth Conference of 1929.
[2] John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, no. 11.
[3] This is especially true if one emphasizes feminine roles, even if - as I wish - to admire them.
[4] always bearing in mind that "God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman. He is God": The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 239.
[5] Ibid. no. 369.
[6] The Theology of the Body, Pauline Books, Boston, 1997, p. 48.
[7] Our Lord's words, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35), mark a law for human development and happiness. It is more important to give than to take. Growth in humanity - humanization of individuals or of society - depends on one's capacity for giving and on the actual giving each one makes. Sexual situations should be filled with demands on our capacity for giving. The problem with sexuality in its present condition is that it is a force more inclined to take and less inclined to give. Sexual education or formation must tend towards motivating people to respond nobly to the challenges of giving which are present in the various sexually-differentiated situations that characterize life, and to resist the urges of selfishness that they can also provoke; and to understand when and how - to what degree and in what way - one can take from what sex has to offer, and so be fulfilled by it.
[8] "It is commonly thought that women are more capable than men of paying attention to another person": John Paul II: Mulieris dignitatem, 18.
[9] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 239. In passing, note the special weakness of the one-parent family where children miss the experience of learning to relate to father and to mother and of perceiving the difference.
[10] A reference might be made here to the interplay of logic and intuition. Men are said to be more logical (although I know many men who would seem to disprove the assertion), while woman generally have higher gifts of intuition. Neither logic nor intuition should be confused with intelligence, although each can lead to an understanding of persons or situations. While it is easier to be logical than to be properly intuitive, we should all try to be both and to combine the resources of both. In many optimal family situations, one sees an effective interplay between the two. It is necessary to be logical, but it is even more important to have a grasp of the human factors involved. Family situations in particular are seldom well solved by mere logic; intuition often fills in the gaps, so as thus to arrive at a deeper intelligence.
[11] Motherhood "involves a special 'gift of self' on the woman's part", and so a mother has special "joy and awareness that she is sharing in the great mystery of eternal generation": Mulieris dignitatem, 18.
[12] These points and those of the preceding section help to underline the grave handicap the civil law inflicts on children if it allows their adoption by a homosexual couple. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith remarked in 2003: "the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood" (Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons).
[13] cf. A. Sicari: "The family: A place of fraternity" Communio 20 (1993), p. 303.
[14] Only a philosophy of self-sufficiency - which is destructive of inter-personal relations, of affection, of family, of society - denies inter-dependence, in the various modes and expressions it can take.
[15] It is through a process of discovering that one cannot always have one's own way, however much one wants to, a process of having quarrels, making up, giving and taking, that a child gradually learns to share, and so to be a friend, and to make and keep friends.
[16] The Harry Potter series points up a lot of this. At the start Harry, Ron, and Hermione are particular friends. Two boys who "share" the same girl-friend; and one girl who has two boy-friends. Of course, later in the series the relationship changes.
[17] Persons are not meant to be used but to be loved or at least respected; sexual use is one of the worst modes and quickest ways of degrading personal relations.
[18] It is true today that we have become prodigal in kissing almost everyone, even complete strangers. It is also true that signs of affection, once overdone, become banalized. The indiscriminate giving to everyone of very special signs of affection, is either of saints or of people with a superficial sense of human relations.
[19] For a fuller analysis of this, see chapter 8.
[20] The latter is what shows a real union between persons. Whoever reduces the sexual relationship to a union of bodies without a union of souls will never marry - or will fail in marriage - , for marriage can only be properly understood and successfully undertaken precisely as a joining of two separate persons in a unity of mutual self-giving, dependence and common undertaking.
[21] "the desire to use another person is fundamentally incompatible with love": Karol Wojtyla: Love and Responsibility, p. 124; "There is a fundamental contradiction between 'loving' and 'using' a person" ibid. p. 231.
[22] "Love consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one's freedom on behalf of another. Limitation of one's freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love. If freedom is not used, is not taken advantage of by love, it becomes a negative thing and gives human beings a feeling of emptiness and unfulfilment" K. Wojtyla: Love and Responsibility, 135.
