From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 00:36:44 MDT
At 10:43 PM 5/1/02 -0700, Hal wrote:
>Would you personally intervene to try to stop your neighbor from
>genetically engineering his yet-to-be-born child in some abusive way?
The most ironic element in this debate (at least in its crippled public
form) is that those who most vehemently oppose human cloning on prudential
grounds--it might go wrong and produced a damaged baby--are usually those
most ferociously opposed as well to any intervention in `natural'
reproduction that has high risks of doing exactly the same thing.
Should CF-carrying intending parents be pried apart in their beds and hosed
down with cold water? Should their reproduction only be allowed by the rest
of us if they use advanced in vitro technology to sieve through several
fertilized eggs, discarding any with palpable genetic errors? You might
hope that they'd be inclined to choose this course, despite its costs and
pain and lack of assured success in getting pregnant, but suppose they
insist that this is some deity's will?
Many people currently make babies that they *know* are doomed to come out
raddled, or at least highly likely to. Taxpayers or insurers might decide
to withhold community-funded medical treatment from them, on the grounds
that the damage is parentally inflicted, but that would be weirdly cruel
and grossly unfair to the kids themselves.
It's very difficult.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:45 MST