Well, that’s not really the case. You protect and nurture your ovaries and eggs, and your husband protects his testicles and sperm. For a very brief time you’re also protecting both the egg that may be fertilised and the sperm that might fertilise it.
I don’t protect my ovaries and eggs ON PURPOSE. My body might do so, through some kind of evolutionary biological imperative. My husband protects his testicles out of fear of intense pain. But neither of us does so out of concern for a child that does not exist.
Once I was pregnant, I consciously made all kinds of choices to ensure the health & safety of the baby.
I’m afraid I have another small nitpick; once you became aware you were pregnant, you made those choices. There was likely some amount of time between you actually concieving and you knowing you’d concieved.
In addition, there are plenty of couples for whom concieving is difficult (or they may be unlucky), who plan ahead by taking steps to increase their sperm count or working out when a woman is most fertile; in these cases, it can be said that a couple are protecting, and investing in, their respective gametes before conception.
This thread (like stem cell research) moves unbelievably quickly!
I think “permits” is almost being too generous. The current administration’s stance places a stranglehold on our nation’s scientists’ ability to perform embryonic stem cell research, and this is a field which moves extremely quickly (See my quotation from 2005 NIH hearings above). Simply put, if we are going to put the brakes on stem cell research, we need to sort ethics faster if we expect to remain competitive. Perhaps private enterprise will step in and fund this research since the NIH has essentially been rendered impotent by Bush’s executive order and now-subsequent veto of legislation that would have expanded federal funding. My understanding is that the private sector has not yet picked up much of the slack. If the research can be done, I’m certainly amenable to a private solution, but I’ve yet to see one. Furthermore, the advantage of reliance on federal funding is that the information and technology generated by such funding is often vastly more open to we, the taxpayers, than analgogous corporate-generated research would be. The NIH is an excellent (though increasingly underfunded) entity–really I’d say one of the best government agencies in existence.
Good point. My impulse is to say we should cross that bridge when we come to it, but we will almost certainly come to it. This is really a topic unto itself though, and I’m not well-versed enough in immunology to say whether or not human cloning will ultimately be necessary. Surely, it would be a comparatively easy solution to the problem of histocompatibility. This problem also simply goes back to the question of whether or not an embryo represents a human life (with the added twist that these embryos would no longer just be IVF leftovers, but rather created for the purpose of stem cell harvest), a subject about which we’ve already said a great deal in this thread.
But that’s an extremely difficult definition to make. A greater understanding of stem cell biology might lead to cures for all kinds of cancers, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease; we might be able to slow or ameliorate the negative effects of human aging; we might gain unparalleled understanding of human development which might in turn lead to cures for other developmental disorders… or not. Or none of it, really. Honestly, I don’t think we can know until we try.
An interesting question does presents itself: if we learned something truly earthshaking–say, a cure for Parkinson’s that required the use of cloned human embryonic stem cells–using IVF embryos, would those of us who believe embryos are human life still object to human cloning (that is, the generation of human embryos for therapeutic purposes) if it meant millions of lives saved? Would our society have the willpower to resist reaping the benefits of such a discovery? And does the possibility of discovering such a costly cure mean that we must not perform the research in the first place?
Of course, that’s all conjecture–we might never make such a discovery–and it’s possible we might sidestep the cloning solution to histocompatibility entirely by some technique we can’t even conceive of today.
How can this be seen as anything less than hypocrisy? Sarahfeena, you created a child. In the the process, there’s a good chance that you had fertilised eggs fail to implant without even knowing it happened; yet you feel this is moral while the same failure of a fertilised egg to implant is immoral if the fertilisation was achieved through IVF? Considering that an estimated 25% of pregnancies fail in the first 6 weeks, anyone trying for a child risks the accidental destruction of an embryo - how this is moral and ok for those who concieve naturally but immoral for those who concieve with assistance is beyond my understanding.
We are about to undertake IVF. We don’t know and have no real control over how many embryos will be created, and we don’t know how many we will eventually use but we are not going into this with an attitude of “Make more than we need and we’ll chuck the rest when we are done”. There is no intention to destroy frozen embryos. We simply do not know what the future holds, and the fates of any frozen embryos depend on any number of variables - Will it work the first time around? Will both embryos implant? Will only one implant? Will it be none? If it all goes well, will we want a sibling for our child in a couple of years? Would twins be too much of a handful for us to consider another child? Will parenting be so wonderful that we want many more? What if our circumstances change and we decide we can’t afford more children? We do know that we want to undergo the lengthy, uncomfortable and costly egg harvesting part of the process as few times as possible, which is the beauty of being able to freeze embryos - if we fail, frozen embryos will give us a chance to try again without starting from the beginning, speeding up the process and meaning I need to take less medication and undergo fewer anasthetics. If we are fortunate enough to have embryos left in storage, I doubt the decision to leave them unused will be one we reach quickly or easily, as I can imagine agonising over the practical, logical arguments against developing them versus the emotional desire to give them a chance - not too dissimilar to any couple who make the decision to call their family complete while wondering what could have been, but with the twist of those potential children having a physical representation sitting in a tank of nitrogen.