[23] Psychiatric studies show that the choice to live together, instead of marrying, easily induces deep-rooted anxiety and insecurity: for example, see Nadelson-Notman: "To Marry or Not to Marry: a Choice": American Journal of Psychiatry, 138 (1981), p. 1354.
[24] Karol Wojtyla: Love and Responsibility, 83.
[25] cf. C. Burke: "A Postscript to the 'Remedium Concupiscentiae'", The Thomist 70 (2006): 481-536.
[26] see below, Ch. 8.
[27] cf. "A Postscript...", p. 525-529.
[28] that is, gathered together into one single body or Code. Up to 1917 ecclesiastical law had been scattered among many legislative decrees and other documents.
[29] On promulgating the Code in 1983, Pope John Paul II referred to it as the "last document of the Second Vatican Council" (AAS 76 (1984) 644).
[30] cf. Is 55:3, Jer 31:31-33, Ez 16:8, 60; 37:26, Dan 9:4, Mal 2:14.
[31] This strikingly new way of describing marital consent is now firmly established in magisterial teaching. So the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church says that the consent "by which the spouses mutually give and receive one another is sealed by God himself" ( 1639).
[32] Mt 16:24-25; cf. Mk 8:34-35; Lk 9:23-24.
[33] cf. Humanae vitae, no. 9; Familiaris consortio, no. 13; Mulieris dignitatem, no. 7, etc.
[34] bearing in mind that the idea of "giving oneself" cannot cover absolutely every aspect of one's person (personal responsibility, for instance, always remains inalienable). The gift, the mutual self-donation, involved is rather the fullness of complementary conjugal sexuality.
[35] It also held that there is no essential interconnection between these two ends. Hence the conjugal act retains its full meaning as an expression of marital love, even if its procreative potential is deliberately nullified. This thesis (which of course underpins the whole contraceptive movement) was to be expressly rejected by the teaching of Humanae vitae in 1968. Chapter 8 will look further into this and try to show the deep human logic to Pope Paul VI's teaching.
[36] We have studied this at length in several places: "Personalism and the bona of Marriage": Studia canonica 27 (1993), 401-412; "Marriage: a personalist focus on indissolubility": Linacre Quarterly, vol. 61 (1994), pp. 48-56; "The Object of Matrimonial Consent: a Personalist Analysis": Forum 9 (1998)1: pp. 39-117.
[37] c. 1055, 1. The expression "is of its own very nature ordered to" is equivalent to "has as its ends". This is made clear in the 1994 Catechism: no. 1660 repeats the formula of canon 1055 which is summed up in no. 2363 in the words: "the twofold end of marriage".
[38] In magisterial thinking this distinction was not as longstanding as might be thought. The first official church document in which it appeared is in fact the 1917 Code.
[39] Gaudium et spes, no. 48.
[40] Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium, 25.
[41] cf. C. Burke: "Personalism and the bona of Marriage", op. cit., pp. 411-412.
[42] General Audience, April 21, 1982.
[43] Summa Theol. I, q. 100, art. 2.
[44] Veritatis splendor, chap. I: "What good must I do?"
[45] David Copperfield, ch. 44.
[46] In consequence, "legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity": Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons" 2003.
[47] "Our faith is decisively opposed to the attitude of resignation that considers man incapable of truth - as if this were more than he could cope with. This attitude of resignation with regard to truth, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the crisis of the West, the crisis of Europe. If truth does not exist for man, then neither can he ultimately distinguish between good and evil": Benedict XVI: Homily, Austria, Sept 8, 2007.
[48] Without knowing and respecting the harmony between the natural ends or purposes of marriage, it becomes well-nigh impossible to achieve the natural happiness that marriage promises. The crisis into which marriage has plunged in modern times is largely the consequence of seeking happiness without understanding or without accepting these ends.
