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.
First of all, I'm very sorry you and your wife had to go through that experience. It must have been really hard.
Although I consider an embryo a person, I think good sense needs to be taken into account. After everything that happened, "keep trying" is equivalent to saying "keep suffering". That's not a solution.
You remind me of something that happened to a friend of mine years ago. She had a baby who was born seemingly normal, but they quickly realized that something was wrong because she wasn't developing properly. It took 2 years to reach a diagnosis. She had a very rare metabolic disease with a 100% fatality rate (she died when she was 7). After many tests they found that the baby was born like that because both parents shared the gene that causes that disease. Still, one day I went with my friend to the hospital (this hospital had no religious affiliation) and I heard one of the doctors tell her that she should try to have another baby - with a 50% chance of the child having the same disease! I couldn't believe it. It wasn't my place to say anything so I bit my tongue, but in the car my friend told me she would prefer to commit suicide than taking the chance of having another child go through so much suffering. A few years after her daughter died she adopted a healthy boy who needed a family and they made this plan B work.