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.
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.