What restrictions would you put on reproductive choice?

Fervent pro-choice advocates face a dilemma as reproductive technologies such as prenatal diagnosis, IVF, PGD, and surrogacy become more sophisticated and ubiquitous. The ability of parents to select the gender of their children, via either preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select embryos of the desired gender for transfer, or via abortion after ultrasound determines a fetus’s gender, illustrates this dilemma well. Again, to quote from my upcoming book:

Because the pro-choice movement centers on women’s rights, sex-selection technology poses a particularly thorny problem [for pro-choice advocates]. Sex selection to ensure male offspring stems from ancient patriarchal notions that boys are more valuable than girls. American fertility doctors treat patients from Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures who take advantage of our unregulated fertility industry to use PGD to ensure that they have baby boys. In some cases the mothers-to-be proactively seek the treatment, and in others they appear to be under pressure from husbands and extended families to deliver much-desired male children . . . In such cases, accessing fertility treatment may be less about a woman’s freely exercising her choice than about her obligation to conform to ancient cultural and familial practices that are fundamentally oppressive to women . . . [Read more...]

We have three more posts related to abortion–Ellen Painter Dollar’s answers to my questions, which will appear here this morning and this afternoon (and, in longer form, on Ellen’s blog Choices That Matter). And then tomorrow morning I will post a summary of what I’ve learned from this exchange. For now, my question for Ellen:

Why is ending the existence of an embryo or fetus morally different than ending the life of a baby once s/he is born? In other words, if we are treating embryos with reverence as human lives created in the image of God, why is abortion not murder?

I believe that fertilized eggs are God-given human lives that should be treated with reverence, and that the deliberate ending of an embryonic human life is a morally weighty decision deserving of great care. I do not believe that embryos are mere clumps of biological matter to be subjected to parental whims. However, I object to characterizing abortion (or the discarding of embryos created via reproductive technology) as the “murder of innocents,” for a number of reasons.

The following paragraph comes from my upcoming book, No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction.

“Politically charged pro-life/pro-choice debates have made it difficult to contemplate embryonic life because these debates insist on absolutes. Either embryos are the same as babies, or they are merely bunches of cells subject to their parents’ choices. I think most people, when pressed, would say that neither is quite true. Embryos occupy an in-between place. They are liminal; they serve as a doorway or threshold between one state of being (individual sperm and eggs that only have the potential for life until they join with the other) and another (the definitive, transforming presence of a newborn child). The threshold is essential for connecting those two states of being; it cannot be lightly discarded any more than a house can be built without doors. But it’s also more a passage to something vital than a destination in itself.”

There is so much more to say on this, and a blog post doesn’t offer enough space in which to say it. In my book, I go into this idea more, looking at the ambivalence with which we, as individuals and as a culture, perceive embryonic life, whether in the womb or (when reproductive technology is involved) in the laboratory. That ambivalence—an ambivalence that is relatively universal, true of those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice—provides a clue that the nature of embryonic life is not nearly as clear-cut as those on either the pro-life side or the pro-choice side of abortion debates often make it out to be. Churches that hold a clear pro-life position, for example, generally don’t hold memorial services for miscarried embryos. So abortion is murder but a miscarriage doesn’t count as a death to be publicly mourned? Likewise, a woman who has been passionately pro-choice her whole life and miscarries generally doesn’t say, “Oh well. It was just a clump of cells, subject all along to my parental choices. No big deal.” Most of us, on some level, recognize the shades-of-gray nature of embryonic life. For me, that nature means that while deliberate destruction of embryonic life, via abortion or the discarding of excess embryos in technological reproduction, is a decision of moral significance, it is not murder. [Read more...]