Comment (33)
Email
Print
del.icio.us
Technorati
diggBrave new babies
Reproductive technologies are creating children who have no real biological parents. They deserve better.
Some old and new phenomena – adoption is old, reproductive and genetic technologies and same-sex marriage are new – have recently thrown the issue of children’s rights with respect to their biological origins, biological families and family structure into the public policy spotlight and public square debate.
Adoption has long challenged children’s rights with respect to their biological families. Early in the 20th century, societally condoned sperm donation presented a similar challenge. In the last 30 years new reproductive and genetic technologies (NRTs) have brought, and will continue to bring, unprecedented challenges. And, most recently, same-sex marriage has done so.
Over the millennia of human history, the idea that children – at least those born into a marriage – had rights with respect to their biological parents was taken for granted and reflected in law and public policy. And children’s rights with respect to their biological origins was not an issue when there was no technoscience that could be used to manipulate or change those origins: a baby could only be conceived in vivo through sexual reproduction. But with NRTs that is no longer the case.
So, what are our obligations to children with respect to their biological origins and biological families? What protections do children need and deserve?
| They describe powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents... They ask, "How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?" |
I propose that the most fundamental human right of all is a child’s right to be born from natural biological origins and that children have human rights with respect to their biological parents and families and that these rights must be recognized. The articulation of human rights is an ongoing process. Children must move from being the "voiceless citizens" to becoming the new kids on the human rights block and nowhere is that more important than with respect to rights regarding their biological origins and biological families.
New rights for children
Whatever the broad impact on society of NRTs, these technologies result in children being born: What do we owe those children ethically? So far, we have largely failed to address this question. Our ethical focus on NRTs has been almost entirely on adults’ rights to access these technologies to found a family. But as the first cohort of children born as a result of NRTs reaches adulthood and connect with one another through the internet, they are changing our focus. We are now asking, what are their rights with respect to the nature of their genetic heritage and knowledge of what that heritage is?
Issues of children’s rights with respect to their genetic identity, their biological families and the nature of their genetic origins arise, in one way or another, in the contexts of adoption, the use of new reproductive technologies, and same-sex marriage. The connection among these contexts is that they all unlink child-parent biological bonds. Each context raises one or more of three important issues: children’s right to know the identity of their biological parents; children’s right to both a mother and a father, preferably their own biological parents; and children’s right to come into being with genetic origins that have not been tampered with.
Children’s rights to know the identity of their biological parents
It is one matter for children not to know their genetic identity as a result of unintended circumstances. It is quite another matter to deliberately destroy children’s links to their biological parents, and especially for society to be complicit in this destruction. It is now being widely recognized that adopted children have the right to know who their biological parents are whenever possible, and legislation establishing that right has become the norm. The same right is increasingly being accorded to children born through gamete (sperm or ovum) donation. For instance, the United Kingdom has recently passed laws giving children this right at 18 years of age.
The impact of NRTs on children born through their use, other than that on their physical health, has been largely ignored; it has been readily assumed that no major ethical or other problems arise in creating children from donated gametes, and that opposition to the creation of these children is almost entirely based on religious beliefs. Such assumptions have been dramatically challenged in the last two years as the first people born through the use of these technologies reach adulthood, become activists, and call for change. They describe powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families, and describe themselves as "genetic orphans." They ask, "How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?"
The ethical doctrine of anticipated consent is relevant in deciding what we owe ethically to children brought into being through NRTs. Anticipated consent requires that when a person seriously affected by a decision cannot give consent, we must ask whether we can reasonably anticipate they would consent if able to do so. If not, it’s unethical to proceed.
