A.I.: Artificial Insemination

Not quite the Spielberg flick, I'm afraid. Yesterday, our neighbor, Chris McFarland, asked me and my father to help him breed his cows this year. He's trying something new, at least for me and my father: artificial insemination. More on the nuts and bolts in a bit. It was short notice; he let us know yesterday afternoon, and he needed our help this morning. We determined that it was possible, since we Catholics are allowed to cheat and go to Sunday Mass on Saturday night.

We did so, and the priest looked a little surprised to see us; my dad always goes to church on Sunday morning. We chatted for a bit, and my father explained to the priest that we had to get up early tomorrow morning to artificially inseminate the neighbor's cows. The priest joked, "That's against Catholic teaching!"--by which he meant artificial insemination for the conception of human life. He looked at me, knowing that I'm a theology student, and asked: "And he's letting you do this?!" I just said, "I think I can tell the difference between a cow and a human!" and left it at that. He responded, "You're not working with Catholic cows!"

This morning, we loaded up the 4-wheelers on the trailer and rounded up cows. On my way to a few stragglers, I think I hit 2 or 3 nesting birds. Include their nests, and you can add 5 or 10 more to the list of those animals who die to put a steak on your plate and a burger at McDonalds. Anyway, we sorted the cows from the calves (they are still together; later this fall they will be separated, or "weened") and started running them down the chute.

I ran the chute, which means putting in a metal rod, the bar, between cows so that the front ones don't move backward and the back ones don't move forward too quickly. Believe it or not, it's one of the more dangerous jobs. If you insert the stick too slowly or in the wrong place, an advancing or retreating cow can hurl the bar into your body with impressive force. I've heard stories of broken arms and legs, perhaps even worse, so I keep a close eye on my bar dynamics and the cows' positions. The job was rendered all the more difficult today by the fact that the bar I started with was slightly bent and not solid metal; it was a semi-hollow tube. As cows ran into it over the next hour and a half, the bar would turn so that each impact made the bend slightly worse. By the end, it had probably at 45 degree bend in it; it looked like a three foot boomerang. Accurately slipping that turning, bent rod between advancing cattle while keeping all my fingers intact was a tricky job that kept getting trickier, but here I am typing away. I survived.

The technical details of the A.I. were briefly explained to my dad and I after we were mostly done. What we were doing today was inserting a hormone suppressant into the cows' vaginas. Before insertion, it looked like a white, upper-case "I" (sans-serifs) with a string attached; when inserted, it unfolded into an upper-case "T" to hold it inside the cow. It's job was to greatly reduce the cow version of estrogen in their body, tricking them into thinking they'd just dropped an egg. A week from now, we'll remove those "T"s and give them a shot of cow-estrogen that will make them all ovulate more or less simultaneously. Then, precisely 60 hours after that second stage (don't ask me who discovered the time-frame), the actual A.I. will happen.

I can't say how that is done yet (since I've never seen it), but this is where things get really interesting. While correct that the Catholic A.I. ban is only on humans, the ethical issues around A.I. in general are perhaps more complicated than my exchange with the priest last night led on. Perhaps most curious is the development of what is called "sex semen." No, this is not a tautology; it refers to the ability to sort through a bull's semen to pick out which individual spermatozoa will result in a male calf and which in a female. Using sex semen, herds can currently be skewed to 70/30 or better for the gender split. Some have told me 90/10, but that might not be practical, actually. It's similarity to the practical consequences of China's one-child policy (30 million more men than women) might be striking, except in cattle, producers are more likely to want females than (apparently) China does. I haven't heard statistics on what the overall trends in gender production have been; some people want heifers (females) and some want bulls and steers. It depends on the operation of each individual ranch.

China's one-child policy has unmasked a cultural undervaluation of female children, an implicit sexism. If such a study were to be done on the cattle industry, would similar trends arise? Would there be a cow-sexism against males or females? Taking a step back, can there even be such a thing as "cow sexism"? That is, even if such trends exist, are they ethically significant? Does such a practice improve or detract from our appropriate use of the gifts of the earth and our scientific rationality? I don't know, at least not at 12:30 in the morning. For me, in this instance, my conscience has not been put on alert. Right now, my dad has the opportunity to watch an experiment for free, using someone else's cows to see whether he's happy with the results of this process.

As for A.I., the Catholic theological ban is in place because of the belief that the human sexual act has intrinsic value that cannot (or should not) be separated from its unitive or procreative ends; by separating sex from procreation, human A.I. fails to grasp the fullness of what the human sex act means. It is not clear to me that cow sex is invested with this same meaning; cows have not evolved as (generally) monogamous creatures with life-long procreative partners. My intuition, then, is that A.I.'d cows could indeed be fully "Catholic." But the sex semen thing, that's a whole new, sci-fi twist on the question. That encroaches on questions of genetic selection and genetic modification, questions I'm not prepared to answer tonight. We'll see how the process unfolds over the next couple weeks.