I ask you to consider a situation in which a pregnant woman is fatally injured in a very serious car accident. The nature of her injuries has left her “brain dead” and such her body remains functional for a limited time (the perfect organ donor).
Here’s the challenge: Imagine that with advances in fertility, it is possible for this embryo to be transplanted* into a healthy surrogate mother. If the embryo is not transplanted soon it will die. Who decides where that embryo goes?
I love the thought of “the government” or even better “the voting populace.” Imagine the slippery slope of receiving a phone call at 3am from a mysterious voice requesting the use of your womb for 9 months.
The obvious answer would be that noble women from around the world would line up to volunteer. I don’t believe this for a second, my reasoning stems from three observations: the number of people that sign their organ donor card, the number of people that donate blood, the number of people that offer live bone marrow transplants. All three of those cases involve situations in which people die because there were not enough volunteers, and I expect that in my thought-experiment the demand of motherless embryos would soon exceed the supply of volunteering mothers.
So to clarify the original post: in this case where an embryo needs a surrogate mother to survive, who decides where that embryo goes, and is there anyone who does not get any say?
*Feel free to attack the situation on a medical level. But keep in mind that transplantation procedures are approaching routine. And fertility advancements will improve with time. Considering the state we are at now with artificial insemination etc. this situation is not entirely implausible in the near future. And once started will only improve with repetition.
I say that we consult the ruling council of giant squids.
In reality, no such urgency to coerce a surrogate mother will occur; the embryo will simply be an unfortunate casualty.
More on this; in the case where an adult patient needs a kidney or bone marrow transplant, do mysterious voices call you at 3am and request one of your functioning kidneys or a sample of your bone marrow? No.
In the case where in order to survive, a patient requires the use of transplant material that is not forthcoming, who decides? Nobody; the patient dies. Sad but true.
In the case of a human embryo, a further stage of separation might be that the medical profession may not choose to consider it a ‘patient’.
I’d like to make this a little more challenging.
The pro-life stance tends to be that embryo = baby. So replace embryo in my question with baby. If a mother died in a car crash but the baby survives, there is a clear chain of custody: father assuming there is one, failing that next of kin (ie grandparents), last resort orphanage. There are cases where the baby is born pre-mature, and I’ve heard of anecdotal cases where the mother was kept on life support to allow the embryo to develop. I’m asking you to consider a few steps further.
Now Mangetout, scary thought but at which point do we flip from ‘not a patient’ to ‘is a patient’ ?
I perceive this as first father chooses, second the mother chooses since next of kin is covered in her will, thirdly the government chooses, then someone has to volunteer. But in my scenario the father can’t choose himself (yet…) so would he be allowed to “choose” someone else? In the second case the mother (through her will) dumps the baby on a family member (who may choose to give it up) but again, grandmothers really shouldn’t be carrying a child to term. Which would leave the state to set up some sort of orphanage system…
Does the father have any legal claim over an embryo, if so is there a specified age (obviously a point after DNA could be compared)?
I don’t think this is a particularly scary question; it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to answer definitively and objectively, but I don’t see why that should scare us any more than we are scared by the question “how many bristles can I clip off my chin before I no longer have a beard?” - there is no obvious natural cutoff point, so we have to decide for ourselves where we’re happy to draw the line.
Of course, it’s possible that you have supply and demand reversed. So far as I know, in all of the surrogate-mother cases thus far, the woman who provides the womb wants a baby but is infertile, and so pays or otherwise arranges for another woman to have an embryo which is then transfered to the infertile woman. The situation you’re asking about, in fact, would be simpler, because there’s no chance that the genetic mother is going to try to go back on the contract. There is still the possibility of complications with the genetic father, though: Presumably, the host mother will want to raise the baby as her own, but the father may also want to raise the baby as well. He may decide that giving up the baby for what’s essentially adoption is better than letting it die, but that’s not a given.
No post has ever - EVER - made me laugh as much as that comment! I literally have tears in my eyes. Thank you for the best grin in weeks!!!