Posted on 04/30/2006 3:11:01 PM PDT by wagglebee
"Yes and eventually they will realize that they have a biological child that they will never be able to see"
There is no guarantee that the donated egg will be successfully fertilized, much less successfully implanted via IVF, much less successfully carried to term.
Chances of all those actually occurring are slim.
Not everyone feels the same way, of course. But my argument isn't based on feelings per se.
If if a baby has been deliberately brought into existence in such a way that his or her parental origins are ruptured or violated, that is an injustice to the child. We should all respect a child's right to be brought into existence by the loving marital union of his mother and father.
Many children lack this. Millions do. Tens of millions lack something --- married parents, for instance ---and yet they're not miserable: they still live and get along and are daily grateful for what they've got.
But let me offer an analogy. If a child is born deaf, he lacks "something" and yet he adapts, and his parents adapt, and life can be wonderful. But to deliberately conceive a child so as to make him deaf (hypothetical: if you could create an IVF embryo deliberately designed for deafness) that would be wrong because it would burden the child with an intentional (not just an inadvertent) defect.
The keyword here is "intentional."
Do you see how it is wrong to premeditatedly design the situation so that, by your intention the child lacks something important? For instance, if he is deliberately conceived to be deaf? Or if he is deliberately conceived to be bereft of his biological mother?
Yes, I think concubinage (as in the case of Abraham, Sarah, and the concubine or "surrogate" Hagar) is immoral. It's reproductive adultery, which is just as morally objectionable as sexual adultery. (In their case, of course, it was sexual adultery too, since they didn't have a laboratory technique available.)
And it worked out with pemament bad consequences for Abraham and Sarah and their offfspring, which, as I understand it, come down even to the present day.
"So Abraham and Sarah were "immoral" for arranging a surrogate to bear Abraham a son (Ishmael)? Modern day IVF is just a technological advance on the Biblical times custom of arranging to have a servant bear children for infertile couples."
Agreed. I wonder if the Biblical literalists and Christian Moral Supremacists are in favor of going back to the husband getting to sleep with a concubine if his wife can't produce offspring?
I understand that you have "feelings" against IVF, but I think you're creating a false analogy. A child is still being created from his parents' combined genetic material. It's happening in a glass tube instead of a bedroom, there's no Chateauneuf du Pape to get Mom and Dad in the mood, and there are lab lights instead of candles. Other than that, the premeditated design is the same.
You think IVF is icky and immoral. That's fine. But the result of a successful IVF treatment is exactly the same as the result of a romp in the ol'Beautyrest.
But I hope you'll notice that I didn't say a word about my "feelings." What I did do is to lay out a reasoned argument against deliberately fracturing the child's parentage in such a way that he becomes a "product" of three or more parents.
Prescinding from your feelings or mine, can you honestly argue in favor of deliberately deconstructing natural parenthood?
I would agree with you that deliberately producing a child you know will have a defect (like your deafness example) is very different than having a child that just happens to turn out that way.
However, assuming that everyone involved is healthy, I don't see that anything terrible is being done to the child by creating it. I probably can't separate my feelings from this entirely, because I have no idea whose sperm and whose egg created me, and I absolutely don't care. The people I have had a long, close relationship with have been my parents, and it wasn't their sperm and egg.
It's an interesting topic, certainly, and I appreciate that we can both approach it conversationally rather than confrontationally. I don't think the parents who have IVF in order to have a child think of the outcome as a "product". I think they send birth announcements, not new product announcements. :)
LOL. You think this example of Abraham and Sarah failing to have faith that God would provide them with a child is something we should consider exemplary behavior?
Do you have any idea what happened to the descendants of Ishmael? Have they been a blessing to Abraham and his rightful descendents?
SD
Ever since I read Brave New World in high school --- and that was a long time ago! --- I've been disturbed by the deconstruction of human procreation. Every step toward the laboratory production of human species-units will seem more-or-less innocent at the time. But each step necessarily desensitizes us for the next step, and thus we approach the advent of semi-human or subhuman offspring (hybrids, clones, chimeras, and cyborgs) --- presented to us as an improvement of the human race, of course!
I don't think this is just a slippery slope. I think it is a logical 4-lane highway, given our loosening grasp of the relationship between natural sex, natural procreation, and "human nature."
See my response #103. Just because somebody did something in Biblical times doesn't mean it's a role model for us. Biblical people practiced concubinage, levirate marriage, and polygamy,--- and for that matter, slavery ---none of which is given to us as a positive example!
I haven't read "Brave New World" since then, either. It's easy to imagine things getting out of hand, but I don't think it's really likely to go that way.
I don't fully understand IVF myself, because I don't understand, personally, a strong drive to have a child. It's just outside my experience. But I know that people do have that drive, and for better or worse will go a long way to fill that desire. The desire may well be more selfish than altruistic, but I think IVF is well enough established that it will continue; I have not heard of anyone seriously suggesting that it be outlawed.