[49] Only in truly exceptional cases can marriage work well without children, without the children that God wants for each individual marriage. It is of course possible that God may not want any children for a particular marriage, even though husband and wife may be anxious to have a family. These (materially) sterile unions can be happy if they accept God's will. They will receive special graces from him to learn to love one another more and more as each day passes. And they can, and indeed should, achieve a spiritual fruitfulness by devoting the time and energy that would have gone to their children to formative and apostolic activities in favor of others.
[50] Gaudium et spes, no. 50.
[51] "Man cannot attain that true happiness for which he yearns with all the strength of his spirit, unless he keeps the laws which the Most High God has engraved in his very nature. These laws must be wisely and lovingly observed": Humanae vitae, 31.
[52] Gaudium et spes, 48.
[53] Jacques Leclercq, Le mariage chrétien, Casterman, Ch 2.
[54] ib. ch. 5.
[55] Leclercq, Ch 6.
[56] ibid.
[57] Humanae vitae, 9.
[58] Leclercq, op. cit. ch. 5.
[59] cfr. Council of Trent, Session 24, can. 5; Vatican Council II, Gaudium et spes, 48-50.
[60] Collier's Encyclopedia, Vol. 8, p. 281 (1968 Edition).
[61] National Center for Health Statistics, Washington, D.C.
[62] In fact, if two people got on "happily" in marriage, without ever having had to make any real effort at it, their marriage - however "happy" (and it would, I think, be a mediocre happiness) - would not have been a successful marriage: for it would not have succeeded in maturing them as persons.
[63] Even to love God, who has no defects, is hard; because although He has no defects, we have. Each one of us finds it difficult to come out of self and to give ourself to another - which is what love implies. We find that difficult even when the Other is perfect. When the other is not perfect, as occurs in all purely human relations - marriage included - , it is harder still.
[64] If it were human nature always to "feel in love", then there would be no need for a law of indissolubility... In this sense, it is precisely for those who no longer feel in love that the law is meant!
[65] Newsweek, Feb. 13, 1967.
[66] St. Thomas Aquinas remarks: "jealousy of the husband towards his wife, and of the wife towards her husband, is natural; for it is to be found in everyone" (Suppl. q. 65, art. 1).
[67] This idea - that a new marriage will enable the children to refind a father or a mother's love - far from being an argument in favor of divorce, points up one of the worst effects of remarriage. It may well be, for instance, that their mother no longer loves their father, and feels she loves another man instead. But only an extreme of selfishness or of psychological blindness can lead her to think that her children can - or should - make such an easy transfer of natural and deeply rooted affections. The mere wish - let alone the attempt - to get them to transfer their filial love to a substitute parent, thereby rejecting their real father or mother, can produce very serious psychological consequences.
[68] Therefore couples who deliberately remain childless, so that they can enjoy each other's love more, are leaving that love defenseless against the inevitable onset of selfishness.
[69] This whole subject is studied in depth and in a broad context in my book, Man and Values, Scepter Press, 2007.
[70] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1607.
[71] See chapter 15.
[72] Married couples "have need of the grace of God.... Without this help, man and woman cannot achieve that union of their lives for which God created them at the beginning": Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1608.
[73] cf. The Forge, Scepter Press, New York, no. 28.
[74] cf. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2005), no. 498.
[75] We are obviously not speaking here of the gift of self that a person may make to God.
[76] "Seed" is here intended to refer equally to the male or the female generative element.
[77] In this way, in fact, the uniqueness of the decision to marry a particular person is reaffirmed in each marital act. By every single act of true intercourse, each spouse is confirmed in the unique status of being husband or wife to the other.
[78] The "language of the body" is of course a key expression in Pope John Paul II's writings on sexuality and marriage.
[79] "Contraception falsifies the inner truth of conjugal love", John Paul II, Familaris consortio, 32.
[80] This still is true even in cases where, for some reason or another, the spouses cannot have children. Their union in such cases, just as their union during the wife's pregnancy, draws its deepest meaning from the fact that both their conjugal act and the intention behind it are "open to life", even though no life can actually result from the act. It is their basic openness to life which gives the act its meaning and dignity; just as the absence of this openness is what undermines the dignity and meaning of the act when the spouses, without serious reasons, deliberately limit their marital intercourse to the infertile periods.