FWIW, we have decided to put unused embryos up for “adoption” rather than earmarking them for destruction. It took a while for me to feel at ease with the idea of having biological children running around “out there” being raised by other people, but I’ve come to regard it as the best option for us - and I can still empathise with people who chose otherwise. If we are unable to have a child ourselves, I imagine donating unused embryos will be re-evaluated as I can picture myself struggling to cope with the idea that someone else can have “my” children and I can’t, but fingers and toes and everything else crossed that this is something we’ll never have to face. Regardless, any embryos that are destroyed in this process will be a loss to us, not an unregarded victim of collateral damage. Just like you, we want a child. Just like you, we have tried to concieve a child. Unlike you, we will know when our fertilised eggs fail to implant. Unlike you, we will mourn this. I can’t understand how you can find this immoral without comdemning all procreation.
Personhood is not a light bulb; something that is either on or off. It is a slow progression from mindless cells to Jessica the little girl.
DNA is not personhood; if it was, I’d be commiting mass manslaughter every time I stubbed a toe.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
My view : They wouldn’t care, unless they or a loved one had the disease in question. People who follow the “pro-life” view tend to have a complete disdain for the lives and suffering of others; they wouldn’t care about the death of a few million or billion people. Unless, of course, they are one of the condemned.
Nope. The opponents would end up like the religious nuts who object to blood transfusions; a minority ignored, save to be mocked. One reason they oppose such research, I expect.
[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Not really. I was trying to get pregnant, and so I was treating myself each month as if I were pregnant, just in case.
True, and in this sense, I was taking pre-natal vitamins, in order to ensure successful development of the embryo. However, I don’t see how that changes my point. I did everything I could to make sure that my baby was healthy from the moment the sperm & egg joined.
I really do not understand this line of reasoning. In one case, I tried to get pregnant, and prayed that the embryos would implant and everything would be fine. Sometimes, as in my case, actually, they either don’t implant or they don’t develop, because for some reason, they were not able to survive. Usually this is because they do not develop correctly. If I had had IVF, I would create embryos knowing FULL WELL that perfectly healthy ones would be not be used, and may very well be destroyed.
I am not saying that people go into it with this attitude. I am just saying that I don’t believe in making embyros into by-products on purpose.
I understand all of these issues, and the emotional turmoil people go through, as I do have several good friends who have opted for IVF.
I think it’s a great thing that you plan to give the unused embryos up for adoption. Good luck with the IVF, I hope it works out great for you!
[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
In this case, I would suggest to you that you did, in fact, protect your fertilised egg “in advance”.
Not entirely so; your actions also helped protect, and give support to, the unfertilised egg (and all the others, but that’s peripheral). I’m sure you took precautions to stop your ovaries from becoming damaged, or took precautions of some kind when you were trying to become pregnant so that chances of pregnancy were high.
What i’m getting at is I see a similarity between these positions. A person who believes personhood isn’t achieved at the moment of conception protects their child when it is only a few cells, so that the baby is healthy when it develops. You see it a different way; conception provides personhood, so you protect your child even before it is those few cells. I’m merely saying that we could go one step back, and say that protection of sperm and eggs in order that children in the future are healthy is similar.
Again, not totally correct. IVF embryos have a chance of not being perfectly healthy either. Plus, I don’t see where you’re dividing a line between knowing full well and “maybe” knowing. What’s the chance a fertilised egg might not implant? With IVF treatment, it’s 100% certain that embryos will not be used; what’s the acceptable percentage chance?
Sorry, missed these questions before:
As a parent, you have the right to convince your child of whatever you want, including the idea that B should be willing to sacrifice herself for A. You do not, however, have the right to force the transplant service to use a donor who does not meet strict criteria for donor acceptability (a normal healthy child, for instance). For that matter, if B were brain-dead and on life support, you still couldn’t force the transplant team to use her heart if it were otherwise unsuitable, although you would be within your rights to consent to organ harvest as legal guardian of the child.
This is too vague. What experiment(s) did you have in mind? Can you give an example? Has it gone through the IRB? Have the patients consented or been consented by their legal guardian/power of attorney?
The closest example I can think of would be a clinical trial for an experimental treatment protocol for advanced-stage cancer. These could be considered (arguably) harmful if you take into account side effects from radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, but would hopefully produce some useful data.
Guess what? We do that already.
True. However, at the moment the priority should be to expand and invigorate the existing pool of stem cell lines available for research, so we can at least start down that path. A useful secondary effect of available federal funding would be the de-stigmatization of embryonic stem cell research as a viable career choice (currently a serious problem even in California).
Of course, once research has progressed to the point where cloning becomes an issue, it will hit the second roadblock (the signed bill prohibiting therapeutic cloning) and stall out once more while a (hopefully more enlightened) government argues the issue.
This is a point that, in my opinion, cannot be overemphasized. I don’t believe in the likelihood of private funding either; for one thing, few companies are likely to fund research that’s not going to show a short-term tangible benefit. I have no idea how many private individuals are funding stem cell research.
If human cloning does become necessary, I believe it’s already been pre-emptively prohibited by one of the bills Bush didn’t veto.
