When the Government Seizes Your Embryos | Hacker News Reader

When the Government Seizes Your Embryos

newyorker.com

18 pointsAnon8413 comments

If the laws are good, if I agree with the means and the ends, then I do not mind the wrong people defending it, or for the wrong reasons.

So let's all sustain for a second our disbelief and ignore all the value judgments, governments and churches involved. The crux of the issue is that the law changed to require that artificial insemination be available only to couples.

In my own country it seems adoption is also only available to couples (either legally or de facto), and it is near impossible for a father to win a custody case when divorcing.

I think the wider trend here is prioritizing some ideal of what would be the best outcome for the (future) child and most of society believing a single parent would not do as good a job as a couple, on a significant averages comparison, and that men are inferior child rears as well.

I don't know if it is true, but living in a democracy means common wisdom, anecdotes and tradition bend scientific and informed decisions.

Let's not summarize too much.

The crux of the issue is that the law changed to require that artificial insemination be available only to straight couples.

I find it chilling that a government can force the donation of your genetic material "for the greater good". Unless we explicitly consent to our genetic material being used in a certain way (i.e. donating eggs or sperm) it's terrifying to think that we can essentially be forced to.

Also, see the case where parents got permission to use their dead son's sperm to create a grandchild. Presumably the parents picked the partner to conceive the grandchild.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/nyregion/west-point-cadet...

My daughter should not be treated under the law as 'my genetic material'. Firstly, she is not just my genetic material, she is her mothers too. Secondly, she has her own genetic makeup being the product of two people. Thirdly, as a result of her conception and the fact that she is different genetically from both her mother and father and the fact that her interests as a living thing are not identical to her mother and fathers, she is actually a separate person, and thus my property rights over my DNA (if they exist) certainly ought not to affect how the law treats her best interests as a minor. Due to virtue of having separate interests, the law should primarily focus on her interests, and in certain cases, it would be appropriate to subsume my interests as her father (or her mother's interests) in order to best serve hers. This is not a novel application of law. The law exists in part to protect those who cannot speak for themselves, people such as minor children and the disabled. In these cases, the law infers their interests.

The same can be said of the children in question, who are not simply the property of the female lawyer. Although they share her DNA, simply sharing DNA does not give her the right to do with them as she pleases, just as my mother does not have rights over me (and neither does my father of course). Under this framework, no one is telling the lawyer what to do with her genes. They are telling her how she is to interact with other people, who in this case, happen to be her children and the children of whichever men fathered them.

In the case of the female lawyer, the government is deciding that it is better for the embryo to be implanted in a genetically unrelated woman because she has a partner, rather than the mother of the embryo herself. If you believe that an embryo should be treated as an individual, how is this different than forcing a single mother to give up custody of her child to be raised by strangers? What has the mother done to lose the right to raise her own child? Should single mothers lose custody of their children, since being raised by two parents is preferable? If not, why is okay for her to lose custody of her embryo?

In the case of the West Point cadet, they took his sperm and created an embryo after he died. He didn't explicitly consent to an embryo being created at all.

So I actually disagree with the Polish government here, but not on the grounds that a government should not be able to set policy in this area, but rather I think the policy they set is wrong.

I also think a government should be able to create policy in this area. What's horrifying is that the government has deemed it morally preferable to assign custody to strangers over the mother. Losing custody is usually due to things like neglect, child endangerment, drug use... now simply "being single" can be added to the list.

When two people who may disagree on the personhood status of an embryo can agree that this policy is bad. It must be a pretty terrible policy.

I don't object to the single mother part. I object to the adoption part of already created embryos. I don't think it's a bad idea to prevent the systematic creation of children alienates from one of their parents

Why is the Vatican opposed to IVF? Is it general, or situational?

FTA: "Many Catholics object to the fact that embryos are routinely discarded during the IVF process"

Fascinating

The Church also objects to the creation of the embryos even if none are discarded, and all are implanted and brought to term by the mother. You are citing an objection to abortion, but the Church is also against the creation of the embryos to begin with.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docum... (1987)

tl;dr several reasons:

1. the church considers the reproductive faculty to be exclusively for marriage in the marital act. The marital act must be "procreative and unitive" to be licit, and IVF (and a variety of other fertility processes) frustrate the unitive nature.

2. IVF as currently performed always ends up producing multiple embryos.

2a. The embryos are genetically tested and those that don't make "the cut" (whatever that might be, right now; the goalposts can move and can depend on the parents or various other things) are simply discarded/destroyed, and the church holds that this is infanticide/murder.

2b. The embryos that make the cut but are "extra" go into a freezer, but the church holds that these are human beings that should be accorded the dignity of any other person. They might be used at a later date, they might not.

Even if there were a technique developed (which development the church would also consider illicit because the research would require consuming more embryos) that resulted in exactly zero "extra" embryos, point 1 above still stands.

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