[81] Obviously we are not referring here to those occasions in which, out of justice to a third party, one of the spouses is under an obligation to observe some secret, for example, of a professional nature. Fulfilment of such an obligation is in no way a violation of the rights of married intimacy.
[82] If it is not sexuality that each spouse in contraceptive intercourse gives to or takes from the other, what does each one in fact actually take or give? In what might be termed the better cases, it is a form of love - divorced from sexuality. In other cases, it is merely pleasure, also - be it noted - divorced from sexuality. In one case or the other, contraceptive spouses always deny themselves sexuality. Their marriage, deprived of a true sexual relationship, suffers in consequence.
[83] General Audience, November 21, 1979.
[84] though we have referred in passing to those richly suggestive biblical passages which speak of how the spouses in conjugal sexual intercourse "know each other" and become "one flesh".
[85] I know an African family with eighteen children and no car, and an American "family" (if it can be called that) with eighteen cars and no children. And I honestly think that the African family is much happier: about eighteen times as much.
[86] John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, no. 34.
[87] The love of naturally barren couples, to whom God does not give children, should of course also grow; but it too needs dedication to others, if it is to do so.
[88] By one or two children perhaps; or perhaps by five or six. It is only God who knows the measure of support each marriage requires. Hence the vital need for spouses, if they are to resolve the matter successfully and happily, to approach it prayerfully.
[89] Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, II, 2 (1979), p. 702.
[90] On the Scope and Nature of University Education, Discourse IV.
[91] There was a Babe born once in Bethlehem and nothing was or is better than that Babe, who shares his goodness with each baby born, and would have wished to share it with many who have not been and never will be born.
[92] Another African footnote. Disconcerted by Planned Parenthood arguments, a Kenyan remarked: "Traditionally if the neighbors' cow gave birth to a calf, one congratulated the family, because their standard of life had increased. Nowadays if the wife gives birth to a child, one is apparently supposed to sympathize with them, because their standard of life has gone down... I have to figure that one out".
[93] Gaudium et spes, no. 48.
[94] How clear, directed to both parents and children, are the words of Pope Benedict XVI: "the family comes into being from the responsible and definitive 'yes' of a man and a women, and it continues to live from the conscious 'yes' of the children who gradually join it. The family community, in order to prosper, needs the generous consent of all its members" (Message: World Day of Peace, 2008, no. 6).
[95] Josemaría Escrivá: Christ is Passing By, no. 114.
[96] St. Josemaria Escrivá insisted time and again on the inseparable harmony that should exist between "individual freedom and the personal responsibility that must always go with it" (Christ is Passing By, no. 184; cf. Conversations with Msgr. Escrivá. no. 100).
[97] Christ is Passing By, no. 28.
[98] If the passage of the years is not to undermine married happiness, each of the partners needs to keep on seeing some ideal aspect in the other. Yet it is obvious that no man, and no woman, can remain indefinitely the perfect ideal for the other. He or she has too many defects, and sooner or later these defects are going to be discovered. Nevertheless, even though it is inevitable that the partners in marriage discover each other's defects, this should not necessarily lead to the collapse of their ideal of love. It will modify it, in the sense that they will come to the recognition that only God is perfect. But, defects and all, husband or wife should continue to be the ideal for their partner. The real danger here come from pride. Pride tends to blind us to our own defects, and to make us much too sharp-sighted as to the defects of others. Similarly it makes us more aware of our own virtues and blinds us to the virtues of others. If husband and wife are to keep up their ideal love for one another, if they are to love each other more and more as time passes, then they need, with God's grace, to learn to be humble. Humility will make each one more aware of his or her own defects than of those of their partner. At the same time it will make them regard their partner's virtues or good points as greater and more important than any they themselves may possess. This is the only way that each of them can remain convinced that they are enjoying a love of which they are not worthy. This ideal they were looking for in their marriage will remain standing.
[99] Journal, III, 214-215.