First off, apologies for not coming back into this thread until now. Other people have made the arguments I would have made, but are making them better than I would have, so kudos to you.
I was going to sat the exact same thing. If someone makes a new treatment for breast cancer, but is only useful on advanced breast cancer that is past the point of being treatable with surgery, radiation, chemo, or anything else, how else are they going to test it? Things like this are done all the time in medical research. A new treatment gets FDA approval for clinical trials, and so the companies go out and do the trials and whoever meets the criteria and, here’s the key, consents to the procedure. The researchers go into the trial knowing full well that, due to the nature of clinical trials, not everyoen will get the treatment and therefore (if it’s a terminal illness), some will die, even though they might think they are getting the treatment. I see this as very similar to the proposed (now vetoed) bill.
Were those cancer patients going to die anyway? Yes. Nothing could have been done to save them. Will some of them still die, because they aren’t actually getting the treatment that is being tested? Yes, because that’s how a double-blind study works. However, the ones who live (or who might still die but showed some kind of quantifiable result because of the treatment) will give the researchers data and help further their cure/treatment, hopefully to the point where it gets full approval and can be used to save more lives.
So, in the end, we have no one dying who would have no died otherwise, yet many more lives saved. Same thing with the embryos. They will be destroyed no matter what, so why not do research with them like we did with the cancer patients that mgiht save lives in the future?
No additional embryos will be made or destroyed. A bill stating this was passed by congress and signed by Bush, so any argument using that line of logic is not valid. I know that some opponants are against it on moral grounds, that no matter what, they will not condone a practice that destroys what they see as human life…yet at the same time, they say they don’t want to outlaw IFV. This, to me, makes no sense. I don’t see how you can be ok with destroying them in one instance, but not ok in another…especially considering they are really the same instance.
Can those who agree with the veto of this bill, yet don’t wany any action taken to outlaw IFV, state their reasoning why?
But you don’t know this. It’s entirely possible to “use up” your entire batch trying to get one or more to actually implant.
More accurately, if you have IVF, you know FULL WELL that there’s a CHANCE some of the embryos won’t be used, and will most likely be destroyed (now that Bush vetoed the bill).
I don’t see the similarity. I have no need or reason to protect JUST the egg. I lose one of those every month. I protected the FERTILIZED egg. Big, big difference.
Pazu, the point of those posts was not to hash out every detail of a real-world example scenario, it was to make a general point that it is not morally acceptable to force Person A to sacrifice herself in order to benefit Person B, because Person B’s life has been judged more worthy. I didn’t see anything in your response that challenged that idea.
Alright; then have your ovaries removed. You have no need to protect just the egg, so you may as well get rid of them.
Do you see what I mean? You do protect the egg, because you need it in order for it to be fertilised in the first place. You protect them so that at some point it can be fertilised (and become a person), just as someone may protect what they consider a ball of cells because at some point it will become a person in their eyes.
OK, I need to clear up some misconceptions about my position.
It is not (IMO) immoral to create an embryo that is not healthy and does not survive for reasons known only to God.
It is true that IVF embryos have a chance of not being healthy, either. In my opinion, if it is MORE likely than with natural conception, then this is a problematic area. BUT, my core problem with IVF is not that it created UNVIABLE embryos. When I had my miscarriages, the sac that the baby is supposed to grow in developed, but the baby didn’t. No matter what I or my doctor did or didn’t do, that baby was NEVER going to develop. This is, I believe, the most common kind of miscarriage. It happens all the time, more often than people think. Usually, there is some chromosomal problem with the cell division. If such a circumstance occurs, whether naturally or through IVF, there is nothing wrong with “destroying” it, because there IS NO BABY to destroy.
In a situation where an embryo exists, but does not implant, again, there is no way to know, if the embryo was created naturally, that this is going to happen. Personally, if I was to have a known problem with repeated implantation failure I would not continue to try to get pregnant. Likewise, if I were to use birth control, I would not use a method that causes fertilized eggs not to implant.
Getting to IVF, I think that the Church’s view on this is relevant to the general public in one way, but not in the other. The first reason the Church does not believe in IVF because they don’t believe in any “artificial” form of conception. This means, conception should only happen through the sex act. As a Catholic, I am bound to this. However, I do not expect our government to impose what is strictly a religious teaching onto others. The other reason the Church is against it is because of these wasted embryos. This is an area where I think goes beyond just a Church teaching. If I think it is murder to destroy these embryos, then I have a moral obligation to try to stop people from doing it, just as I would try to stop any other murder.
This all being said, to me, if IVF could be perfected to the point where the created embryos have at least as high a chance of being successfully implanted as an embryo created the usual way, and if all embryos that are being saved to have additional children were actually given that opportunity, then I personally would have much, much less of a problem with it.
Apologies for misunderstanding your position, Sarahfeena.
Hmm. Would you be ok with (or at least accepting of) the creation of embryos with a deliberate defect? For example, if we could “build in” a time limit of 3 weeks, after which that embryo dies. Would it be acceptable to create such embryos, or is it only when the health of the embryo is up to chance that it’s acceptable?