Here's an ethical scenario - from my own life - for those of you who consider embryos to be people:
When my ex-wife and I were together, we tried to have kids to no avail. She kept miscarrying before we could get to the third month of gestation.
We went to see a fertility doctor. The doctor told us right off the bat that because she was working out of a Catholic hospital, she wouldn't be able to prescribe IVF.
... but we described what was going on and here's the approach that she ended up recommending:
Just keep trying. Keep trying with lots of monitoring to figure out what's going on: one cycle we might be able to get to 6 weeks, the next 8, and then further and further until - hopefully - we would get to a full term live birth. Every cycle, we'd just tweak medications and whatnot to get a little bit further along.
Now...I personally had no problem with this approach (which ended up not working - we didn't end up having kids), but it did occur to me that it was absolutely wild that the Catholic hospital where we were going would be okay with this.
I mean, imagine you had a house where kids kept dying mysteriously. It would be monstrous for someone to suggest "hey - let's just keep sending kids in, but strap wireless cameras to them so we can try to figure out what's killing them."
It seems to me that anyone who really did think that an embryo is a person - and who wasn't a complete hypocrite or psychopath - should have said something like "your pattern of miscarriages means there's too much risk for the next embryo. Stop trying to get pregnant."
So... thoughts?
I've posted a poll. Along with voting, please post your reasons why you voted the way you did in the thread below.
I could have referred you to an excellent fertility doctor near me. He accomplished miracles. The only problem is that the parents kept wondering why their kids looked exactly like the doctor. The doctor explained that all kids looked like that, and showed pictures of many kids of many parents, and all of the kids looked like the doctor.
Cursing genetic tests, the doctor finally admitted that he was the father of the many babies because he knew that infertile fathers could not sire kids.
There are many men willing to help out with your dilemma. The problem is, they offer the same solution as the doctor.
The couple next door adopted a dog. But I keep staring at that dog's face. Where have I seen that face before? Of course we now know that gene-splicing different species is possible. I suppose that we could enjoy many years of chess games with the dog, and he could drive to the store to pick up his own Alpo. Unless, of course, he spots a cat, then we'd have to pay for a few fences that the car crashed through.
I know what you mean about sending kids to a house where they meet their demise. I bought a Kidd extinguisher, and, so far, it hasn't extinguished any kids, but I still feel a bit guilty for buying it.
I wonder about the ethics of those who experiment on living creatures. I spoke to Dr. Shaw about his cat experiments. He had moved his cats (top of their heads cut off, electrodes implanted) to our labs because his labs were inundated with thousands of protestors. His experiment was to chemically prevent the cats from blinking then measure with glass tubes filled with conductive liquid, the brain reactions to patterns on a computer screen. Horizontal and vertical strips were shown. Dr. Shaw said "they are happy little kittens." I wonder if he would have been a "happy little physicists, experimenting outside of his field of expertise," if electrodes were placed in his head?
Experimenting with the creation of life (birthing with a track record of failure), seems a bit off. Some would say that such birthing attempts (despite adjusting medicines) is a natural process, and God wouldn't be against anyone for trying to give birth.
What about the
possibility that the baby would have been born, but due to the difficulty of the birthing, the baby might have been born handicapped (physically or mentally). Would it be so bad to have a damaged baby and make a damaged adult? Is that what we tell handicapped people? (You were damaged, but that's okay)?
At
UC Irvine, 750,000 animals per year were destroyed in experiments. After the experiments were over, the animals were put to death. Presumably it was illegal to cut off the top of a cat's head and stick in electrodes (I've had this conversation before), but those restrictions were ignored. I personally knew a female student whose job was to
wring the neck of chicks merely because they were male, and they didn't need male chicks for their particular experiment.
I asked a protest organizer if they would consider a compromise, perhaps reuse test animals in other experiments, to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of animals, and they said no. That seemed like an odd response. They would rather push for zero tolerance than achieve partial success.
I met a teenaged girl at a PETA booth, who was collecting to save kittens from starvation. They were cute kittens. But I pointed out that
kittens are carnivores, and by saving them, they either have to convert to vegetarian diets or eat meat, and meat comes from some sentient animal. Often the sentient animals are herbivores (they don't hurt any creatures, except for swatting flies with their tails).
I was shocked to find that most of the
cows slaughtered for meat live only to 9 months of age. It is not profitable to let them get older. It was common practice to shove an
electrode up their butts and electrocute them (quickly and mercifully, though
sometimes something went wrong and they lived).
It seems that we have choices to make when we slaughter for meat or raise carnivores, or step on worms by accident, or try to have babies knowing that we have a track record of failures. We could find
compromises to save as many lives as possible, as long as we are willing to compromise our key values and admit defeat (saving many lives in the process). We could find compromises in the form of
adoption for those who can't conceive naturally.
I think that we need to stop and think of alternatives before proceeding.
We live in an imperfect world, and are often confronted with difficult choices.
After the 911 attack, President W. Bush double-dog-dared us not to "cut and run" (quotation of W. Bush stolen from a previous politician), and to "stay the course" (quotation of W. Bush stolen from a previous politician), and to kill 1,000,000 Iraqis though Iraq was at peace, and there was no connection between Iraq and terrorism. Then W. Bush tried to lie about Niger selling yellow-cake Uranium to Iraq. W. Bush made us feel like chickens if we didn't try to save the US from terrorists, and he lied about intel that only he had access to. Our choice was to be a sitting duck, attacked at the whim of the al Qaeda, or go to war to defeat the enemy (though the enemy didn't have a country). Such difficult choices are presented periodically throughout our lives.
Zalenski has been faced with the choice to defend the Ukraine, or bargain with Putin to remain in charge of the Ukraine under the leadership of Putin (and become a satellite nation of Russia). The US is faced with the same choice....do we fight for Ukraine, or do we let Russia grow in power? Which is better for the Ukrainian people.