[100] And how about the lives of the saints, both men and women? Terrific reading, certainly, for adolescents - up to perhaps eleven or twelve years old. If after that it is more difficult to find lives of saints capable of capturing the interest and enthusiasm of adolescents, the fault must be laid at the door not of the saints but of their biographers. Most of these move around in a sort of disincarnated supernatural world and seem incapable of pointing up the natural virtues and the humanly attractive and moving aspects of these heroes. But there are signs that things are improving in this area.
[101] See Josemaria Escrivá, The Way, no. 88.
[102] "We see clear signs of a disturbing breakdown in the very foundations of society: signs of alienation, anger and polarization on the part of many of our contemporaries; increased violence; a weakening of the moral sense; a coarsening of social relations; and a growing forgetfulness of Christ and God". Benedict XVI: Homily, Washington, D.C., April 17, 2008.
[103] Even within marriage its use - if it is to remain noble and at the service of love - requires control and restraint. Where that restraint is lacking, sex, far from serving or fostering love, tends to destroy it; for, rather than love, it expresses self-seeking.
[104] We leave aside the question of drugs.
[105] Of course, some will reject the concept of sex-addiction, or the idea that it corrupts or enslaves. This is like the drug-addict or alcoholic who says he is not addicted; that he just likes drink or drugs. [ would not argue with him. What he needs is help. But if he won't acknowledge his need he won't let himself be helped. Alcoholics Anonymous have spelled out this truth of life very clearly.
Others would even say that if people prefer pornography, they are not really being exploited: they are getting what they choose. Certainly; but what they choose is exploitation, even if, perhaps, they don't see it. A large part of the exploitation lies precisely in manipulating the exploited into the idea that they are choosing freedom when in fact they are choosing slavery. Once the pornographer puts up signs outside his establishment saying "Slave shop"; "We offer slavery: attractive, indeed captivating, but slavery" - then, though we may still call him an exploiter, we will no longer have to call him a hypocrite. In the same way as marxists must be called hypocrites for so long as they continue to manipulate the term "democracy". Can anything less democratic be imagined than marxist philosophy or tactics, or than a Communist State? We should therefore keep calling Marxists hypocrites until they stop calling themselves democrats. Once the Marxists cease to talk about democracy and say clearly: "What we offer is an earthly paradise where men will be born, reared, fed, put to work, made socially useful, and eventually hygienically buried and entirely forgotten, under the dictatorial control of a one-party State, where each one will be treated at all times as a strict economic unit and nothing more, where elementary material needs will be cared for, but where not the least vestige of personal or political freedom will remain...", when the Communists say this, then we will continue to say that their programs are as mistaken and as hollow as ever, but we will no longer have to say that they are insincere. So with the pornographers.
One stage worse than the blind leading the blind is the blind fooling the blind: the blind blinding the blind... The fact is that no one is qualified to speak about sex unless he acknowledges its contradictions: its noble function, if integrated into God's plans, but also its potential, if uncontrolled or exploited, for making slaves. Writers, artists, film producers, magazine editors, advertisers, today know well this potential and the profit it brings them. The problem is that their public often refuses to acknowledge it.
[106] And, since God's will is that we should be happy (his will is our happiness), if we do contravene it, we will not be happy.
