Hagar’s Child: Theology, Ethics, and the Third Party in Emerging Reproductive Technology

Abstract

Every gesture is a moral gesture, and every moral gesture, every decision creates a narrative that is at once personal and public, at once unique and taken within a tradition of human moral activities. Nowhere is this more true than in reproductive medicine, and no tradition stronger or more closely held than traditions of religious practices. Thus, emerging reproductive technology has become one of primary ethical attention and concern for religion. For the three Abrahamic religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the story of Hagar, the young slave used as a surrogate mother to Abraham’s firstborn son Ishmael, is the shared ground for the first family of faith, and it is fully of drama and tragic necessity. In the Hebrew Scripture, as noted above, the effort to create a child outside of the usual narrative of marriage does not go happily, and for Muslims, the plight of Hajar (Arabic for Hagar) is central to the Hajj, the required pilgrimage to Mecca, in which her frantic search for water to maintain her son, after they are cast out and left in the desert, is one in which she runs back and forth seven times between two peaks, Al-Safa and Al-Marwah. This physical act of desperation is replicated, as thus, the pilgrim must use his/her body to re-enact the seven circuits in the desert heat, running up and down the hills. The drama of the third party is repeated, reenacted, and respoken so powerfully in these traditions that it clearly raised the question, “Why?” Especially as recounted of an historical era in which disempowered slave women were commonly seen as property, why is the text so attentive to the problem of the use of these women as mothers? It is a core question for scholars who seek to understand the positions of contemporary religious traditions and contemporary third-party reproductive projects, for such core foundational narratives capture both the desperation, frustration, and infinite yearning of infertility, and the ethical problems with the use of the body of another in the service of so central a human activity as childbirth. This chapter will briefly review some of the ethical and theological concerns of a number of traditions as they considered third-party reproduction.

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan 10 years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going? “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered. Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” The angel of the Lord also said to her: “You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers. She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

Genesis 16