So, ethically, we must listen to what donor-conceived adults are saying about gamete donation to decide whether we can anticipate consent to it. They – and adopted children – tell us of their profound sense of loss of genetic identity and connection. They wonder: Do I have siblings or cousins? Who are they? What are they like? Are they "like me"? What could I learn about myself from them? These questions raise the issue of how our blood relatives help each of us to establish our human identity. Humans identify closely with their close genetic family, and it seems that we also identify with traits in our family members that we like (and we try to develop the same ones in ourselves), and that we dislike (and vow not to be like that – the positive power of negative identification) . In short, from what many donor conceived adults tell us we cannot anticipate consent to anonymous gamete donation – or, indeed, to gamete donation itself.
Ethics, human rights, and international law – as well as considerations such as the health and well-being of adopted and donor-conceived children – all require that children have access to information regarding their biological parents. And it is not just these children who have this right, but their future descendants as well. Children deprived of knowledge of their genetic identity – and their descendants – are harmed physically and psychologically.
Respect for children’s rights in these regards requires that the law should prohibit anonymous sperm and ova donation, establish a donor registry, and recognize children’s rights to know the identity of their biological parents and, thereby, their own biological identity.
It is a further question whether gamete donation itself is ethically acceptable. Many of us have come to see it as acceptable for couples who do not regard it as immoral. But some donor-conceived adults adamantly disagree. Whether it should be available to same-sex couples or single women is a much more contentious issue.
Children’s rights to both a mother and a father
This right brings us to the issue of same-sex marriage, which has been legalized in Canada and some other countries. Under both article 16 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and domestic law, marriage is a compound right: the right to marry and to found a family.
Giving same-sex couples the right to found a family unlinks parenthood from biology. In doing so, it unavoidably takes away all children’s rights – not just those brought into same-sex marriages – to both a mother and a father and their right to know and be reared within their own biological family. It does so because marriage can no longer establish as the norm the natural, inherently procreative relationship between a man and a woman, and the rights of children that flow from that norm, in particular, the rights of children to both a mother and a father, who are their own biological parents unless an exception is justified as in the "best interests" of a particular child, as in adoption.
The primary rule becomes that a child's parents are who the law says they are, who may or may not be the child's biological parents. That is, the exception to biological parenthood, which used to be allowed for through adoption law, becomes the norm. In other words, same-sex marriage radically changes the primary basis of parenthood from natural or biological parenthood to legal (and social) parenthood as the Canadian Civil Marriage Act expressly legislates. That change has major impact on the societal norms, symbols and values associated with parenthood.
The same issue of children’s rights to both a mother and a father is raised by society’s involvement in intentionally creating single-parent households, for example, by funding single women’s access to artificial insemination.
Same-sex marriage advocates argue that children don't need both a mother and a father, and "genderless parenting" is just as good, or even better than opposite-sex parenting, because all children are wanted children. Research is showing, however, that men and women parent differently and other research that certain genes in young mammals are activated by parental behaviour (epigenetics – the interaction of genes and environment). Science may well show us that complementarity in parenting (having both a mother and a father) does matter for children’s well-being in ways we have not previously understood.
One argument against same-sex marriage raised in the Canadian cases was that same-sex couples could not found a family naturally and, therefore, marriage was not an appropriate way to publicly recognize their committed relationship. The Court of Appeal of Ontario responded, however, that these couples could use reproductive technologies to found a family. The common thread between same-sex marriage and reproductive technologies is that both disconnect procreation from sexual intimacy between two humans: Same-sex marriage involves sexual intimacy with no possibility of procreation; reproductive technologies involve procreation with no sexual intimacy.
The debate on legalizing same-sex marriage in Canada focused almost entirely on adults and their right not to be discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. The conflicting claims, rights, and needs of children were barely mentioned. It’s worth noting that legally recognizing civil unions, unlike the recognition of same-sex marriage, does not negate children’s right to both a mother and a father, because it does not include the right to found a family. For that reason, it represents the most ethical compromise between respect for the rights of homosexual people not to be discriminated against and the rights of children with respect to their biological families.
Children’s rights to be born from natural biological origins
In the more than 25 years since Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby," ushered in the brave new world opened up by NRTs, advances in the technologies have made more and more previously impossible interventions possible. Those "advances" make it necessary to formulate new rights for children in relation to their biological origins that would have been unimaginable until very recently.