[107] After all, if a man is not in control of himself, he can be pretty sure that he is being controlled by someone else. This control or manipulation of the many by the few, especially through the medium of sex, covers much wider fields and interests than might be at first imagined. We have spoken of the commercial pornographer who peddles pornography, and of his interest in breaking down the sales resistance of his potential clients. Let us not think, however, that he is the only one with a clear interest in promoting pornography. There have been recent developments in the commercial world in general which are significant. The use of a certain element of "sex appeal" in ordinary advertising has been a normal matter to which no one has ever dreamed of objecting: pretty faces smilingly decorated ads for stage-coach trips in the nineteenth century and smilingly decorate ads for airlines trips in more recent times. Over the past couple of decades, however, this has degenerated in many cases into progressive and downright pornography. Why? If the degeneration is due to thoughtlessness on the part of the firms concerned (their simply letting themselves unwittingly used by elements within the advertising profession), their witlessness is truly appalling. The possibility remains that it is in fact a result of deliberate policy; that certain manufacturers realise that it is easier to sell (anything) to people without self-control, and so they favour whatever breaks down that control. It is not a pleasant possibility. One cannot easily exclude the same unpleasant possibility from the sphere of politics. When one looks at certain political programmes which favor liberalization of censorship laws, for example, one wonders if the master thought in the mind of the "liberal" politicians who sponsor these policies could not be that they have a double manipulatory effect: they are vote-catching (people easily fall for the promise of easy freedom) and (so at least some people believe) they make for an enervated and therefore easily governed population. Some liberal politicians are well aware (even if their voters are not) that the permissive societies they are brain-childing are becoming more and more like Huxley's planned and totally manipulated Brave New World. They have even outdone Huxley's World Controllers in maintaining the fiction of freedom. The fact that they are wrong about such a liberalised society being more easily controllable (at least by democratic means); the fact that such societies inevitably lead to growing social violence and anarchy, and that in the end they can only be governed by sheer police force, merely underlines the ultimate purpose of these policies - calcul ated, as they are, to destroy the very humanity of people's lives.
[108] The Pope in the same passage lists some of the major distortions that can be found in such a society: "In the context of a civilization of use, woman can become an object for man, children a hindrance to parents, the family an institution obstructing the freedom of its members".
[109] The reason why our relation with persons is so much more important than our relation with things, is that one can love persons and be loved by persons, while one cannot have a true love for things, and certainly cannot be loved by them.
[110] The Pope's Letter is not just about the family; it is first about man. Modern man, the Pope says, does not really know himself: despite "great progress in understanding both the material world and human psychology", man today has largely lost the awareness of what he really is, and so "remains to a great extent a being unknown to himself" (no. 19). All around, one can see this loss of the sense of human identity - of what one is; what one's purpose in life is; whether one is free or not; and if one is free, whether any purpose or responsibility accompanies one's freedom; whether one is autonomous and self-sufficient, or rather made for others or for the State; what sex is about, what sexual identity means; whether therefore marriage and the family have any meaning, and so forth.
[111] "In the face of the so-called culture of death, the family is the heart of the culture of life": Centesimus Annus, 39.
[112] Letter, no. 15; cf. Christifideles Laici: the family has the "task of being the primary place of 'humanization' for the person and society" (40).
[113] no. 14. Benedict XVI says that, if love is true, "in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to 'be there for' the other" (Deus Caritas Est, no. 7)
[114] Registro Histórico del Fundador, Rome, arch. 20,770, p. 83.
[115] Registro... 20,584, p. 177.
[116] Registro... 20,159, p. 108.
[117] Christ is Passing By, no. 24.
[118] Registro... 20,159, p. 108.
[119] Registro... 20,770, p. 108.
[120] The Prisoner of Azkaban, p. 140.
[121] Summa Th. I, q. 100, art. 2.
[122] Maisie Ward: G.K. Chesterton, London 1944, p. 11.
[123] The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton. Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 36.
[124] Some medieval theologians took a Scholastic philosophical principle, that the soul is the "substantial form" of the body, as basis for a theory of "retarded animation," according to which the fetus has at first no more than an animal or vegetable soul, and that a rational and human soul is infused only when it is sufficiently developed and can represent an adequate "receptacle" for this substantial form. With such a theory, it was impossible to assign other than a quite arbitrary moment for "animation" which is what some Scholastics in fact did (some said 40, others said 80 days after conception). Modern embryology has helped in the rejection of this theory and in the return to the earlier position (held, for instance, by such Fathers of the Church as St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzen) that the rational soul is present from the moment of conception. As can be seen, philosophy owes a debt to physiology in reaching a scientific understanding of the stage at which the human organism in fundamentally constituted, namely, the basis stage of fertilization, at which therefore it can receive its "substantial form".
[125] We might note here that to the arguments given earlier taken from embryology, we can add an argument taken from juridical science. All ancient and modern jurisprudences attribute to the unborn child full juridical personality, expressed, for example, in the child's capacity to inherit or be the beneficiary of a will.