Last Updated on 09/09/2024 by Arun jain
There was an immediate backlash when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But there was as much backlash from the left as it was from the right: The overwhelmingly Republican state government took just weeks to pass legislation to shield fertility clinics from liability when fetuses are damaged or destroyed.
It seemed that the battle over IVF, as a cultural question, was over before it began. In May, 82 percent Americans polled by Gallup said they believe IVF is morally acceptable. In response to public pressure, Donald Trump promised recently Also a theoretical mandate to protect IVF with federal protections and pay for health insurance.
This was not inevitable. A generation ago, bioethicists were fighting over whether to make assisted reproductive technology normal or taboo. There is now a strong public consensus that it should not only be tolerated but celebrated.
But this one can be quiet. With major technological advances in childbirth on the horizon, what was once predictable is becoming plausible, setting the stage for a potentially tumultuous shift in the cultural mood about assisted reproduction.
Consider in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, a technology under development that would allow eggs or sperm to be created from normal body tissues such as skin cells. Men can be genetic mothers, women can be fathers, and people can be the offspring of one, three, four, or any number of parents.
The first child born through IVG is probably still a long way off – one The researcher predicts It will take five to 10 years until the first insemination attempt, though new biotech timelines are often optimistic. But bioethicists Henry GreeleyNoting the benefits of allowing same-sex couples to have genetic offspring and IVF allowing parents to select dozens or even hundreds of the most genetically desirable embryos, predicts that eventually the majority of pregnancies in the United States may arise from this type of technology. . Deborah L. spar, writing About IVG for Times Opinion in 2020, echoed the view that such advances seem inevitable: “We worry about designer babies or the prospect of some madman Frankenstein hatching in his backyard. Then we found out that there was a nice couple next door.”
But once a technology like IVG enters public view, will feelings about reproductive technologies remain stable? After all, Americans sometimes take a surprising turn against the technology they used to embrace, and today we’re in the mood for a reaction. Americans are dissatisfied with smartphones, social media, nuclear power and processed food for children, and their old faith in technology to solve the oldest human frustrations has recently been shattered. A turn against reproductive technology may be coming—not least because Silicon Valley, the focus of much of today’s criticism, is getting more involved.
Classical-liberal critics of assisted reproductive technology, among whom I count myself, argue that it can unethically turn the arrival of a child, which should be treated as a gift, into a project. We undertake projects to realize our own ambitions. We control, select useful materials to meet desired results and discard waste.
The irony of the science fiction story “Gattaka” is that the most oppressed character was not at a biological disadvantage, but the person whose creations his parents had made for him were forever written into his biology. His life was not entirely his own.
It’s remarkable that this idea is so pervasive in our culture and yet has no purchase on how we think about reproductive technologies today. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis is a process that analyzes IVF embryos and allows technicians to eliminate those with genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome, or select those with a desired trait, such as a male over a female. Sex-selective abortion, which is widely practiced in India and China, is already materializing a genetic overclass (boys) and a relinquishable underclass (girls). Then to my colleague Brendan Foht “Kinship engineering” — egg and sperm donation, surrogacy and mitochondrial replacement therapy, which are billed as fertility treatments or medical therapies but actually ensure desired kinship relationships.
Although these practices cater to the parents’ preferences, the fertility industry couches its services in the language of gifting, especially egg donation and surrogacy—both to the women supplying the eggs and the parents seeking them. The techniques we already have for selecting children’s traits are similarly seen in our culture as ways to gift children with the best possible lives.
But what happens when the figures most associated in the public mind with the push for reproductive technologies turn from the nice couple next door to Silicon Valley tech overlords?
Pay attention to recent attention Elon Musk’s pronatalist ambitionsEspecially his desire for more children for “smart people”, his widespread use of IVF and surrogacy, and his service as a sperm donor to live up to his promise. Even amid a discourse overwhelmingly committed to the liberalization of reproductive technology, it’s surprising how willing critics are to recognize something here that’s just … well, weird.
That could be an example. Information recently informed How billionaires like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Brian Armstrong are “behind the boom in reproductive tech start-ups developing sophisticated embryo testing, sperm freezing – artificial wombs.” The subtext is unclear: just imagine the headlines if the first child born from an artificial womb is not for a sympathetic middle-class couple unable to conceive after a hysterectomy, but for a slew of tech gurus with designs on populating a coastal colony.
Or imagine that people already angry about the emerging technology respond to IVG and its potential to create children from a man’s egg or a woman’s sperm, not as a lukewarm extension of the human experience but as a radical break from it, a project too. Distant masses had reacted overwhelmingly in this way before Denial of cloning.
If we find these scenarios plausible, as well as thought experiments, it tells us that the prophets of inevitability are wrong and that the public mood toward assisted reproduction may yet sour. But we shouldn’t wait for a flurry of tech backlash. Instead, we should allow ourselves to see the small ways that we are already living in the world that science fiction writers envision—a world where we convince ourselves that designing children to match our dreams is something we can do. Do for them instead of for us – and start over. Now set the limit.
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