You don’t want to catch foot & month disease. They typically should not leave sterile conditions because of that potential threat. Therefore, having cell-bundles grown in petri dishes and vats is probably preferable than an autonomous live animal.
That takes off a bit of the moral conundrum of having cute animals raised to be sacrificed. Vegetarianism and veganism are getting traction fast, so that could become more controversial. SciFi has explored the possibility of having conscious humans raised for their organs, so you could see an increased awareness in the next decades.
On the other hand Uplift made it our duty to raise as many creatures to full awareness as possible.
Which author are you referring to exactly?
I can’t remember if Orphan Black is about that.
More recently, Altered Carbon or shorter format I saw on Dust toyed with similar ideas.
I'm sure Randall Munroe did his research but still.
I guess it's the sort of thing you can count on someone doing the moment it's possible...
That's an interesting idea. If it's OK to hire humans as surrogates, why couldn't we create an animal to do the job? Especially if an animal with a wider pelvis (e.g. a small cow) were used, it could eventually be made safer than regular human pregnancy.
Butchers seem to have made peace with a few things. The same with their clients, lamb eaters. Let's be honest, at some point we cut corners; diabetes is the new epidemic. Most people, at least in the developed world, can stuff their faces with cheap (and poorer you are, more empty) calories.
Why are they both called diabetes? The consequences are the same, high blood sugar levels causing damage to eyes, kidneys, and peripheral blood flow in limbs. This can cause blindness, kidney failure, and limb amputation and eventually death.
With the kind you get from over indulgence your pancreas is still functional, you just have insulin resistance.
I believe this is to help the other kind of diabetes where you produce no insulin.
Humanity is just a infant. It's way too early to talk about limits, really.
W.r.t. to the moral dimension, there doesn't seems to be enough information in the article to make an assessment either way. If we're destroying fertilized human embryos to obtain stem cells to produce organs, then we are committing something categorically gravely immoral. If we're obtaining cells from the person needing the transplant and coaxing those cells into producing organ tissue, then the moral analysis will depend on contingent factors.