Making babies to harvest tissue

[flashl]

Marrow With Children

May 22, 2008
by William Saletan

If you're tired of reading about how dead Hillary Clinton is or how long it'll take her to admit it, fly with me across the Atlantic for a couple of minutes. A monumental debate is going on in the British House of Commons over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which will influence how governments around the world regulate family and reproductive issues in the next century.

Everything's on the table in this free-for-all: late-term abortions, human-animal hybrids, and IVF for lesbians and unmarried women.

...

The number of votes to prevent lesbian parenthood beat out the number of votes to prevent abortions after 20 weeks. From this, you could make a pretty good argument that feminists are right: Some supporters of abortion restrictions care more about regulating sex and family structure than about protecting life.

...

But that's still not the headline, in my book. The headline is that restrictions on lesbian IVF and trivial species mixture outpolled restriction of genetic testing to choose embryos for tissue harvesting. The common term for this practice is "savior siblings."

...

In my view, the rise of this mentality -- the reconceptualization of human beings as medical tools and resources -- is way more dangerous than gender upheaval, species-mixing, or even abortion. Abortions, no matter what you think of them, are defensive. Tissue harvesting, on the other hand, carries an affirmative mandate. It entitles you, and arguably obliges you, to deliberately create new human life, which will then live or die based on its utility to others.

Slate

[LeftishBrit]

1. Who is this bloke? Is he on the Religious Right?

Human beings have always been to some degree treated as 'tools and resources'. Why is it OK to have children to help with labour on the farm, carry on the family name, look after the parents in their old age, keep the family business going, help save the marriage, etc., etc., but not (in part) to save a sibling's life? I agree that it is a bad thing if the children are ONLY valued for instrumental reasons, and not for themselves; but that applies to lots of case, not just 'saviour siblings'.

[alarimer]

2. If they are talking about embryonic stem cells

It is not a "baby", just a cluster of cells that would not even be viable if it was implanted.

I believe all these are valid tools in the eradication of diseases like MS or Parkinson's.

[uberllama42]

3. I don't see any ethical objection to any of the practices in that bill

The objections I've heard rely on a religious idea about what a human being is, rather than a medical idea. To my knowledge, there is no reason why that research should not go forward.