A child’s right to be conceived with a natural biological heritage is the most fundamental human right and should be recognized in law.
Children have a right to be conceived from untampered-with biological origins, a right to be conceived from a natural sperm from one identified, living, adult man and a natural ovum from one identified, living, adult woman. Society should not be complicit in – that is, should not approve or fund – any procedure for the creation of a child, unless the procedure is consistent with the child’s right to a natural biological heritage.
The addition of the words man and woman in defining the right to a natural biological heritage, rather than simply referring to sperm and ovum, as would be more common, is not superfluous. It is theoretically possible to create an embryo with the genetic heritage of two women or two men, including by making a sperm or ovum from one of the adult’s stem cells and using a natural gamete from the other person, or making an "ovum" from an enucleated egg fused with a sperm and fertilizing it with another sperm, or perhaps by using two ova. The word "natural" excludes an opposite-sex couple using this technology to make an artificial sperm from an infertile man or artificial ovum from an infertile woman.
The requirement that the gametes come from adults preempts the use of gametes from aborted fetuses; it prevents children being born whose biological parent was never born. And the requirement that the donors be living excludes the use of gametes for postmortem conception. The right to bear children should not include the right to deny children at least the chance, when being conceived, of meeting their biological parents. Conceiving children with gametes from a dead donor, as an Australian court recently authorized, denies them this opportunity. In that case, as is so often true, the judge considered only the rights and wishes of the adults involved.
"Designer children" and societal values and institutions
I will not explore, here, the extensive literature on the ethics of designing our children by genetically altering – whether to enhance or disenhance – them when they are embryos. Rather, I want just to mention some important philosophically-based objections to doing that, which have not been widely discussed.
Because creating "designer children" involves genetic manipulation of human embryos, it destroys the essence of their humanness and, ultimately, the essence of the humanness of all of us. Genetic manipulation interferes with the intrinsic being of a person – with their very "self." As philosopher Søren Kierkegaard puts it, the designed person is not free to fully become themselves, which is the essence of freedom.
The power to fully become oneself requires that the person has non-contingent origins – they need to have a sense that they can go back and start again to remake or actualize their very self, and, in order to have that, they must not be preprogrammed or designed by another. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas agrees that designed persons no longer can own themselves, which is necessary to make their being and their lives fully their own – they are not free in their intrinsic being. They are deprived of the liberty that comes from the fact that no one has interfered with the essence of their being and that, as a result, their genetic makeup has come into existence through chance. Moreover, because these children are not equal to the designer, they are deprived of equality.
This loss of liberty and equality affects the humanness of all of us because, first, we would all be complicit in such manipulation by not prohibiting it. And second, because tampering with some people’s origins destroys a necessary condition for establishing a moral base for a secular society –that all people must be free from others’ interference in their intrinsic being, if they are to have the capacity to take part in the human interaction from which a shared morality arises.
The injustice of one generation imposing its will over another generation (if the first generation designs its own children) would also result in other losses that have implications far beyond those directly affected and the present. The use of these technologies by one generation challenges the basic human rights of equality and freedom of future generations. And because the liberty and equality of all citizens is at the heart of democratic societal institutions and of the values which democratic societies promote, to create people who are neither free nor equal undermines those institutions and values. In short, not prohibiting "designer children" undermines the very foundations of our Western democratic societies.
Conclusion
All these rights of children are of the same basic ethical nature –obligations of non-malfeasance, that is, obligations to first do no harm. Consequently, as a society, we have obligations to ensure respect for these rights of children. It is one matter, ethically, not to interfere with people’s rights of privacy and self-determination, especially in an area as intimate and personal as reproduction. It is quite another matter for society to become complicit in intentionally depriving children of their right to know and have contact with their biological parents and wider family, or their right to be born from natural biological origins. When society approves or funds procedures that breach these rights of children and, arguably, when it fails to protect such rights of children – for instance, by failing to enact protective legislation – society becomes complicit in the breaches of rights that ensue.