I don't think the natural process of procreation will ever really lose its popularity. ;)
The lawyer was the most normal and decent one on the panel. She said she was concerned about how law was going to evolve around these new technologies, because it was all a jumble of property law and contract law and tort law, and the aspect of "family law" per se was being pushed to the side because nobody has any idea of what a "family" is: therefore everything is seen in terms of fulfilling the desires of the contracting parties: product satisfaction.
The prostitution advocate was a rather madcap personality who just wanted to skewer people's ideas of propriety. (Giggle-provoking in an adolescent way, but not so amusing in an adult.)
The really sinister one was the insemination entrepreneur. She argued that women's liberation would never really be possible until childbearing becomes a totally extrauterine procedure. In other words, she saw women's child-bearing capacity as something that puts women at a permanent disadvantage vis-a-vis men.
She was asked, well, if that's the case, why was she in the business of getting lesbians pregnant? Her answer was that any step away from the normal man-woman-child thing was one step closer to the ultimate goal of the laboratory production of humans.
She meant business. She REALLY meant business. She was already in close collusion with the embryo-experimentation crowd. And that was 20 years ago.
Well, since some of you consider Abraham to have been a pretty sinful guy for giving up on the idea of having children with his 100 year old wife Sarai....... It seems that God's covenant with Abraham and his seed was pretty generous, considering what each side had to bring to the table.
Even Abraham's son Ishmael was blessed with the legacy of becoming the founder of a great nation (corrupted and coopted much much later by a guy named Muhammed)
http://www.parentalguide.com/Documents/Bible_Studies/Gods_covenant.htm#4-GOD'S%20COVENANT%20WITH%20ABRAHAM%20AND%20HIS%20SEED
But ..... since you evidently descend from Isaac's side of the father Abraham's line, .... are you and yours a blessing to God or not?
Huh, what? What are you talking about? How does what you say second relate at all to what you say first? And what do you mean "considering what each side had to bring to the table"?
It's very simple. God promised Abraham that he would be the progenitor of a vast multitude of people. God didn't promise this cause Abraham brought anything "to the table" that God needed. It was a favor, a blessing, that God bestowed on Abraham.
Did I say he was a "pretty sinful guy"? No. Do I recognize that his giving up on God's promise and deciding he needed to jumpstart his legacy by visiting the maid's tent is sinful?
Yes, I do. On both accounts.
It teaches us a lesson that God is true to His promises, even when they seem impossible. They also teach us that man may have his own ideas about how he can "help" God along when God's timetable doesn't match our own.
The one thing I would not learn from this episode would be what was orginally stated, that this episode from the Bible proves that God is in favor of artificial/extramarital methods of conceiving babies.
SD
Galatians 4:22 - 26 gives you the insight you're looking for:
For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. ... Hagar ... is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.
The children of the free woman --- not the children of the concubine --- are the heirs to the promise. Clearly, some of the behavior shown in the OT is meant as a negative example. Inter alia, it portrays concubinage in a negative light.
Really? As I understand it, there are plenty of people who will kill and even torture you and then neatly dispose of your body. All that it takes is enough money. Hey, it's a free market right?
The weight of the decision between right and wrong is not altered by how many or how few will do something, nor by its cost to have done. Personally, I do not see a problem with this; these are eggs, not people. But let's not let logic get in the way of one illogically slamming the illogical for their lack of logic. Have at it!
Leggo my huevos!!!
Fascinating logic!
By this logic, a Muslim can marry a six year old girl, kill his daughter for holding hands with a boy, cut off the head of an "infidel" and engage in all sorts of other barbaric behavior, so long as his country's doesn't prohibit it (and many don't) all because Islam doesn't have any "moral pronouncements" against it.
True that is a moral difference. But maybe there is another way of seeing it too. Parents who conciously decide to become parents through adoption or infertility treatment.. may be a better home for a child, then the biological parents where the child was an accident.
Also what if the biological parents had a genetic problem, and could get a child who had a higher chance of being healther, smarter and more attractive? Is there a moral imperative in seeking to give your children as many advantages as you can?
True. There's nothing wrong with adoption or what can accurately be called a infertility treatment: that is, a treatment which restores the person's normal fertility. A procedure that uses an ovum or sperm from somebody outside of the married couple isn't, to speak accurately, a treatment that restores the couple's normal fertility. It bypasses the infertile partner and achieves pregnancy using a third party's fertility.
Similarly, there's nothing wrong with finding cures for genetic diseases. The problem arises when you screen embryos and destroy ones which are imperfect; or when (for instance) you generate embryos via IVF and discard "extras." There are probably 100,000 - 400,000 frozen human embryos "in storage" right now who are "extras" from the IVF industry, whose very existence shows how the industry uses human lives as commodities on the one hand, or biological waste on the other. To treat a human being like trash at any stage of his lifespan is deeply morally repugnant.
Couples who don't wish to become pregnant with their own child should consider adoption. Even some of these spare embryos can be adopted:
www.snowflakes.org/
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