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Reproductive Technologies

Why Pro-Life Counsellors Ought to Lie

Those who are pro-choice often get frustrated by anti-abortion advocates, who are seen as using underhanded and immoral tactics to decrease numbers of abortions. These include presenting misleading information about abortions at their advice centres.
For example, it is claimed that some abortion counsellors show pictures of late-stage abortions when discussing early-stage abortions, exaggerate the trauma felt by people who have had abortions and assert that foetuses feel pain earlier than scientists believe they do. A large part of the opposition to the amendment proposed by Nadine Dorries , which would have prevented bodies which carry out abortions from counselling women, was that this might mean that more women would be counselled by anti-abortion groups who cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about abortion. I’m going to suggest that it is a mistake to think that anti-abortion advisors are failing morally by providing misleading information about abortions. Indeed, they might be failing morally if they did not do so.Read More »Why Pro-Life Counsellors Ought to Lie

Uterine transplants: applaud, and then shut up

By Charles Foster

It was reported this week that 56 year old Eva Ottosson is planning to give her 25 year old daughter, Sara, the uterus in which Sara herself gestated. Sara suffers from Mayer Rokitanksy Kustner Hauser Syndrome: she was born without a uterus.

Predictably the newspapers loved it. And, equally predictably, clever people from the world’s great universities queued up to be eloquently wise about the ethics of the proposal.

But if ethics are concerned with what we should do, there was really nothing worthwhile to be said about Eva Ottosson’s altruism (bar the usual uninteresting caveats about dangerousness and resource allocation), except: ‘Fantastic’.Read More »Uterine transplants: applaud, and then shut up

For sale: one womb

In a world where you shouldn’t have to wait for anything, why wait nine months for your child to be born?

This is the marketing pitch of Silver Sling, a Manhattan-based surrogacy clinic. Silver Sling offers ‘chemically accelerated births’ that can shorten the duration of surrogate births to three months. Wealthy clients who wish to have a child but do not wish to undergo pregnancy themselves – much less have to wait nine months to have a child – may pay for these accelerated pregnancies as a means of convenience and time efficiency. Silver Sling enables them to have a child in three months by transferring the couple’s embryo to the uterus of another woman who agrees to act as a surrogate for a fee. These surrogates are, for the most part, women from the lower end of the economic spectrum.

Lydia is one of these women. She is a Russian immigrant in her late 20s and is considering becoming a surrogate for the third time. In doing so, she will make enough money to bring her brother to the USA from Russia, something she promised her dying mother she would do. This is despite the fact that undergoing a third accelerated pregnancy will make her sterile, ending her own dreams of having a child with her boyfriend, Stephan.Read More »For sale: one womb

How are future generations different from potential persons?

A debate piece in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter by the philosophers Nicholas Espinoza and Martin Peterson (autotranslated version) on abortion rights has led to strong reactions in the Swedish blogosphere. The authors make two claims: First, that even people with liberal values can take issue with current abortion rights because it involves a goal conflict between the interests of present and future individuals in having their legitimate desires fulfilled. Second, that the binary view that things must be either allowed or banned is wrong, and that there exists a third domain where laws should take moral ambiguity or internal conflict into account. Their suggestion is that women who end up in situations in this third domain should neither be helped nor hindered by society, and should be allowed to end their pregnancies at clinics where the fee is proportional to their ability to pay. The short article seems tailored to anger holders of practically every view, although I suspect the authors mainly felt it was more of an interesting argument than a deliberate golden apple. Here is a small bite on the green half of the apple: is climate and abortion ethics comparable?

Read More »How are future generations different from potential persons?

Knowing is half the battle: preconception screening

In a recently released report the UK Human Genetics Commission said there are “no specific social, ethical or legal principles” against preconception screening. If a couple may benefit from it, testing should be available so they can make informed choices. Information about this kind of testing should also be made widely available in the health system (and in school). The responses in the news have been along predictable lines, with critics warning that this is a modern version of eugenics or that it would lead to some people being stigmatized.

