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The Ethics of Artificial Reproductive Technologies
Hand-in-glove with recent debates about marriage should be debates about artificial reproductive technologies, or ARTs. These have been largely unregulated in the US, resulting in a wild west of anonymous sperm donation, surrogacy, three party reproduction (egg, sperm and surrogate all from different people) and hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos awaiting….something.
Most Western countries regulate this industry. Though I’m generally against excessive regulation, I think we — as a nation — need to do the soul-searching and caution that the ART industry is seems so uninterested in doing for itself. In most Western countries, anonymous sperm donation is illegal, as is surrogacy. Many regulate the number of embryos that can be transferred per cycle, resulting in far fewer multiple births. These regulations arise from a great many legitimate ethical concerns. Most nations — and some U.S. states, to some degree — but not in America as a whole.
What are the problems with these under-regulated practices? Anonymous sperm donation means that the number of children conceived by sperm donors is unlimited. Donors are often medical students looking for a little extra cash. One young sperm donor passed on a serious genetic heart defect to 9 of his 24 children. Beyond such health concerns, imagine being the child of a sperm donor and wondering if everyone you meet might be your half-sibling. You could never even be sure about people who know their own two biological parents because the father might have been a sperm donor.
Not surprisingly, the incidence of drug and psychological problems is appreciably higher for children conceived in this way, and 50% report feeling sad when they observe biologically connected families. In countries that require that donor identity be attached to sperm, donation plummets. Many also severely limit the number of children that can be produced by any one donor. At a minimum, we should have both of these regulations.
Akin to sperm donation — though on a smaller scale for obvious reasons — is egg donation. Potential parents advertise for eggs at elite college campuses and on Facebook, often with emotional appeals about giving “the gift of life.” What they do not advertise is that stimulated egg production jeopardizes the reproductive health of the donor. And then there’s the commodity angle. It is obvious that parents are looking for high intelligence by seeking genetic material on elite college campuses, but many even seek other traits like ideal height and weight and attractive features. It is the ultimate commodification of children, short of the day (may it never come) when all traits can be specifically chosen. Methinks many purveyors of diversity don’t actually like the reality of diversity.
Surrogacy also carries with it multiple risks. Pregnancy is always a risk, many of these pregnancies result from multiple egg implantation, resulting in the birth of multiple children and far higher risk. In the U.S. and India, it is legal to pay women for surrogacy, so poor women can easily be manipulated. And of course, women’s bodies, hormones and natural human emotions prepare them to want and love the baby they carry, though they sign away all legal rights before this natural process begins. The cannot change their minds as they come to love the baby they carry, who is sometimes their own biological child. Very few women want to repeat the experience and many find it deeply damaging.
We all feel deep sympathy for people who want children and are unable to have them. But in all this ethical morass, the most important questions should always be about the children. People who pursue artificial reproduction are making a decision for a person — the resulting child or children — who will have to live with the consequences of that decision, which often means that they have been deliberately deprived of one or both biological parents. To those who say that the child would rather exist than not exist, I will just say that this is not how we think of children. By that logic, every time we pass up an opportunity to make a child, by rape or any other means, we have deprived a child of existence.
Many here have said in previous discussions that biological parentage doesn’t matter. I agree that the most important aspect of parenting is the emotional connection to the child. The adoptive parents I know are wonderful, and generally both parents and children are deeply grateful that they were brought together, the parents because they longed for children and were unable to have them, and the children because, though their biological parents were unable to care for them for some reason, they cared enough to find fine people who could give them a good, stable home.
But what about children who are deliberately created to be separated from their biological parents? This is a very troubling practice. Buying and selling humans has always been associated with slavery. Remunerative ART is not exactly the same, but it is not entirely different because it often deliberately breaks the parent/child bond that is understood to be so beneficial to children. Doing this risks changing the way we think about children.
Recently, an Australian couple went to Thailand to find a surrogate because surrogacy is illegal in Australia. The surrogate gave birth to twins, one of them with Down’s Syndrome. The parents refused to bring the Down’s child home, and the Thai mother, who wanted the child but had participated in surrogacy because she was poor, could not afford to raise him. Does anyone think for a moment that if that child had emerged from the body of the woman who contracted for his birth that she would have refused to take him home? Having a surrogate bear that child changed the way she thought about him.
All of this enters the philosophical territory about what it means to be human, to know who you are and have a place in the world. A child who is given to adoptive parents may not know the circumstances of his birth, but he surely knows that his birth parents made some kind of human mistake: most likely they were teenagers or college students who got carried away, and no doubt they suffered for that mistake and learned something in the process, as is so nicely illustrated in the movie Juno. But what about the child whose parents deliberately created him because they wanted a child, using a grab bag of genetic material? What does it mean to be deliberately deprived of your biological heritage, which connects us to a human chain that stretches behind us since the beginning of time and, if we have children, continues after us till the end of time?
