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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.
Published in General
Assuming, of course, that the coercee has more schmundo than the coercer. Big assumption. Terrible assumption, IMO, considering history. Anyway, I know where this line is headed and we’ve been down that aways before. I’ll retreat, but in fairness you can have the last word on it since I took a shot in this post.
Would you prefer that the market is an aggregate of all moral agents? It’s true that the fact that the market prices everything doesn’t imply that there should be a price for everything, but prices give us the most objective reconciliation of competing ideas of the good as we converge on objective morality over time.
Well, aren’t you’re assuming the coercee has more votes? I think that’s a more terrible assumption.
Ed, I love you man. All bad blood is gone.
Do you guys believe it is not possible for coersion to be an aspect of an individual’s conception wrt the individual being conceived?
Rape would be a coercive aspect of a individual’s conception. It would not detract from the individual’s worth. ARTs would not be a coercive aspect of an individual’s conception, and equally with rape, it would not detract from a person’s worth.
If a person does not exist prior to conception for the purposes of determining the value of a potential life how can it exist to be coerced?
I’m other words – you cannot simultaneously argue that the value of potential persons holds no moral weight while at the same time claim that coercion is being used on nonexistent persons.
Rape is coercive for the woman, yes. But how is it directly coercive for the individual being conceived? For one thing, not every rape results in conception. Second, sperm is not being forcibly injected into the egg. Rape, along with consentual intercourse, allow the conception to occur naturally, which is to say, spontaneously. Conception is out of direct human control in those cases.
This literally makes no sense.
You’re making it difficult to speak calmly. If you don’t consider rape a coercive aspect of someone’s conception, then nothing is a coercive aspect of a person’s conception. Either way, your point is irrelevant to the person who is conceived by ARTs.
No, I don’t think the person being conceived can be coerced by the circumstances of his conception. If you think that lack of consent to being conceived means you’ve been coerced you believe, by definition, that literally everyone was coerced in their conception.
No, I disagree with this. There is a price for contract murder. People have done it for cheap. That doesn’t mean that a price of, say $5,000, says anything about the objective morality of contract murder as a concept, for society, or for an individual.
Thanks Mike. And a promise is a promise, even though I desperately want to comment. Then again I’m even more desperate to not enter an anarchocapitalist conversation.
Not going to read through 10+ pages because I’m on really limited internet, and I’m not likely to find someone who both understands what you’re saying and disagrees.
My family has both totally adopted kids– no genetic link– and line adoptions– where a cousin screwed up, and an relative took on the kids. (Neither knew until adulthood, although one line adoption cousin noticed “hey, my brother looks EXACTLY like dad, and we’re adopted…gotta be a relative, if not a child.”)
I’m Catholic. I believe a kid has a right to their parents. Sometimes stuff goes wrong, and they don’t get their right. That no more makes it right to deliberately deprive them than folks sometimes choking makes it OK to suffocate folks; similarly, someone surviving a wrong doesn’t make it OK to commit it against them again. (the “they were already wronged, so wrong them again” argument about artificially created humans not being worthy of life. It’s as much nonsense as a child of rape being someone who can be killed at will.)
Jennifer- do you think the ovum has rights? Can it be coerced?
Oh, for love of life, there are folks arguing about if the kid who has the misfortune to be formed because of rape is responsible for the rape.
That is…unspeakable.
Unfollowing, because someone so disgusting as to argue that the child of rape has a moral responsibility for the actions of a parent is an irrational, disgusting and reprehensible being of unspeakably low morals.
Maybe I’m just splitting hairs here. Referring again to the photo, I’m not arguing here that the individual is coerced by the circumstances of his conception. I’m arguing that his conception is coercive. The totally direct manipulation of his conception is what I am trying to highlight. This is why I distinguished the photo from rape in my other comment. In rape, there is no direct manipulation of the cellular event known as conception.
Just to avoid confusion: when I compared the photo to rape at first, I was thinking that the egg was analogous to a raped woman. Maybe that’s why you thought I was joking, Sal. The ovum alone has no rights.
It seems to me that a free society respects spontaneous conceptions and encourages them within particular contexts, and discourages or even bans manipulated/ coerced conceptions.
Why?
Foxie, I don’t see anybody here assigning blame to the child, but I haven’t been keeping up with the comments very well. Which comments are you referring to?
Again, I’m not being facetious, but could you explain (step by step) the reasoning behind why and to whom you consider the circumstances of conception of artificial reproduction to be coercive?
Jennifer – The reason rape is wrong is that it is coercive to the person who is raped. It is not an offense against a child who is conceived as a product of that rape. Unless you can show that the woman who delivers a child conceived by artificial means was coerced the rape analogy simply does not apply.
Do you mean to ask the following: “Do you believe that some modes of conception can include, or in some sense produce, coercion of the individual being conceived”?
If so, I understand the spirit of the case you’re trying to make, but can’t get around the following: you cannot coerce an individual who does not exist. By the time the conceived individual exists, the (supposedly-coercive) act of conception is over.
How would you make the case that coercion can jump that chasm?
No, Merina. The phrase “force something on someone” exclusively refers to the person starting the fight, initiating the use of force. If you want a law or regulation to prevent people from using ART’s in some cases, you are the one starting the fight, initiating the use of force, forcing something on someone. Others who want to remain free of this coercion are not forcing their morality on you. If you want to choose not to use ART, they will not stand in your way. But, it sounds like your morality is not just a personal thing; you want the State to apply it to everyone else as well.
No Owen. We each have a view of what society ought to be. Just because one involves enacting some laws and one doesn’t does not change that. Everybody knows we have to have laws. I regard the society you want as immoral and I suppose you regard the one I want as immoral, but we are both the same vis-a-vis each other in our desire to have the vision of society we want. Under your society, I am not free to live in the type of society and culture I want to live in and that I regard as moral. So you are trying to force your vision of society on me just as I am trying to force mine on you. Both of us are compelled do this because humans are moral, thinking, believing animals and that’s what creatures like us do.
Mike, I agree with you that the market can do a lot of things, but I heartily disagree that it is moral. To be moral you have to have a brain and be able to think about right and wrong. Just because someone will pay a big price for something does not make it moral, it only says that someone wants that thing very much. I really don’ think you’d want to live in a world where the market was considered the prime moral agent. As Ed pointed out, contract killers are part of the market. Does that make them moral. No. You don’t really believe that.
Ha ha! When sitting at my computer this morning, my husband came up and asked, “Are you mud wrestling with the libertarians again?” He knows me so well.
Sure, but what makes you think the market would allow for contract killers? It’s illegal to use contract killers now, and people would pay much more to not be killed than for the privilege to kill someone, so it would be illegal in a pure market as well. The market outcome doesn’t say the individual preferences are moral, it’s just more likely to result in a moral set of laws and overall results than voting, and trusting politicians to enforce the law out of the goodness of their heart, is.
I love that metaphor! It’s a good picture to keep in mind about what we’re doing here. It’s good enough for a T-shirt.
The difference, Merina, is that in our vision of society you are still free to live the life you want according to your morality. In your vision for society everyone is forced to live by your moral code.
Freedom vs Force.
Maybe, maybe not. The moral tenor of the whole community changes and makes it so that everyone I care about is affected. That’s the point. I am not free to live in a moral community under your regime.
Not quite right. No matter what percentage of my income I dedicate to personal security, a wealthy man who I crossed could dedicate far more resources to killing me, at far less cost to himself.
A market is only as moral as the individuals within in. The system doesn’t encourage morality beyond requiring you to in some way benefit other people with your labor in order reap the benefits of theirs.