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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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Just can’t agree with you there Mike.
That is complete bull-hockey. Just because other people aren’t Catholic doesn’t mean there are no longer Catholics.
Ah Jamie–there’s no point in getting into society and its underlying assumptions again. So let’s not.
I’m sorry Merina,but your philosophy on this is completely at odds with the entire American experiment in liberal democracy. You don’t want to live in the land of the free, you want to live in the land of the people who all behave exactly as you want them to.
You don’t think groups of less wealthy people would pool their money to take out the rich [CoC]hole who thinks he can get away with murder? Is that why people get rich? So they can kill others indiscriminately? Lets say he does kill you and then your family gets a $15 million settlement that the rich guy has no problem paying. Suddenly, your family has the wealth necessary to kill the rich guy… not that we should really get bogged down in these weeds here. It takes a book to go through all the reasonable counter-points.
So you are unfree if the community does not govern itself by your concept of morals. Got it.
I’ve got to say that this, plus the tortured definitions of coercion by yourself and Jennifer, are preparing me to regard your future protestations over your religious liberties being ‘coerced’ by SSM with greater equanimity.
People gathering together to establish a set of rules that they will live under, and the consequences of breaking those rules? Like a government? With laws?
Freedom is slavery.
Your being able to live in the particular kind of society you apparently want is not a species of freedom.
I wasn’t talking about people getting together to make rules in this case, just to take out the anti-social evil. But since you brought it up, it would be similar, only it would work at least as well and doesn’t inherently rely on immoral forms of coercion.
Once you give a private entity the authority to take away others rights, it becomes a government. No matter what its composition, once it is the referee, it is no longer a player, and will suffer for all the corruption inherent to an entity that accumulates that level of power.
I don’t merely think anarcho-capitalism is ill-advised, I think it’s literally impossible.
This isn’t the least bit true, but I don’t see much point of refuting it here.
I know you do, most people don’t want to consider it a possibility. Even if you thought it was possible, you wouldn’t want it. That’s fine. Such a change in the status quo in inherently scary. All your objections have responses though, and they tend to be the first ones people think of, so they are the responses that have been worked out the most, if you’re actually interested.
Market arrangements work so well because force is not in play. If I am being treated badly by my employer or a merchant, I may vote with my feet because they lack the authority to use force against me.
Once you and I pool resources to higher a body guard, and give him a set of rules under which to operate, we’ve create a small government. If Tom and Sal hire their own body guard, they have a create a small government. When our private security firms clash with force, we have the world’s smallest war, but a war none the less.
Let’s say our guy beats Tom and Sal”s guy, and we enforce what ever decision we had made that led to the conflict, we are clearly acting as a government, no matter what term we ascribe to our agent who carried out the task.
Competing security firms will just be hostile governments of a small scale, that will gradually consolidate power until their are a relatively small number of big security firms, known as nations.
Highly unlikely.
Tom’s dad knows people…
Some day I’ll write a series of posts on this, but I’ll give a short unsatisfactory answer. First, it’s unlikely you’ll be the one giving your bodyguard orders. Likely they will offer you a series of protections which you can take or leave at a given price.
When there’s an inevitable conflict between Firms A and B, they can either fight it out, which might work out for one of them, but is very expensive because they must pay the strongmen. The strongmen likely have families to care for, and would need more compensation the more dangerous the job became.
Since most conflicts will be foreseeable, firms A and B will contract ahead of time on how they will resolve disputes between members. They will find an arbiter they each believe is sufficiently fair and follow their decisions. They will follow the decisions because they are “repeat players” and their reputation for honesty and peaceful low-cost conflict resolution will be why the vast majority of members hire them.
On the general issue of the market adequately providing security and contract enforcement I would just like to direct everyone to the first half of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. To very roughly summarize it, Nozick’s argument is essentially that the most efficient market distribution of private security and law-enforcement would be for a single entity to have a monopoly over a given geographical area. This is essentially what the libertarian ideal of a minimalist state is.
All of these factors are in play for governments, and soldiers in war. And yet none prevent war from happening. The dangers of war have never prevented mercenary forces from existing at all times in history, in essentially all places. Tiny Greek city states frequently found 10,000 volunteers to fight the Persian’s wars for them. There will always be young men willing to risk their life for a profit, regardless of who is calling the shots.
Force under the purview of private entities is subject to the same miscalculations that people have made for millennia when it comes to fighting. Just as some investors miscalculate and go broke in the market, others calculate well and take their opposition to the cleaners. There is nothing innately moral about the winners or the losers of a physical conflict, unless cleverness and opportunism are considered moral traits.
Governments have a bottomless pit of coercive income and CEOs that don’t undergo any personal risk when sending others into war.
That would be news to the pilgrims and quakers and amish. I think it would be news to the framers of the declaration and the constitution too.
Governments have a bottomless pit of income because they have the authorization to gather it by force.
When 80% of the town hires a security firm to enforce their rules, and I benefit from that order without paying, how long do you suppose the arrangement will remain non-coercive?
I have to reject the premise, because it effectively begs the question. “If we assume a government like situation, how long will it be until it’s a government.”
It’s a government like situation because the costs of maintaining law and order are substantial, and have to be divided among numerous people in order to be practical. If there is no broad based support for the security apparatus, individuals with enormous capital with simply have a monopoly on force.
I tried to word my claim clearly; maybe failed (or maybe you did understand; not sure). What I meant was that there is not a right to restrict the rights of others. Merina seems to want the so-called freedom to live in a society in which she can dictate what others are free to do. That’s not freedom, properly defined, I maintain. We should be free do do what we want, unless it’s violating the (correctly-defined) rights of others.
Ah–but there’s the rub, isn’t it Owen? What are those “rights” and who correctly defines them? That’s why we have conversations about such things and it’s why I started this post. I think it is profoundly important to figure that out with regard to beings who don’t yet exist but might, who don’t have rights since they don’t exist, but who nevertheless demand some morality on our part in defining what will give them the best chance for a good life. I know that libertarians want a simple world where everyone does what they want without causing harm. But in fact, defining that little phrase causing harm is no simple task. It kind of demands some thinking about good and evil. And then it turns out the world is not really all that simple.
Owen, I don’t think she wants to dictate; I think she wants to persuade and vote on how things should work just like everybody else. Perhaps you think that in voting this way she goes too far in considering harm that is other than direct harm. Ok, but she’s not a libertarian and liberty doesn’t only mean what libertarianism says it means.
Or, what Merina said, because she said it better, more warmly, and more appealingly than I ever could.
What is truth?
Sal–you got a laugh form me!!!!! Asking the most profound age-old question that all humans have pondered in all of time so casually! Why not make it a whole new post?