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Children and opportunity
SC ( 10/23/2003, 04:38:57 )I'm trying to put myself in other people's shoes to answer your apparent query about the importance of treating infertility. My first thought from that perspective was: if you want to ban medical procedures that have no health benefits, why aren't you going after the plastic surgeons?In addition, if you don't think infertility is a threat to equality of opportunity, you're spending far too much time in the lab. The opportunity to have children is probably, for most of the world's people, the most important opportunity they will have in their lives. Children represent people's hope for the future, their contribution to society, their legacy, the solace of their old age, and the only semblance of immortality they have a realistic chance to obtain. Maybe you have different priorities because you have recently devoted a lot of effort to getting a PhD, but even among the most well-educated populations, not a lot of people have or even want PhDs. The PhDs I know still believe that there is nothing more important than family. Marriage is comparable to education in determining one's upward mobility because of the social standing and opportunities to share expenses that it provides, and most people seek a marriage partner because they ultimately want to have children. Saying that you don't want children is the kiss of death for a lot of people on the dating scene. Try doing a search on an internet dating site and see how much the potential date pool shrinks if your search specifies that you don't want to have children.Until recent times in the most developed countries, fertility was the primary yardstick in determining a woman's worth, and to some extent, the same held true for a man as well (it would be more so but for the tendency to arbitrarily blame the woman for infertility). In less developed countries, children are still the primary form of wealth and social security. That's why people in those countries have so many of them. If a medical condition keeps someone from being productive at work, that's considered a health care concern, because it affects that person's standard of living and emotional well-being. When people can't find jobs that suit their skills and personalities, or feel that they aren't making a contribution to society, they get depressed and suffer from stress-related disorders (in fact, I wondered from some of your posts if this might apply to you). Parenting is a job; why should frustrated potential parents not suffer the same symptoms as people who are improperly employed? Why should the inability to have a child be any less of a concern than the inability to make money? If the best contribution a given person can make to society is to conceive and raise a child, society as a whole will suffer if people who would otherwise be suited to the task of parenthood can't undertake it.All of us think about leaving something or someone to carry on our existence after we're gone. Some people might seek to build a house or make a discovery, donate to charity or have a paper published. For others, their life resides in their children, the product of their immortal cell lines. A threat to their children is a real threat to the form of continued existence that they have chosen, just as much as a fatal disease is to an artist who has yet to do his best work. In one section of your post you say that cloning would mean that humans are replaceable, and presumably you think that this is a bad thing. Yet you also say that one man could fertilise a million women. Aren't you therefore considering men as replaceable? Isn't that what it means, if for the purposes of fertilising women, it makes no difference whose sperm is used, or for that matter, who reproduces at all? Saying that we already have too many people in the world is making the same assumption; it is treating people as units of the same commodity to be produced in the right amount (ironically, treating sexually reproduced people like exact copies of each other). Lots of people have treated children as commodities for years, but not because they had cloning in mind.If the family unit can handle adopted children, it can certainly handle cloned ones. What matters most to children is knowing that they are loved and wanted, and that someone is there to fill the parental role. A cloned child would have more emotional security and sense of identity in some ways than conventional ones do. Clones aren't genetic duplicates, and they would be different from their clone parent, but they would know, as adopted children do, that they were in a sense chosen by their parents, without the adopted child's anxiety about having been given up by someone. They wouldn't have to go through life knowing, for instance, that the family was really hoping for a child of the opposite sex, or that their existence was the product of a contraceptive accident. Cloned children would also have a slight advantage in guessing where their talents might lie, and in determining which trait had been inherited from whom, because someone else would have already done much of the groundwork.Cloned children, like twins, would also be of benefit in helping all of us understand ourselves. They would show the influence of environment on otherwise similar people who were born at different times.However, reproductive cloning as it is commonly discussed is unlikely to become popular because it's not most people's first choice, and it's likely to become obsolete before it is perfected. "Therapeutic" cloning, if it could be successfully used to replace the body's aged cells with younger ones, would prolong people's lives, and therefore remove the main reason many people have for conceiving children (in a sense, it would be a gradual, cell-by-cell form of reproduction). Cloning and related technologies are also being pursued as a means of making eggs and sperm outside the body. If this were to be successful, cloning could be used to make sperm from one parent, an egg from the other, bring them together in vitro, and duplicate the effects of sexual reproduction. Even today, the number of ways to artificially produce a baby is in the teens, and cloning will have to compete with all of them. The best way to "ban" what people now refer to as reproductive cloning would be to give people sufficiently attractive choices that they will do something else.In the meantime, I don't think it will help to insult people for wanting children. The sort of fearmongering anti-cloners are engaging in only reinforces the impression that people who oppose cloning have a "law of the jungle" attitude. Pro-cloners have assumed for good reason that their opponents see existence as proof of the right to exist, and will accept cloning only when they are shown that it has been used to produce a baby. This encourages people to want reproductive cloning when they otherwise wouldn't.
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