Those obligations extend also to future generations. We should clearly recognize that any genetic procedure that will turn out to be harmful to the future child or to a future generation, or contrary to their interests, is morally unacceptable and should be prohibited.
Knowing who our close biological relatives are and relating to them is central to how we form our human identity, relate to others and the world, and find meaning in life. Children – and their descendants – who don’t know their genetic origins cannot sense themselves as embedded in a web of people, past, present and future, through whom they can trace the thread of life’s passage down the generations to them. As far as we know, humans are the only animals who experience genetic relationships as integral to their sense of themselves.
We are learning now that eliminating that experience is harmful to children, biological parents, families, and society. We can only imagine how much more damage might be done to a child born not from the union of a man’s natural sperm and a woman’s natural ovum, but from "gametes" constructed through biotechnology.
In conclusion to summarize, children’s rights with respect to their biological origins are:
• For those origins to be natural;
• To know the identity of the progenitors of those origins; and
• To be in contact with those progenitors within a family structure
-- that is, to be reared by their biological mother and father
within their genetic family.
Margaret Somerville is director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, and author of The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit.
Hi Margo,
I cannot say I’m happy since I was waiting eagerly for your thoughts but in a way, your full agenda did a favor to the health of my own work and researches. So, thanks for the opportunity of discussing your mind teasing ideas. :-)
Cheers,
João Pedro Afonso,
Thank you for all the careful thought that you’ve given this issue and your substantial contribution to the debate that will, undoubtedly, continue to unfold. I’m not able to respond in detail to your arguments and propositions, as a result of a very heavy speaking and writing schedule. I apologize for that.
Margo Somerville
I try to be thoroughly, so I hope I covered all the big points. If not, say so, it is not my intention to run away of any argument. I also tend to be more explanatory than needed, but that’s because I hope others are reading too. Forgive me for that.
Just to return to the little provocation I done in the start, related with the second part of my original post, there was an interesting development in the (real) story I wrote to you. After I wrote it, I read that the (real) father is going to sue the Portuguese state for not have return his daughter yet to him. The interesting part is the foundation of his claim: according to him, the state is guilty of violate the right of the child to live with his parents… basically, your proposal, I think. I’m not fully satisfied with the decoding I made from the news, but the funny thing is that it appears that the child has been refusing to receive more visits from the (real) father after the first one. So what we have here is a right assigned to the child, used to do something she doesn’t want. It is of course a perversion of the real truth: what the father is really reclaiming is his right to live with the daughter. But to talk about child’s rights has much more weight… demagogic too. A last curiosity, the child has not his name, only the name from the (real) mother… due to the father initial refuse to assume her.
...(11/11)
Cheers,
“And, finally, a pro-choice culture does make these arguments against germ cell line interventions and for a right to come from natural origins less weighty, as if one can take life why not design it? I think the answer is that abortion - whether or not we agree with it being available - has to do with respecting women’s autonomy, not directly with killing fetuses, although that is the usual (but not always necessary) outcome. In fact, a strategy used by prochoice advocates is to keep the fetus invisible. Many people are only comfortable with abortion when the focus is only on the woman and the fetus is ignored. Brave new babies technology relates directly to and has direct impact on the fetus. Therefore, the arguments against it can still hold even in a prochoice context.”
I understand your point. As I said before, I think the majority is going to be massively against, and that includes pro-choice people. What I wanted to point when I talked about pro-choice culture was that no pro-life culture will ever accept this kind of technologies for what they imply: Failing here might mean very graphic failure results, sure to impress everyone, since mothers will always take their pregnancies until their term, if not miscarried them. So, there’s only the pro-choice culture left, able to hide earlier their failures (the confort issue you pertinently pointed). Something similar happened in the first years of babies in vitro. To assure a good success ratio, it was common (or at least I have that impression) to fertilize more eggs than the target goal. Multiple twins resulted from there but, of course, there is a limit to the capacity of a mother to carry them all with success, and some filtering was needed… this, of course, is “impossible” to rationalize or justify in a pro-life culture.
