Social/political foo: IVF
May. 11th, 2006 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alpharaposaCatholic school teacher fired for using in-vitro fertilization technique to get pregnant.
I've been doing some thinking about IVF. We have this idea of what it's like, but in the debate over embryo stem cell research we found out that there are all these embryos destined for the trash bin sitting around. Where did they come from? From the process of in vitro fertilization. Hundreds of viable embryos as a waste product. For anybody who opposes abortion, this is a catastrophe.
See, they don't just stick one egg and some sperm together to get an embryo. They get as many eggs (using fertility drugs) out of the ovaries as they can, put them with some sperm and let any fertilized eggs develop a little into small embryos. And then they attempt implantation, but that's not always successful on the first try. With the extras, they can keep trying for a while, but eventually they succeed. What happens to the leftover embryos? They get either stored or 'disposed of' in some fashion. If the couple doesn't want them, nobody else will take them. In the effort to create one life, a dozen lives may be created and then literally thrown away. Many people resort to these techniques, creating the hundreds of 'waste' embryos that were the point of contention in the stem cell debate.
That is an amazingly high price to get one baby 'of your own'.
The other points are also very important. In That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis writes of people living on the moon who have 'cold marriages'. They don't have sex with each other- they each lie with copies of the other person instead. They conceive without ever having to touch. Now, if that concept doesn't leave you cold, I don't know what will.
And yet, and yet... that's what IVF is. It's conception without sex. In our society, it's a thing of last resort, but to bioethicists, it's the wave of the future. I don't know how many science fiction settings there are where people who actually have children through regular old sex are weird, but there's plenty.
Once upon a time, I thought IVF innocent- even wonderful. Then I learned what the price is.
I've been doing some thinking about IVF. We have this idea of what it's like, but in the debate over embryo stem cell research we found out that there are all these embryos destined for the trash bin sitting around. Where did they come from? From the process of in vitro fertilization. Hundreds of viable embryos as a waste product. For anybody who opposes abortion, this is a catastrophe.
See, they don't just stick one egg and some sperm together to get an embryo. They get as many eggs (using fertility drugs) out of the ovaries as they can, put them with some sperm and let any fertilized eggs develop a little into small embryos. And then they attempt implantation, but that's not always successful on the first try. With the extras, they can keep trying for a while, but eventually they succeed. What happens to the leftover embryos? They get either stored or 'disposed of' in some fashion. If the couple doesn't want them, nobody else will take them. In the effort to create one life, a dozen lives may be created and then literally thrown away. Many people resort to these techniques, creating the hundreds of 'waste' embryos that were the point of contention in the stem cell debate.
That is an amazingly high price to get one baby 'of your own'.
The other points are also very important. In That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis writes of people living on the moon who have 'cold marriages'. They don't have sex with each other- they each lie with copies of the other person instead. They conceive without ever having to touch. Now, if that concept doesn't leave you cold, I don't know what will.
And yet, and yet... that's what IVF is. It's conception without sex. In our society, it's a thing of last resort, but to bioethicists, it's the wave of the future. I don't know how many science fiction settings there are where people who actually have children through regular old sex are weird, but there's plenty.
Once upon a time, I thought IVF innocent- even wonderful. Then I learned what the price is.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-12 05:20 am (UTC)So if we took those few affordable dollars from everyone and added them up it'd be a rather sizable chunk of money. Which means it could be put towards doing something more visible... Isn't this how charities and special interest groups work already?
No one ..... to educate the public, to make this a national issue.
Because it's not necessary to do those things to make it a national issue. Besides, and I hate to say it, it probably wouldn't accomplish much were you to take some of those drastic measures, yet when a celebrity goes out and helps out with a token bit of effort they're touted as heroes? A bit backwards don't you think?
I don't think people appreciate just how little talk alone helps anyone.
Talking is one of the best ways to get the information out there for people so they can be educated and spread out the information. It's the whole if you tell two people something, and they tell two people, and so on and so on, you eventually will have reached a large audience by only telling two people to start. I have no idea how many conversations have been started about this topic in people's homes since having read this, do you?
Three excellent rejoinders by anhert
Date: 2006-05-13 11:12 pm (UTC)asl_ninja