This is deeply meaningful and integral to who we are. It gives us a place in the world. People can be adopted into biological chains, sure. In our family, there are 20+ cousins on each side, and both sides are happy to include an adopted child. Those children are every bit as much a part of the family as the other children. But our blood tie is strong because most of us share it. Like all families, we have our arguments and annoyances, but in the end we are family. Blood is thicker than water and we overcome our little tiffs because that’s what families do, partly in honor of those people we share who produced us. We often talk about them and speculate about the genesis of some of our traits. That’s what it means to be a family.
Years ago I read The Handmaid’s Tale, which I greatly disliked. The lefty author posited a silly fictional world where patriarchal religious leaders instituted a system of producing children that involved designated “handmaids” as child factories. No one who understood Christian reverence for life would ever write such a book, but change the background story to ART companies in search of profits, and that is exactly what we have today. It is a growing “industry” that it is time to regulate.
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The same reason every other Western nation has universal healthcare. People are irrational busy-bodies who think they can solve ridiculously complex problems with legislation.
You couldn’t be more wrong. There are some people who could only exist through ARTs, and the alternative is not that someone else would exist. More people is generally better. ARTs gets us more people. You deride others for seeking children who have higher levels of intelligence and other desirable traits and yet your argument rests on denying the existence of children who have the undesirable trait of imperfect existential psychology.
Your rape analogy has already been shown to be incredibly flawed. ARTs is not rape, and you know it. Bringing up rape is a Godwin.
I don’t care what other countries do. That is my point.
Is it because they are more moral than we are or because their populaces as more comfortable with regulation than ours?
Why do so many other Western nations have nationalized health care?
Many people feel uncomfortable with the “wild, wild West” of unregulated human ingenuity. They assume that without regulations, chaos, destruction, and perversion will flourish, just as they did in the wild, wild West. Except maybe those things didn’t flourish in the wild, wild West. Maybe the West was in reality a not-very-wild place, rather boring, even.
Peaceable setting of grievances in the wild West wouldn’t make for good drama, though. Moreover, out East, where there already was a law that most decent citizens accepted, “taking the law into your own hands” was likely to be a hostile, anti-social act. It wouldn’t be so unnatural for Easterners to project their negative, criminal image of “taking the law into your own hands” onto the unfamiliar territory of the West, thereby creating a mythos of the horrors of lawlessness.
No Midge–historian here. The wild, wild west was not a nice place. It was very violent and even celebrated violence.
I don’t know about the regulation thing. We are being crushed by all the wrong regulation, particularly by unelected agencies, and don’t have the regulation we actually need IMHO. I posit that as Americans, it is true that we don’t like regulation, so we don’t pay all that much attention to it or even resist it if we notice, but then the agencies sneakily just have a merry time regulating everything in sight in lefty ways behind our backs, which is to say demeaning and stupid ways,while the things that really do need to be regulated, like ARTs, don’t get much attention.
Whether or not you care, we have a moral issue here that needs to be discussed. Are there moral reasons to regulate ARTs? Is this why those nations have done it? Should we follow their lead?
Whether or not there are moral reasons to regulate ARTs, the actions and regulations of other countries have no bearing on my opinion of the matter. Just as the decision by most western democracies to institute socialized medicine or have a state sponsored religion has no bearing on my opinion of America’s choices on those issues.
Not really Godwin. It in fact does show that the method of bringing someone into existence is relevant and precedes the question whether someone should be brought into existence.
Merina- You’re right that this is a moral issue and that we should discuss it as such. This is precisely why your question about what other countries do is beside the point. Invoking the regulation of ART by countries like Britain and Spain doesn’t say anything about whether ART is moral. At most it is evidence that Brits and Spaniards think it isn’t. If you’re going to take their word for it on moral issues I think it’s worth pointing out that both those countries recognize same-sex marriages. Just saying.
That’s why such a principle is better couched as regarding the protection or violation of individual rights, and why such rights, and their violation, then have to be specifically and consistently defined.
No, what you are talking about is using coercion to roll back access to alternative reproduction technologies that have helped many people whose biology didn’t allow the usual means. I find that rather impossible to square with ‘allowing maximum freedom’. It’s an attempt to impose your religiously based ‘ethics’ on those who have been given an alternative by the advance of science.
For that matter, what are you going to say when techniques like CRISPR soon allow deliberate editing out of genetic defects that lead to or increase the odds of disease? Tell people it’s only ‘ethical’ to bear children with a good chance of growing up with avoidable disorders?
Well, it’s irrelevant because rape is obviously wrong and ARTs is not. Rape violates the rights of a current person, ARTs does not.
Sure, rape is obviously wrong. Whether ART is right or wrong is the point under consideration. Your vote is noted.
It’s not a vote. If ARTs is wrong it’s not wrong by the same logic as rape. So it doesn’t invalidate the point that more people are better.