...(10/11)
...
“The correct question in both cases is how many breaches the presence of the right prevents."…
But there’s worst: Since one of the confessed purposes of the right is to protect the human genome, no breach can be allowed to inject new genes in that pool… to reduce the breaches is not enough, not when is it still possible to do more to prevent the contamination. That means to sterilize any result of those breaches, which implies the effective suspension of more than one human right to the people affected by the breach. I asserted that the new human right proposed would be tantamount to a redefinition of the human race, and now more than ever. If its “raison d’etre” is to protect the human genome, then sooner or later, that “human right” will end used to justify different treatments given to people, driving them away from the “human race”.
I feel I’ve been retelling, over and over again, the same idea: that, with all the respect, the proposed right is not the proper tool to achieve what you want.
...(9/11)
...
The analogy doesn’t help here either. When I first wrote to you, I considered carefully the right to life in comments I didn’t sent. The right to life is unlike any other in the sense that once failed to prevail, that failure is considered irreversible. States that promise too much in respect to this right, might end accountable in matters where only “God” can rule, which is ridiculous and against the “reasonably attainable” requirement I outlined. But there’s an escape route here: once dead, the person ceases to exist as living person, and his rights as such are voided. We can discuss rights for dead people, but the right to live is not surely one of them, as it is not enforceable by definition. Nor they can’t reclaim their rights for themselves alone, someone else must do it as proxies for them… which would lead to the pertinent question if they do it in the name of the dead or of themselves. The core point here is that no one concedes the same human nature to dead people they concede to alive, which justifies the different rights assigned to each one. If we trust this analogy to our case, the “altered” people, because caught in an irreversible breach of his rights, will also be considered of different nature just because they cannot see satisfied ever, the right you proposed.
...(8/11)
..."Good ends do not justify unethical means"…
They do not indeed,… but a means which only produces good ends cannot be classified as unethical, nor an ethical mean cannot be that if it only produces bad ends. To believe otherwise would destroy the fundamental desire we should experiment for ethical actions in detriment of unethical.
..."It is a duty on others not to do that (and it doesn’t matter legally or ethically that the person to whom the right will pertain is not yet in existence), so it is an enforceable right relating to one’s coming into being, but of course it can be breached. To take an analogy, the right to life is meant to prevent murder but murder still occurs.”
I trust you to have guessed already my answer: since by your words, the genome is so central to the human being, a changing genome means a different person… whom you have already acknowledge to be from the “human family” too. The enforcing you are asking will deny his existence, feasible but not if to evoke it, you use a right of his. Is it ethical to proxy the right of someone who’s coming to being, to deny his own existence? And if succeeded and that results in a non-existence, what legal legitimacy has a right belonging to one who never existed ever?
...(7/11)
Explored all the reasons I could think, there is only left the failure possibility in this kind of interventions, an argument which I already acknowledge before. But risk of failure is a constant in any medical intervention, and that never constituted before an impediment to it… except as a factor in evaluating the risks/benefice ratio which decides it. No reason why that shouldn’t be applied to this problem too, highlighting what could be considered acceptable or unacceptable risks.
So, aesthetics’s reasons, it will be.
Before I comment the rest not explored here, let me say I think the designed people idea to be one needing an exceptional open mind to be accepted. Resistance to it, will be the norm for now, independent of any political orientation. I don’t understand why the surprise about people known for liberal values, but maybe I’m misled about political ideologies… I thought that liberals in the Americas would translate to Leftists in Europe… and Left is traditionally concerned with equality between persons. “human germ cell line” alterations posts a big challenge to that idea. In contrast, the Right accepts easier the idea that men are not all equal.