Read More »Knowing is half the battle: preconception screening

Catholic bishops condemn France’s first ‘bebe medicament’

Last month, doctors in France announced the arrival of the country’s first so-called ‘saviour sibling’. Born to parents of Turkish origin, Umut Talha (Turkish for ‘our hope’) was conceived through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This technique, in conjunction with Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) typing, commonly known as ‘tissue-typing’, has enabled families to have a child – a ‘saviour sibling’ – that is capable of donating life-saving tissue (usually umbilical cord material) to an existing sick sibling. Umut’s parents approached the hospital in Clamart a year ago requesting tissue-typing PGD. Their two existing children had beta thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder that requires monthly blood transfusions.

An embryo was screened and genetically selected from an original group of twelve embryos to ensure that it was both free of the disorder and a tissue match for one of the existing siblings. The resulting saviour sibling, Umut, did not have thalassaemia, and cells from his discarded umbilical cord will be used to cure his older sister, now aged two, and her monthly blood transfusions will be discontinued. Umut’s parents plan to return to Clamart to undergo the same procedure to cure their other child, Umut’s four-year-old brother.  

Saviour sibling selection is nothing new. Read More »Catholic bishops condemn France’s first ‘bebe medicament’

61-year-old woman gives birth to her own grandchild, and so what?

The “news” is that a 61 year old from Illinois served as a surrogate mother for her daughter’s son, carrying in her womb the embryo created using her daughter’s and her son-in-law’s egg and sperm.

Anyone shocked?

I guess no, and this is instead a (nice) surprise to me.

When I started my first class in Bioethics, in 2001, surrogate motherhood was still a very controversial topic, at least in Italy. People were passionately debating about the moral legitimacy of such  kind of “unnatural” practice. Also, people were really worried about the fact that women who had already passed menopause could procreate.

Read More »61-year-old woman gives birth to her own grandchild, and so what?

Moralism and Reproduction: Ten Infringements of Liberty

One of the great success stories of British science in the last 30 years was the introduction of In Vitro Fertilisation by Steptoe and Edwards in 1978. They should have won the Nobel Prize. Around 3% of babies are now born after IVF. Testing of and experimentation on early human embryos offers great prospects for improving not only the health of the next generation but how well their lives go. Today, a wide variety of genes which cause or contribute significantly to disease can be tested. Soon, it will be possible to test for all the genes an embryo has and choose embryos which start life with the least prospects of disease and greatest range of talents, abilities and capacities. And IVF has allowed individuals and couples to have children in new ways, expanding procreative liberty. Experimentation on embryos is yielding important knowledge of human development and contributing to the development of regenerative medicine, or stem cell therapies.

Assisted reproduction, including embryo testing, and research involving the embryo has been controlled by the Human Fertlisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). I recently wrote an evaluation of the performance of the HFEA. I argued that the HFEA was set up on the wrong premise: the embryo was said to have a special moral status. Regulation should be set up on the basis of preventing real, tangible and direct harm. Destroying some embryos but not others is not an example of preventing harm. Secondly, it has operated to enforce public morality, imposing moralism not preventing harm. This was kind of objectionable moralism that was employed by Lord Devlin to justify a ban on homosexuality. Thankfully, HLA famously disposed of that bad justification, at least in the case of homosexuality. Moralism, however, has been alive and well in the case of reproduction.Read More »Moralism and Reproduction: Ten Infringements of Liberty

Can Liberals Support a Ban on Sex Selection?

Australia essentially bans sex selection, except to prevent babies being born with serious sex-linked disorders. The National Health and Medical Research Councils also prohibits it in its guidelines.

A couple in the state of Victoria is currently appealing to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to allow them to access IVF and to deliberately have a girl. The couple have had three boys naturally and lost a daughter soon after birth. They recently had IVF which resulted in a twin pregnancy. The twins were boys. They aborted the pregnancy.

I argued over 10 years ago there are no good reasons to oppose sex selection in countries like Australia.

Read More »Can Liberals Support a Ban on Sex Selection?