Nor does the point that more people are better make ART right. That was the whole reason the rape point was brought up.
It doesn’t make ART right, but it presents a strong presumption to overcome. Rape easily overcomes this presumption. Appeals to the psychological consequences to these new children doesn’t begin to rise to this level.
Mike, the only point of the rape analogy is to show that we all agree that we don’t think that people should be brought into the world by any means possible. We do all agree about that. Now let’s turn to ARTs. It’s a pretty broad topic, actually. There are many methods, people who seek them, forms of donation and so forth. I really think we need to be more specific to hammer out these points. What about sperm donation for example. Should people be allowed to donate anonymously? Is it ethical to pay them? Should the number of children from each donor be limited? Should single mothers be allowed to get it? If it is anonymous, should some info be given out? And so forth. These are complex and delicate questions that we really need to consider. Don’t you agree?
Sal and Jamie–
People in other countries, especially in the West, which we regard as our cultural family, have some profound thoughts about these issues. Sure, I agree with other countries like Italy and Germany about marriage, but on this issue, they must have reasons for banning practices. Do you really think that we have nothing to learn from anyone else about the morality of these practices that people come to our country to take advantage of? Don’t you think it behooves us to consider if we are complicit in something bad?
And you’d like to use coercion against efforts to do that. You have a morality that you are trying to impose. Freedom is a slippery concept, LO. It’s not just doing what you want. And in this instance, you are talking about another life coming into existence. That will be a person who needs to have a family, might possibly very much want a connection to his or her biological family, and who might have higher levels of risk for drug abuse and other problems because of being brought into the world in a particular way. Their freedom is at stake too. Again, there are many aspects to the questions surrounding this issue that should be discussed and hammered out. And I think we need to do that.
Whatever the technology is, it has to be considered on its merits. Everything has a moral dimension. We cannot, especially in this day and age, say that just because we can do something we should. I have a friend who operates on babies in utero. This is mostly good, but they have to consider the risks and benefits, including the chances of miscarriage and whether or not the operation could be performed as beneficially once the baby is born. Nothing, in other words, is simple.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t say that the practices of other western democracies lend weight to your arguments only when they happen to agree with you.
Jamie, I didn’t say that all the countries agree. They don’t. Their laws are not all the same. I just said that we should ask ourselves why they take the positions they do on ARTs and consider whether or not the free-for-all we have in our country is ethical.
Merina- I’m not disputing that foreigners can provide thoughtful insight on moral questions. I just think that you’re cherry picking the issues upon which such insight is to be given weight. My own view is that a moral argument (or any argument, for that matter) is persuasive based on its reasoning and not by the number of people who espouse it. Invoking the fact that other western countries regulate ART doesn’t say anything more about the morality of ART than the recognition of SSM in many western countries says about the actual merits of SSM.
On coercion, I think it’s worth asking what we consider the default status of conduct to be. Is it that that which is not specifically prohibited is permitted? Or is it that that which is not specifically permitted is prohibited? Coercion arises when we try to change the status of conduct away from the default. If the default status of conduct is that it is prohibited legalizing it could be coercive. On the other hand if the default status is that it is permitted regulating said conduct is coercive.
Sal, don’t you think it is curious that we are the only nation in the West that allows the free-for-all wrt to ARTs? Does that not give you pause? Is it cherry picking to ask this question about such a major topic? I don’t think so. I believe countries look at the arguments from other places when considering how to proceed on redefining marriage as well. I know what I think is correct on that, but I think it makes sense to consider how other humans analyze the question. Sure the moral reasoning is the important thing–so let’s do some of it instead of mucking about in the weeds like we are doing now!
Well, now we are talking about specifics anyway. And I disagree with you on every answer. Leaving moral questions to ARTs companies when you are talking about life issues is akin to letting Planned Parenthood determine the morality and timetable of abortion.
Leaving it to ARTs companies (who are reliant on the satisfaction of their customers) is the moral answer.
Merina- we are also the only Western country which allows capital punishment. The fact that the rest of the Western world is wrong on such a major subject as whether the state can take a life is interesting to me, but it is not terribly persuasive.
As for our current mucking about in the weeds, I agree with you that it is counterproductive. I would only note that the digression from discussing the moral merits of artificial reproduction was caused by your invocation of the fact that other western countries regulate it, with the implication that that somehow lends weight to your substantive position.
That’s just another way to say: “Sure, rape is obviously wrong. Whether ART is right or wrong is the point under consideration” I’m not really sure what we’re arguing about here.
Merina seemed to believe her point invalidated my use of the strong presumption for new life. I thought the point was unnecessarily inflammatory and did nothing to counter my point. You seemed to think the point was valid for what it attempted to do. Maybe you weren’t claiming that the rape point argued against the strong presumption with respect to ARTs. Nothing has been presented that has risen to the level of overcoming that presumption.
In your opinion. That’s the point under consideration. You think the case is not made. Ok. Others might disagree.