Now, about other comments not covered before:
“which seems to me the approach you are taking - a utilitarian or moral relativist approach”
Ethical schools aside, the best way to challenge general principles, is by testing them with concrete examples. Otherwise, we can not trust them.
..."Many people"..."think such alteration would be inherently wrong"…
Although I think it wrong, I cannot prove it INHERENTLY wrong as I showed it before. Nor I think I saw that proof here yet.
...(6/11)
So, “broken natural order” will not be. What about “social dangers” for the intervened human being? Societies are not always tolerant to the different ones, and even when they are, there are always certain inside groups who are not. Once knowing, school mates could be cruel, grownups could fall into hate crimes pattern. There’s a chance that intervened kids might be shunted from society and end very unhappy, even hurt, with that… would it be ethical to bring children to the world knowing this? First, this can’t be the intrinsic value I was looking for since it is contingent to the society. There is even a chance that the children born that way would be ostracized because of the very own judgment of the process as unethical… a circular argument. Second, if I downplay certain eugenic ideas before because they interfere with fundamental freedoms of society members, how can I accept to not do certain things, solely to be in conformation with the general society thinking? Conformity with a society must be the consequence of a reason, not the reason itself… or else, any new idea or act in society would be considered automatically unethical. If we live in fear of what the society might think of us, or do to us, then we are not free. And to decide the fate of a children based only in its society acceptation and fear of not being accepted, might be considered an unethical argument since it enslave us to what a society wants from us, and not to our reasons or respect for their reasons.
...(5/11)
These arguments and the suspected growing medical costs associated with them are the core problem which the infamous eugenic ideas try to solve. These ideas are not bad per se, since we all practice them unconsciously or not (when choosing whom to date for example, or when we accept the incest related taboos), the problem is when their proposed solutions clash with the right of everyone to form a family, presenting an interference in the private lives of citizens inadmissible in societies which we pretend free. That’s not the case when the eugenic idea starts from the proper family in relation to their descenders. And if they feel their combined genome to be risky and have a chance to obtain risk free descendants through this techniques, children who are not ill and can grow happily and normally, what parents wouldn’t jump to the chance? Why they would not? Because it is not natural? But in a sense, they are restoring nature ways, by filtering those genes that, if it were not our civilization, would be likely filtered naturally… and not even loosing sons and daughters to the process…
...(4/11)
Is it then, because the natural order is broken by this? Because the conjectured changes in the human gene pool would be decided by humans, and this is unacceptable as no one should have that responsibility or power?
Now, here comes the problem… we are already breaking “the natural order”! The natural human gene pool is not fixed, nor are genetic defects appearing only by inheritance alone. Instead, new genes are appearing constantly through diverse mechanisms. Some are irrelevant, a few are lucky advantages, the rest are pernicious. The natural order would be to promote the second ones, to trim the last ones and ignore the others, resulting in an average constantly improving gene pool. This is still happening, but under the influence of our health technology achievements which changes the nature of this filtering: genes which would be filtered before, are now preserved at a medical cost. The result is a constant devaluation of our “common heritage” (measured by the previously natural standards) provoked by the appearance and preservation of otherwise “trash” riding alone with the other genes… a process fueled by our commitment to the right to live, and the dedication of our medical classes. This would be painstakingly obvious if our civilization suffered a collapse in the services it provides, and the world turned much more harsh. We could even discuss if it is ethical to allow the proliferation of these hypothetical faulty genes until the moment when they may provoke the greater damage, but for now, it is irrelevant, since I don’t foresee such civilization downfall at short term… nor the commitment to people’s health to dwindle (in general, even if sometimes we should suspect from some political choices). But no one can say that our genetic pool is evolving in a pure natural way, now.
...(3/11)
Is it to preserve the “human gene pool”, or the “common heritage of humankind that must be held on trust for future generations” from being corrupted? We need to define in this case what means to be corrupted. You were right to treat my arguments as Trojan horses since that’s the way they were intended: if we accept gene cell therapies to treat diseases, it is only a small step to accept them as a means to improve or enhance an individual too. Despite that, the two purposes might present considerable differences about their methods, one mainly centered on eliminating defective genes, the other concerned in adding “better” ones. Funny, the first method is clearly detrimental to the human diversity gene pool (our common heritage), while a simplistic reading of the second method may conclude that this one, in contrast, enriches the same gene pool… but from your words, the reason why the first purpose cannot be accepted, is because it opens a door to the second purpose, which must be avoided at all costs. Somethings doesn’t adds up.
...(2/11)
Revising what I wrote before, there are some errors I hope didn’t destroyed the sense of it. So, it is “nail of relativism” not “nail or relativism”. Also the last paragraph has several errors and omissions I’ll highlight now. It should be:
“The majority of our population is behind the foster parents because being Unable to think on law subtleties, they look directly after the child interests and happiness. The law has also the same interests in sight but instead of being wise enough TO keep open ends, it ties itself in what he thinks to be the best way to proportionate those interests… forgetting that each case, is a different one. I think youR proposals have"…
The word “right” appear often and should have be quoted to distinguish it as a body of laws or goals, from their use as in “the right way”. I also shouldn’t have used the word chimera as an example, since I’m open to the idea that it might be human, by my approach.
“If instead of solving the hereditary problems and produce an healthy child, they lead to a chimera, a brainless body or a terminal ill/non viable one for example, the human thing to do in those cases is an abortion… but this kind of solution or of risks management is only acceptable in pro-choice cultures.”
Just to close the argument, this shouldn’t no problem if “Because creating ‘designer children’ involves genetic manipulation of human embryos, it destroys the essence of their humanness “ but should be for me if by my own words, “What I don’t accept is to think on then as less than humans just because they were designed, once and if that happens”. This needs a clarification. What I’m saying is that our human nature shouldn’t be contingent on our origins, but on what we are. This implies a need to define a human through other means than simply his story. How to draw the line between humans and not humans then, is not as easy as before, and indeed, “genetic manipulation of human embryos” may take them across that line. If you allow me a stupid joke, no one will grant me humanity if having submitted to that kind of intervention, I ended like a cow, with the thoughts of a cow (But then, I’ll probably will like more of another type of buddies :-). The simple way to deal with these cases needs an attitude that Nature has, but our culture still discuss. Remember that my original argument was about HUMAN people born with problems from this procedures, who I think would be more happy if they never knew the origin of them. Genetic interventions like this might fail and do worse than good, but this should not be automatic cause to abortion. But I need to be aware that there are cases where we’ll not have luck at all, and would be cruel to continue… that’s from where came my “gross mistake” expression from.
I’m still thinking on your arguments and the best way of properly answering them… A proper answer is important to me because I feel that in relation to the essence of the topic of the designed people, I feel more agreement than disagreement with you; but the way I voiced my disagreements might induce a wrong idea of that. You see, I’m conservationist at hearth, and visceral opposer to the introduction of OGMs (Organisms Genetically Modified) in nature. Logically, I have qualms about designing people, even because is a kind of “solution” not available to non-designed people. What I don’t accept is to think on then as less than humans just because they were designed, once and if that happens. This is also the solution to anyone who might think to create them as tools, because if they are humans, they cannot be slaves or property. I’ll eventually develop this idea later, alone with a more detailed reply to your answers, but the following clarification cannot wait:
“And finally I’d respectfully suggest that we never call any human being a “gross mistake”.”
You misunderstood me. What I was calling gross mistakes was germ line genetic therapies wrongly done or unsuccessful with dramatic consequences, and which are due to happen if they ever turn mainstream. If instead of solving the hereditary problems and produce an healthy child, they lead to a chimera, a brainless body or a terminal ill/non viable one for example, the human thing to do in those cases is an abortion… but this kind of solution or of risks management is only acceptable in a pro-choice culture. The gross mistake is the failed intervention, not the sad result.
Page 1 of 3 : 1 2 3 >